Alien: Isolation is celebrated as one of the scariest games of all time. And for good reason. Its ability to translate the absolute terror of the first two Alien films is commendable and not for the faint of heart. Always pursued by an intelligent xenomorph that adapts to our tactics and that we can’t fight, it’s a game that knows how to be terrifying at every turn. Something that, in its sequel, will only intensify. For one thing, the xenomorph is going to be able to hear us. Not our characters, but us.
A game that listens to you while you play
In a question-and-answer session for Alien: Isolation 2, Sega and Creative Assembly have confirmed that the Alien will be able to hear us through our microphone. You’ll have to enable the option in the menu, though you can turn it off, this will make the xenomorphs even more dangerous.
In the words of its developers, “if you make noise —if the dog barks in the background—, that could give you away. In the game world, the game generates what we call a ‘logical sound’, that reflects the audio volume, and NPC sensors can react to it. It also works at a distance, so the sound fades out. If you make enough noise and there’s an enemy close enough, it will react as if you’d produced a sound with another device in the world”. This will add another layer of difficulty to the game.
And we’ve said xenomorphs, plural, because another major new feature is that we won’t be facing a single alien. Now that it’s confirmed there’ll be more than one, the difficulty won’t just be in not making noise, but in dodging several of these elusive creatures. This will ramp up the tension. Especially when they’ve confirmed that they’re now even smarter and more capable of adapting to our patterns. This means more than one person, after reading this, won’t even consider playing Alien: Isolation 2 anymore, which still doesn’t have a release date.
