Alien: Isolation - 10 Ways To Create The Perfect Experience

6. Jump-Scares

When it comes to horror, jump scares tend a bad reputation. Often associated with bad slasher films and seen as a cheap way to get the audience to jump in fright, visual media is now praised for completely avoiding them. However, this is not entirely fair and Alien: Isolation would be extremely lacking without these to help break up the tension of sneaking about the ruined space station. More or less all successful horror games have used these to some degree, with enemies dropping in on the player unawares or emerging directly before them at the most unexpected times. Its effectiveness and how well it would compliment the atmosphere would ultimately come down to its execution in combination with the building tension. To paraphrase Hitchcock, show an audience four men sitting at a table talking about baseball for five minutes and then a bomb goes off. You have several minutes of boredom followed by a few seconds of shock. Show the audience the bomb under the table and the conversation now contains suspense. The audience will be drawn in, waiting for the moment everything kicks off, hoping the characters will see it and survive. The same thing goes here; from the cover and the name, the player knows that there is a xenomorph on the station, constantly close by and constantly hunting people down. The player will be nervous now, edging along and watching, waiting for when it might show up and ruin their day. It would deliver much needed pay-off to the constant tension, and it's a tactic many other games have used successfully. Outlast had Chris Walker providing these moments in spades along with a number of other characters, each twisting the knife further as the player descended deeper into the bowls of the asylum. Dead Space was similarly brimming with these from the very beginning, often foreshadowing the appearance of new monstrous necromorphs or making the player realise that every last corpse truly was a potential threat. Even Aliens: Colonial Marines, as rightfully panned as it was, began by attempting to build up a single xenomorph's presence with blips on the motion tracker, and the creature stalking around the player until it finally jumps on them. To reach its full potential, Alien: Isolation needs a few well delivered shock moments to truly give some pay-off to its constantly building tension.