Alien: Isolation

Alien: Isolation is a single-player action-adventure game with an emphasis on stealth and survival horror. The player controls Amanda Ripley from a first-person perspective, and must explore a space station and complete mission objectives to progress forward in the story while avoiding, outsmarting, and defeating enemies. Specific objectives vary across each of the nineteen missions, but can range from activating computers, talking to NPCs, collecting certain items or reaching specific areas. The player can run, climb ladders, sneak into vents, crouch behind objects to break the line of sight with enemies, and peek over or lean around for a safe view. The player also has the ability to go under tables or inside empty lockers and cabinets to hide from enemies.

Amanda encounters various enemies throughout the station, including hostile human survivors and androids. The player can either eliminate them or avoid them using stealth or distractions. The main antagonist, the Alien (or otherwise referred to by the game's characters as "The Creature"), appears briefly during certain sections across the first four missions, but begins continuously pursuing the player after the completion of mission five, "The Quarantine". The Alien cannot be defeated, requiring the player to use stealth tactics in order to survive.

In 2137, fifteen years after Ellen Ripley went missing onboard the USCSS Nostromo, her daughter Amanda Ripley learns from Weyland-Yutani android Christopher Samuels that the Nostromo's flight recorder has been recovered and taken to Sevastopol, a space station owned by Seegson Corporation which orbits the gas giant KG-348 in the Zeta Reticuli system. Samuels offers Amanda a place on the retrieval team to give her closure, and she accepts. Amanda, Samuels and Weyland-Yutani executive Nina Taylor travel to the station via the USCSS Torrens with the help of the ship's captain Diane Verlaine. After finding the station too damaged to dock, the trio attempt to enter it via a spacewalk, but their EVA line is severed by an explosion, and Amanda is separated from the others.

Making her way through the station, Amanda discovers that it has descended into chaos due to the presence of a hostile alien creature onboard. She eventually finds the flight recorder, but discovers that its data has been corrupted. Amanda then makes her way to Samuels and Taylor; retrieving medical supplies for an injured Taylor, she meets Marshal Waits and follows him back to his bureau. There, Amanda meets the imprisoned captain of the USCSS Anesidora, Henry Marlow, who explains he recovered the flight recorder and went to LV-426, where his wife was impregnated by a facehugger before she fatally birthed the creature on Sevastopol.

Alien: Isolation was developed by Creative Assembly, which is best known for their work on the Total War strategy video game series. A game based on the Alien series from 20th Century Fox was conceived when Creative Assembly finished Viking: Battle for Asgard in 2008, after the publisher, Sega, acquired the rights to develop Alien games in December 2006. A six-person team developed the first prototype to pitch the idea, wherein one player would control the Alien manually while another would conceal themselves in an environment and try to hide from the creature. The game captured the attention of Sega and the project was eventually approved.

As Creative Assembly had no experience with survival horror games, it hired people from studios such as Bizarre Creations, Black Rock, Crytek, Ubisoft, and Realtime Worlds. According to the director, Alistair Hope, the team grew from "a couple of guys crammed in with the Total War team" to 100 by 2014.

In the United Kingdom, Alien: Isolation debuted at number two on the all-formats sales chart, behind only FIFA 15. According to Sega, Isolation had sold more than one million copies worldwide by January 2015. By March, it had sold over 2.1 million copies in Europe and the US, below the expectations of Sega.

Critical reception for Alien: Isolation was "generally favourable", according to review aggregator Metacritic. Josh Harmon of Electronic Gaming Monthly felt that Alien: Isolation "succeeds as a genuine effort to capture the spirit of the film franchise in playable form, rather than a lazy attempt to use it as an easy backdrop for a cash-in with an ill-fitting genre." Writing for GameSpot, Kevin VanOrd praised the tense and frightening gameplay, stating that "when all mechanics are working as intended, alien-evasion is dread distilled into its purest, simplest form." However, he criticised the "trial and error" progression and frustrating distances between save points. Jeff Marchiafava of Game Informer stated similar pros, but criticised the voice acting and dialogue.