Dear Player: Alien Objects and Isolation

*Bip, bip, bip*. Better put that away – the Alien can hear your interface. In Alien: Isolation, an epic space-tragedy, you spend more time talking to your retro-engineered tools than other human beings. Stuck in space, you’re main enemy is technology.

A relentlessly dis-empowering game, Isolation succeeds where Doom and Dead Space fail partly by playing to different rules. Survival horror in a purer sense it draws strength both from the deep time of video-games – the clunky claustrophobia of Resident Evil and Silent Hill – and the depths of 1970s sf cinema – the dense metal nests which the Alien comes to call home, a monster more feared than seen. Isolation’s horror is intense but slow: brooding, buckled metal, hums and pangs of archaic devices and decrepit halls. Constant tension quickens the heart with every interaction. You’re weapons are more a threat to yourself than your enemy, drawing the ire of your constant monstrous companion, instead your main medium is engineering. And by god is Ripley a good engineer.

Isolation identifies and inverts a relationship common to fps games: instead of the player following the commands of a companion guide, Ripley works out what to do, exhibiting a proficient technical knowledge which the player must implement in a dynamic world. Cortana doesn’t tell her where to go, and she’s no mute Dr Freeman. Where Bioshock plays with the impotence of the Player, subservient to all instructions prefaced with a “would you kindly”, the rich player character of Isolation finds her own solutions, instantly diagnosing, and constantly working around, the shortcomings of a world in decay. The explicit postmodern nihilism of Bioshock is absent in Isolation, but so too is the ‘crisis in white masculinity’ that nihilism embodies. Instead of a self-negating Booker, we are a defiantly human Ripley. While Sevastopal and Columbia both enforce a sense of futility behind the idea of single-player achievement and emancipation, the disasters and decisions of Sevastopol are contingent and material where those of Columbia are constants, with no real variables.

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I draw on this comparison because the relationship of player to world is at the heart of Isolation, and I feel that its commentary on narrative play and the human interface with the non-human world is a shared concern with Bioshock: Infinite. One might even refer to Isolation as a post-bioshock experience. Where Bioshock highlighted the empty, iterative nature of player avatars and the overdetermined nature of play, Isolation is more concerned with empathy and the give-and-take at the heart of play.

Ripley has a voice and a history, she’s no blank or faceless universal-male proxy – nor an over-sexualised object for a male observer. She interacts with her world, feels its resistance – she has visible feet of clay, and her arms animate every action, the touching, turning and levering of things. There is a physicality and agency to her body and her world. The subtle soundscape adds further material weight to the presence of aggressors and heft of tools, while fleeting gasps and shaky breathing mimic our own shallow breaths at the edge of audibility. Moreover actions cost time, sound and the concentration of perception – your scanner is your friend, but you can only focus on it or your environment, while its bleeps might attract the very monster it helps you avoid.

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Over the course of the game, the most intricate relationship that evolves is that between the player and technology. The Alien hunts you with unscripted cunning, but what both resists and enables you is the world. The sheer protracted length of the game, and the repeated returns to the same environments, confronts the player with an almost bathetic litany of technological failures – from a faulty scanner to a faulty comms tower, you fix or circumvent them all, but the station doesn’t want to let you go. Compared to Sevastopol, the Alien plays with you honestly – death is a relief.

While you avoid most of your enemies, what you engage with – twisting, charging, hitting and punching – are interfaces with your material environment. And what an environment it is. Loaded with cinematic set-pieces and first-person immersion, it nevertheless buck’s the AAA trend by delivering a world that’s both close and distant, near and far. Isolation is a past vision of the future, and for all its immediacy, the station’s failed utopia bears the trace of something that never really ‘was’ nor ‘will be’. Everywhere pseudo-80s arcane specifics of levers and chunky buttons enable a sparse life in space but with tools outmoded to modern eyes. Everywhere dead media are left to suture the player with the world and connect the narratives fragments – from the VHS artefacts that flock across loading screens to the cassette recorders which play back the stories of the dead. The fictive computer screens within the player’s real screen are flickering 8-bit green-black cathode ray VDUs. And the slowness and inadequacy of these retrofuturist machines will get you killed. A lot.

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Nothing demonstrates how the materiality of this virtual world is near-but-far than the save mechanism. To save progress we must use another dead medium, a punch-card slotted into fixed points on the wall. While we save, we can look around, feel the visual space between us and the game mechanic. While we save we feel our fragility. We could die the moment we let go. By rendering analogue procedures inside a slick digital environment, Isolation both renders gameplay more transparently present, and simultaneously more remediated and simulacral. Saving using in-game elements turns what could be a source of ludo-narrative dissonance into an example of tense consonance. The feel of the weight and heft of simulated objects both reinforces the immersive illusion and makes it manifest and tangible. It cannily breaks the fourth wall but keeps us on an umbilical cord – while all the time leaving us heavily aware of our existential peril at the limits of the Game.

In this retrofuturist world of the never-will-be, our immersion is constantly counter-balanced by an awareness of our own contingent identity. That the world feels there and not-there is reinforced by the player’s awareness that every action might lead to their death. The superimposition of operations of distancing and immersion are thus fused to a core affective narrative property of the game: our mortality. Isolation and death reflect the self-referential interface and vice-versa. Instead of a companion voice-actor telling us what to do, we see button presses flash in front of a highly reified in-game machine – a fictive generator or door-lock. Press E. Hold RMB. Press S. Run. Between the on-screen instructions and the material opacity and resistance of objects in the world, it’s almost as if we get a glimpse of the Real. Death. A kind of RL contingency outside of representation, but yet omnipresent in life as in Sevastopol.

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In the very final act we find that we cannot escape death. With all its connotations of Eros and Thanatos, the Alien also embodies this relationship of interface and reinforces how struggle and dialogue are at the heart of the player-representation relationship. A creature seen only fleetingly, an echo in the air ducts, wilful and unscripted, it exists as a personification of the relationships of interface at the periphery of player awareness. It’s a personification of the resistance and fraught distance of the material world to the player’s inputs. The Alien is always with us. If we die at its hands it is only ever the result of our misreading or mishandling our environment. And, like our shadow, like any monster worth a damn, it doesn’t die. Instead it constantly drags us back into the game. We wrestle with it as we wrestle with the interface. Our battle with the Alien is a battle of comprehension, or of understanding. Understanding our limits, as well as the horrifying limits of our world.

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In the final act we find there is nowhere to run. In our clunky space suit we can only hear our own breathing. We back away, and are told, almost sarcastically, to press down then left then right, as we blast ourselves out of the airlock of our only rescue ship. Why do we move when there is nowhere to move to? Why do we have to search for a button that condemns us, a button that was only ever in one place?

Because, in committing our body to our spacesuit, we are saved. As we wait for our oxygen to run out the light of a Weyland-Yutani vessel glints on our helmet. Our rescue by our enemy will always be ambivalent. The game ends, and credits deliver us a sonourous remix of the Nostromo’s flight recorder – a voice recorded and remixed, a body turned to an object and then made something new.

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The ‘single-player game’, Isolation tells us, is a limited, alienating, ambivalent but contingent experience. It creates experiences with us – it concerns living with world, not rejecting its determinism. Isolation modulates the melancholy of Bioshock. It forces us to reconcile not self-destroy. Our achievement is one of survival rather than the rehearsal of inescapable guilt. It is a cyberpunk retrofuturism of the player as canny ‘maker’ rather than a steampunk retrofuturism of the player as ‘condemned’ observer. Alien: Isolation describes an alienation from the world of things, one which can only be overcome when the struggle ceases. After we put away our scanner, the Alien stops hunting us. In the end all that remains is the game’s front-cover image: the player and their spacesuit, drifting at peace, ready to begin everything all over again.

Merlin Seller