Finished Alien: Isolation! Yay! It, uh, only took 35 hours to get through it. 😛 Spent 21 hours on Regular difficulty and got only halfway through the game, then restarted on Novice and spent another 14 hours and finished the whole thing that time.

Let me just get this out of the way first: I really, really liked the game. I consider that 35 hours well spent. Well, maybe I should have restarting and switched to Novice a lot sooner. But anyway it had the most memorable, most beautifully realized science fiction game environments I’ve ever seen, the controls were easy to pick up (forgetting the controls from session to session tends to be an issue for me), and it was by far the scariest game I ever played.

The things I didn’t like are things I don’t like about most video games. I didn’t care at all about crafting. I’d just as soon you didn’t have any weapons and didn’t kill anybody. The characters weren’t very memorable, and it felt kind of long and repetitive sometimes.

But one thing in particular kept bugging me, and again, this is not specific to this game: if the titular alien is the main obstacle in your way, what is it that you’re doing that they’re an obstacle to?

See, drama is all about conflict, right? But conflict isn’t just obstacles. Conflict is trying to do something, and then there’s an obstacle getting in the way of it getting done.

I’m wondering what it would be like to start with a totally nonviolent game with fun, fully fleshed out mechanics for the day-to-day work you do when aliens aren’t trying to eat you — like, I dunno, you’re farming. Or trying to power up your spaceship, solving wiring puzzles. Or collecting resources in unexplored lands and building a colony. And you spend a couple hours doing your job before the alien attacks. And when the alien attacks, you still have to harvest your crops or power up your spaceship or build your settlement or whatever. You had a goal and the alien came to eat you and your friends… and your goal remains the same. The alien is just an extra complication, and in many ways I’d think the presence of the alien should steel your resolve to do your original job.

In Alien: Isolation it never felt to me like you had a goal and the alien was getting in the way of you accomplishing your goal. It always felt like running away from the alien was your goal. Sure, I ran around flipping switches and unlocking doors but those things just felt like arbitrary mission checkpoints rather than necessary tasks I needed to do to reach my end goal of building or harvesting or fixing something. I really didn’t have much in the way of motivation.

I’d be so much more motivated to power up all those generators and hack all those doors in Alien: Isolation if I felt like there were generalized mechanics behind everything and it was up to me to figure out which switches to flip and which generators to turn on in order to complete my totally-not-alien-related goal for the game…

..if, you know, I were making this game…

…oh hey, I think I might have a concrete, solid structure for the spaceship-based parts of Tinselfly.