Here is the 'Alien' Game that I Want to Play

It’s no secret that Aliens: Colonial Marines has received what you might call a “poor reception”, but I played the damned thing anyway. I went into it thinking: is it really that bad? After having played as much of it as I can stomach, I can confirm that yes, it is that bad. It’s a boring, badly presented and uninspired piece of shit. Rather than dwell on the failure of Colonial Marines, however, I want to talk about the kind of experience I would want out of a videogame adaptation of the Alien franchise.

I’ll start by saying that of all the Alien films, the first one is my favourite. I like Aliens too, but I’ve always preferred the original, possibly because I like the slower pace and body-horror vibe of Alien over the action movie style of Aliens. Whatever the reason, I would love to see a game that more closely emulated the original Alien than its sequel.

Here’s how I imagine the game: like in Alien, you are part of a small team of blue-collar workers (unlike the combat-trained military types in Aliens) who are on a seemingly innocuous mission but wind up with the Alien aboard their ship. Rather than setting the game in a sprawl of indistinct corridors and planet surfaces like Colonial Marines, I would keep the crew trapped in the confines of a ship like the Nostromo of the first film. Alien was often described as a haunted house film in space, and like a haunted house, the Nostromo managed to be expansive yet claustrophobic.

The brilliance of the Nostromo was that it was a haunted house with no exit, unless you count the escape pods with limited capacity. In the Nostromo, there was nowhere to run, but plenty of places to hide. That's the kind of environment I would want an Alien game to take place in.

There are two other crucial elements to my vision of an Alien game: to have more powerful aliens, but fewer of them. Instead of the cannon-fodder xenonmorphs of Colonial Marines, I want a return to the seemingly invincible Alien of the original film. Admittedly, a game where bullets do nothing and there are only a few targets might not make for an engaging shooter, but it could make for a great survival horror. Think about how effective and frightening games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Slender were by making their monsters invincible and their protagonists defenceless. In my vision of an Alien game, there are long periods of not getting attacked by aliens, but the constant threat of death hangs in the air, and when you are attacked, there is nothing to do but run and hide. 

You could argue that this sounds like the Raven section of Colonial Marines (with the Boilers), but this section of the game is unsuccessful for several reasons:

1. It lasts all of about five minutes
2. The Boilers look ridiculous, as they waddle around as though they’ve shat themselves
3. Most people will experience this section in four-player co-op, which completely destroys all of its potential claustrophobic intensity
4. The gameplay in this section is a tedious version of grandmother’s footsteps. It isn’t really what I have in mind when I think of an ideal videogame adaptation of Alien.

The problem with Colonial Marines is that the aliens lose all of their menace when you’re popping them off with assault rifles and shotguns every three seconds. If you want a concrete example of how this can ruin an Alien experience, look at how the motion tracker is implemented in Colonial Marines. I hardly ever used it, except to occasionally check where I was supposed to be going when trying to navigate the poor level design. I certainly never used it to check for approaching aliens, because when they appear, they’re simply wheeled out en-masse right in your line of sight. If they aren’t, then a team member will shout exactly where they’re coming from. They swarm directly at your face so you can blow them away one by one with a never-ending supply of shotgun shells.

That isn’t how an Alien scenario is supposed to play out. The motion tracker should be a godsend to videogames. With its ominous mechanical tick and high-pitched bleep, it’s a nervous reminder of your proximity to your impending death. In Colonial Marines, it is just a worthless piece of junk. In my imagined Alien game, it’s as crucial as a watch or a wallet. It's something you are constantly checking to see whether danger is near. This kind of audio and visual feedback can do wonders to heighten the tension of a game, so why not make the most of it? 

Alien and Aliens are two very different films in their approach and pacing, and I'm sure many people are hankering for a decent adaptation of the more action-orientated Aliens. Yet I can't help but feel that there is a great survival-horror game based off of the original Alien waiting to be made. 

What kind of game would you like to see as an adaptation of the Alien franchise?