It's high stakes hide-and-seek, and your opponent gets smarter as time goes by. Never in a game have I spent so much time gazing upward at ventilation openings, advancing on tenterhooks into a room or down a tunnel or through an agoraphobia-inducing warehouse. It clambers through ducts above and beside you, threatening every hiding spot, learning what you like to do and where you like to linger, forcing you to stay on the move, anticipate and palpitate quietly. The Alien can't be killed, only avoided, and you're toast if it spots you, unless you have the presence of mind to lob a Molotov or blast a flamethrower to distract it. The Alien is frustrating in all the right ways. You spend years taking sound design in games for granted, then something like Alien: Isolation comes along to remind you that what you can only hear, what's implied but not seen, is so much more frightening than buckets of giblet-filled blood or pop-out monsters that go boo.Д¬reative Assembly works its terrifying soundscape into a lather by nailing the sense of a commercial space station going about its dismal business: the chugging susurrus of air-handlers, the chittering boot-up sequences to some of the station's computer systems, the pops and twangs of stressed metal as you crawl through ductwork, the juddering whoosh of doors that thud closed and the skirling cacophony of some distant catastrophic breakdown as the station judders and thunders like a volcano on the verge. The soundscape will scare the bejesus out of you. It's still chrome, but with dollops of function-related fidelity, making what could have been just a splashy special effects show into something that makes sense, too.

Ventilation shafts and underfloor tunneling snake logically through station levels, simultaneously aeration systems and thoroughfares for subterfuge. But you'll also spy piping with labels for power management or air filter control, systems that you can manipulate. Some of it's common sense: Sevastopol is mostly dark (or at best, dim) because space stations this prodigious would probably have to conserve power. That was Alien designer Ron Cobb's maxim, and you see it throughout Isolation-a sense that the elaborate geometry comprising the Sevastopol's byways isn't mere ornamentation, and that there's logic behind each level's layout.

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