Get ready for your screams to once again not be heard in space, Creative Assembly has announced that they’re working on a sequel to 2014’s Alien: Isolation. Not a whole lot has been said beyond that.
This is rather surprising since the possibility of a sequel was previously said to be unlikely due to the “poor sales” of the original. When I say “poor sales,” I want to stress those quotation marks since it reportedly sold 2.11 million units in its first six months. To me, that sounds like an awful lot, but Sega deemed this to be a failure in the AAA market, probably because of its budget. There is a lot of discourse these days about the infeasibility of the size of budgets in, of course, big-budget game productions. Some have suggested another industry crash, such as the one that happened in 1983, could be just around the corner. However, keep in mind that people were saying the same thing a decade ago and nothing happened.
If the world was fair and sales were an indication of quality, then Alien: Isolation should have started off like gangbusters. It is considered by some (myself included) as one of the best horror games ever created, with one of the best executions of hide-and-seek slasher gameplay. Hiding under a desk has never been scarier.
Even proponents have admitted that it should have probably been shorter at around 20 hours, and while I agree to some extent, I feel like the game’s pacing really pays off in the last act of the game. I don’t really feel fear when playing horror games anymore, but Alien: Isolation certainly made me feel a lot of stress.
While I don’t think it needs a sequel, it was left open for one. I can easily imagine how it could be done. It seems that, at the very least, creative lead Al Hope will be returning for the sequel. I’m hoping that more of the team will be on board for the production. At the very least, it will be interesting to see Creative Assembly at it again on something that isn’t real-time strategy.
No platforms or release date has been announced for the sequel to Alien: Isolation.
