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Every year around Halloween, I like to binge-watch scary movies to get me in the mood for the holiday. This year, my partner suggested something new: binge-playing a scary game. He had read reviews and decided on the action horror game, Alien: Isolation, which has been out now for just over a year. Over the past two weeks, we took turns playing through this adventure on his computer.

I had fun playing as Amanda Ripley, a strong female protagonist, using stealth and logic tactics to avoid the single alien and other, lesser enemies. The game takes place 15 years after the first Alien film, with Amanda setting out on a quest to find some details about her missing mother, Ellen Ripley. This is the initial objective of the game, but it eventually turns into finding a way off the Sevastopol, a space station littered with the alien, androids, and human survivors. This change in objective is fine, but the game does not make that clear (suggestion: don’t give me false hope for an ending before extending the conclusion of the game by several hours.)

There are numerous positives to the game. Given that it’s a first-person game, you really get to experience the scares up close and personally. There are many tense moments, including your initial cut scene encounter with the titular Xenomorph as it slithers out of a vent over your head. Even before this, you experience the main tactics of the game: crouching, slow walking, and peeping, which are all necessary for your survival. Bullets are limited and various diversion-generating devices are plenty. This adds to the fear and suspenseful experience of Alien: Isolation.

I enjoyed playing as Amanda, but I found that the motion tracker quickly becomes the protagonist of the game. This isn’t necessarily a complaint, but I didn’t enjoy relying so heavily on the device. The sounds are a close second to ensuring your safety, but the problem with this is that it’s rather unreliable. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t without its glitches. From patchy spawning and traveling of the alien across the map, to unreliable sounds, you have to play a guessing game as to where your main enemy is throughout the 15 hours of gameplay.

In lieu of these glitches, you find yourself dying often without chance of survival. Given that I died innumerable times, I got to experience the various kill sequences by the Xenomorph. These are detailed and upsetting, but also relieving, as you have breathing time before your next spawning in a loaded save.

Save points are few and far between, which is frustrating, given the pace you travel through the game. With all of the sneaking and slinking, you assuredly won’t be making your way through this game too quickly. Additionally, it is made clear that you will need to backtrack through the station by the doors requiring an ion torch — something you will continually wonder about for quite some hours.

A main challenge of the game is hiding from your enemies. If you find yourself in one of the many lockers across the map, you can waste your health by holding your breath and lean into the back of the locker. One time, I had found my way into a small metal storage cabinet, and an android aggressively ripped me out, pulling me toward his blank, red-light-lit eyes. Sudden scares like this force you to mirror the fear Amanda is going through in the game. They also make the patterns confusing, as an enemy can discover you randomly, despite all of the precautions you take.

Rewiring stations — placed all around the map — are confusing. It took some time to figure out what the point of them was and what they added to the gameplay. Most of the time, it was nothing except a little atmospheric embellishment.

The atmosphere is built in the down time between alien appearances. Following the aesthetic of the first movie, Alien: Isolation is designed to look like the 1970s take on a futuristic space station with mechanical futuristic flourishes. The entire game is well designed, and the art is easily appreciated, despite the constant stress you are put under.

I would say that the number of hours was the game’s biggest downfall. Upon reading up on this game, my partner warned me that many people were complaining about the 15-or-so hours it took for them to complete the game, but we waved this off as a bridge we would eventually get to, but I wish we had listened. I would recommend playing this game for the first half, but I wouldn’t suggest getting too invested, given that the payoff is hardly worth it.

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Lake Vostok holds many secrets, some of which need to be protected at all costs.

Andrew Terefenko

Opinions Editor

An invasion is underway, potentially endangering the livelihood of millions upon billions of Earthlings. Land is under siege in the name of scientific advancement, leaving its inhabitants utterly defenseless against a technology far beyond their own.

So why exactly are we now the alien invaders, treading upon ground millions of years removed from outside contact?

Those crazy Russians have reached the surface of Lake Vostok, an underground reservoir similar to Lake Ontario in size and layout, buried nearly four kilometers under the surface of eastern Antarctica. As the largest of 140 subterranean bodies of water in the continent, it is hoped that we will stumble upon organisms much like those that existed long before the ice age, eras before humans literally paved their way across the planet. Are these Terra natives ready for our all-too unsavoury welcome?

As a culture of the human race, we have a tendency to ravage, pillage and drain the life out of any bastions of nature we come across. This is a given; how else are we to get the resources needed to build larger and more numerous supermalls with four Starbucks per floor? My main concern at this point is not if this pristine submerged marine savannah will remain as such, as at this point it is only a question of when the first abuses will be cast.

The water in the lake is purportedly twice as clean as four-times distilled water. It won’t be long before wealthy, healthy hypochondriacs decide to taste such cleanliness, and that is the moment when the trend will grow. Fresh water is quite likely the most precious resource on the planet, and what can be more desirable than the absolute freshness Lake Vostok can offer?

The desire for a greater understanding of the organisms is understandable. After all, this lake may have been cut off from the rest of the planet as far back as the Paleogene period, over 23 millions years ago. To put that into perspective, that is millions of years before the first human ancestors, hominids, walked the Earth for the first time.

There is a good chance we may make tremendous strides in discovering our roots as a species, and see first-hand the kind of aquatic fauna that shared the water with our primate predecessors.

We just won’t be able to resist the allure, unfortunately, of a resource unique to that part of the world.

Imagine how much bottled prehistoric water could be sold for to people who have lived through E. Coli scares and continue to live through common tap water paranoia. There is an approximate 5,400 cubic kilometers of liquid gold in that lake, just waiting for entrepreneurial opportunists to begin the paperwork.

Not to undermine the already impressive implications that this research entails for us, but there are cosmic merits to this discovery as well. The conditions in the lake are nearly identical to those of the lakes on Jupiter’s moon Europa. If we find microscopic or even macroscopic organisms that have survived for millions of years in this ancient haven, equally significant life forms could exist on Europa, giving humanity hope for adapting for the harsh conditions of theoretical off-world settlements.

This could very well be our ticket off this planet, so there needs to be a greater call for protection of this cornucopia, so that we can fully draw upon the information that it can provide us before it becomes tainted with industrial drilling equipment and unsafe taint-prevention procedures, which are sure to come along with a mass mining effort.

Currently there are no legitimate claims to the Antarctican territories, only those verbal agreements that several countries have settled to separate their scientific efforts.

The largely ignored Antarctic Treaty of 1961 states that any area of Antarctic land should be used for peaceful purposes only. That being said, the treaty also does not recognize, dispute or establish any territorial claims to the land, giving any water-crazy country dibs on the resource should there suddenly be a need for it. The caveat being that there will be a need for it, as the human population expands and unpolluted fresh water becomes a far scarcer resource.

We are on the precipice of a time when major world powers will make a move for the deep blue treasure trove, but we have the chance now to preempt such a crisis and define legitimate laws that will protect Lake Vostok.

Being alien invaders may seem harmless for the sake of science, but how many movies have aliens as understanding and compassionate researchers?