Alien: Blackout brings back Amanda Ripley... for a mobile game
Five Nights At Weyland-Yutani's
The mysterious Alien: Blackout has now been announced, six weeks after the name leaked, and sadly it's not a sequel to Alien: Isolation. Alien: Blackout will bring back Isolation protagonist Amanda Ripley, but for a pocket telephone game rather than anything PC-y. Blackout actually sounds a bit like ye olde Alien game from the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, putting us behind a computer terminal using surveillance cameras and such to direct the crew around and evade the alien. Or a bit like Five Nights At Freddy's. But whatever it is, it's not a PC game, so it's beyond our purview.
Rumours/hopes/dreams had suggested that Blackout might be a sequel to the wonderful first-person sneak-o-spook-a-shooter Isolation, or the known-but-not-yet-formally-announced Alien shooter we know Fox have Cold Iron Studios working on. And it was expected to be announced during the marketing blast of The Game Awards. Wrong on all counts.
Alien: Blackout is, its site explains, a game where "Using only the space station's limited power supply to operate a holographic map, surveillance cameras, and motion tracker, [Ripley must] attempt to remain hidden and protect [her] crew from the perfect hunter."
It's a description which made me think of the 1984 Alien game straight away. Then I saw the trailer and realised oh, it also looks a bit like Five Night's At Freddys with an alien rather than robots possessed by the ghosts of murdered children. Five Nights At Weyland-Yutani's.
But whatever, it's for pocket telephones, not personal computers. And with that stated, our business with this game concludes. Good day, sir.