Alien: Isolation is my game of the year. I mean, it isn’t actually, you can go read the list right now and see for yourself. I actually gave that honor to Anger Foot. But while Free Lives’ juvenile, violent first-person speedrunning shooter is the best new game I played in 2024, it wasn’t the best game I played overall.
What If My GOTY Didn’t Come Out This Year?
The problem with making a game of the year list is that you’re limited to the past 12 months (eleven, in fact, since I published mine early in December). But if you love games, you probably play plenty of games that don’t belong to the current calendar year. If you’re a multiplayer fan, the game you enjoyed most may have launched last year (Counter-Strike 2), five years ago (Apex Legends), ten years ago (The Elder Scrolls Online), or hell, even 20 years ago (World of Warcraft).
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Or as a single-player fan, you might get really into a series like Yakuza or Fallout and spend your year playing through its history. Then again, maybe you just have that one familiar game that you return to over and over again, because something about it is comforting or special.
The point is, our gaming experiences aren’t limited by arbitrary dates. Other mediums seem to be gripped less tightly by the release calendar. When I watch a BookTuber recap their favorite books they read in a given year, there are almost always more old books than new ones. While movies follow similar awards season topical buzz, there are popular movie podcasts like The Rewatchables and Blank Check that are devoted to discussing films from throughout film history, too, not just new releases. This is rarer in games, where we’re tied to the hype cycle of the new, leaving little energy for the old.
But I want to make a stand for old games in this piece. A game that got a 7/10 upon release (or, say, an IGN 5.9 in Alien: Isolation’s case) but is still being talked about ten years later is worth a dozen games that launch to perfect scores and are quickly forgotten.
Given that I finally played this game so I could review a book about it and developer Creative Assembly announced a sequel on the game’s ten-year anniversary, this actually did end up tying into the release calendar.
What Makes Alien: Isolation A Classic
Creative Assembly’s classic stealth game is one of those games that many reviewers didn’t get at the time. But with a decade of distance, it’s clear that Alien: Isolation was better and more unique than the 2014 games, like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, that hogged the Game of the Year conversation. Playing it for the first time in 2024, Isolation still felt incredibly fresh and unusual. Aside from Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Bunker, no one has made anything that feels quite like this game since.
Alien: Isolation puts you in the shoes of Amanda Ripley, daughter of the iconic Alien heroine Ellen Ripley, as she embarks on a mission to find the Nostromo’s flight recorder so she can finally find closure about what happened to her mother. Once she arrives on the space station, Sevastopol, things go sideways as it becomes clear that something dangerous is happening on the station. Soon, she comes face to face with the terrifying xenomorph, and must sneak her way through the station, all while avoiding murderous androids.
It’s fantastic. I avoided Alien: Isolation for years because I hate horror games where your only recourse is to run and hide. For a game to be really scary, I’ve always argued, it needs to give you interesting ways to fight back and, when people talked about Alien: Isolation, I never got the impression it did. Yet, while it’s true that you can’t kill the xenomorph, the game gives you a toy chest full of items you can use to mess with it. There are flares you can use to draw its attention, noisemakers that obscure your location, and eventually a flamethrower you can use to scare it off.
A Beautiful World Haunted By A Terrifying Monster
These items don’t trivialize the threat. If anything, they do the opposite, highlighting just how powerful the xenomorph really is. Most enemies would burn to a crisp in the face of a flamethrower, but the xenomorph just briefly retreats to an air vent and bides its time.
The world is a joy to explore, too, with gorgeously rendered retrofuturist art and architecture plus authentically ’70s computer interfaces. It feels like you’re inhabiting the locations from the movie, and each is filled with documents and emails to read and voice recordings from Sevastopol’s beleaguered inhabitants. But you don’t have endless time to stop and take in the sights, because there’s an unstoppable killing machine on your tail.
This constant sense of dread, of being hunted, imbues every level of Alien: Isolation. Even when the xenomorph is out of sight, it’s never out of mind. Though the game didn’t launch this year, the palpable feeling of relief I felt when I reached the end of each level, taking the tram to the next part of the station was the best experience I had this year. Alien: Isolation is my honorary 2024 GOTY, and the best horror game I’ve ever played.
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Why Alien: Isolation Is A Big Deal For The Gaming Industry
Remakes being aimed primarily at people who already like the game in question only leads to a lack of creativity. A sequel could be special.