Gaming

The most terrifying film-to-game adaptation ever made is just $10 right now

If you love hiding from cosmic horrors, uncovering the past's secrets, and blasting your enemies with napalm, this is your moment.

sci-fi horror scene of two astronauts found the mysterious alien egg, digital art style, illustratio...
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Movies that get turned into video games are often huge disappointments (and usually the other way around isn't much better). The pages of history are littered with games that were little more than marketing fodder for a blockbuster movie (hello E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, considered the worst game ever made), or half-hearted attempts to recreate storytelling magic that was really best left on the screen.

However, there are the occasional breakouts that defy logic — managing to pull a fantastic gaming experience out of an equally fantastic piece of linear art. One big case for the film-to-game adaptation is 2014’s stunning Alien: Isolation, and right now the game is on sale on Steam for a whopping 75 percent off its normal retail price, meaning you can own this masterpiece for just under $10.

The title is not only a thrilling first-person horror-adventure, but serves as a kind of complementary side-story in the Alien canon. Rather than trying to recreate the exact notes of any of the films, in Isolation you play the daughter of Alien’s Ripley, Amanda, who’s sent off to recover the flight recorder from her mom’s ship 15 years after contact with the Nostromo was lost.

Alien: Isolation is a perfect Halloween experience. The title is known for its heart-pounding sequences of hide-and-seek with the utterly terrifying, titular alien, which stalks the player mercilessly through scene after scene of classic 70’s-style spacecraft. The art design of the game is particularly striking, taking its cues from Ridley Scott’s original Alien film, meaning everything has the retro-future vibe that made that original movie so visually striking. To recreate the atmosphere of that film, developers were given access to a trove of original materials from the film. As PC Gamer wrote back in 2015:

Fox supplied an enormous archive of original production material—a whopping three terabytes of it. “It was like that moment in Pulp Fiction where they open the suitcase,” says Hope. “We were stunned that all this stuff existed. For them to be able to drop that amount of material on us was great. It gave us a really good insight into how that first film was made.” The archive contained design blueprints, continuity polaroids, costume photography, concept art, and thousands of photos of the sets, all in high resolution.

So what are you waiting for? If you love survival horror, have a soft-spot for sneaking around derelict spacecraft, and love a face-hugger, this is your moment to shine.

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