![]() ![]() I bring this up as context because when Alien: Isolation was announced in January of 2014, I was pretty skeptical. And then no other Aliens movies were made ever again. Aliens’ willingness to try something new allowed it to succeed in a way it wouldn’t have if it had simply tried to recapture the spirit of the original. It does this because it knows the audience can’t be scared in the same way it once was. It relies much more on tension and anxiety with a few scary moments here and there, trying to make its viewers sweat over how close the characters come to dying rather than trying to spook them. ![]() Instead, Aliens (with an s) was made into an action film with some horror elements, and it worked much better as a result. ![]() We all knew what a xenomorph was, and our imagination couldn’t run wild like it did the first movie. There was little point in trying to make a traditional horror film like the previous title. All Alien needed was to light the proverbial spark and let your mind run free as partially obscured hands and teeth slowly picked off the cast of the film.īy the time the sequel rolled around, however, everyone had seen a xenomorph before. For any horror experience, your imagination is your own worst enemy constantly dreaming up things that could be there and essentially creating the fear for you. That’s largely what made it scary we didn’t quite know what was chasing those characters, and Ridley Scott (before he went insane) recognized that. It carefully crafted fear by teasing us with shots of the xenomorph here and there, never revealing the full creature until the very end. The original film (also titled Alien) was very clearly a horror movie, playing on the audience’s fear of the unknown. If you’re one of those infuriating young people who was born after 2000 and the first thing you associate with xenomorphs is that awful Prometheus film, Alien is an old movie franchise dating back to the 1980s. Some backstory is necessary before jumping into things, though. Alien: Isolation challenges the notion that a “horror” title needs to consistently be scary throughout to succeed, and as it turns out, the way to do it is to kick the anxiety level up to ten throughout the entire experience. Every so often, a release comes along and rather rudely undermines all of my neat assumptions about game design and what makes something good or bad. Because, after all, if a horror title stops being scary, then it’s lost its purpose. Not only do people wildly differ in what they find scary, but developers then have to program and design a game very carefully to ensure the source of the fear remains scary throughout. While there are a number of generally agreed upon rules for what makes a good action, adventure, or strategy game, pinning down what exactly makes a title “scary” is a lot tougher to do. It might not be unreasonable to say that horror is the most challenging genre to develop a game within. By Paul Broussard, posted on 26 April 2022 / 1,897 Views ![]()
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