In 2014, PC Gamer awarded horror adventure Alien: Isolation Game of the Year , praising its reactive AI and exhaustively faithful environmental design. At the time, staff writer Andy Kelly called it "probably the bravest, most subversive 'AAA' game of the year." "I've played through the game twice now, and the alien still surprises and scares me," he wrote then.
Coming up on a decade later, Andy's definitely played through Alien: Isolation more than twice—and probably thought and written more about it than anyone on the planet outside game developer The Creative Assembly. Today he's publishing a book about a game that has firmly etched itself into the PC gaming canon, and we invited him back to PC Gamer to share a snippet of it. Here's Andy: The only thing I've obsessed over more in my life than Ridley Scott's 1979 horror masterpiece Alien is Creative Assembly's 2014 horror masterpiece Alien: Isolation.
So much so that I've written an entire book about it—an unofficial companion to the greatest horror video game ever made—an excerpt of which you can read below. This chapter is taken from Perfect Organism's Mission Guide, which makes up the bulk of the book. It's a huge level-by-level deep dive into the game that analyses the art, AI, audio, movie connections, level design, easter eggs, development secrets, and other illuminating nuggets of trivia and insight.
The book also tells the story of the game's creation, reveals content that was cut, looks back at its legacy 10 .