In 2014, fans of psychological horror games rejoiced as "Alien: Isolation" released on Oct. 7. The game ties into the franchise nicely, as it chronicles Amanda Ripley's attempts to find out what happened to her mother Ellen Ripley, the classic protagonist of the film series. Unfortunately, things go awry and a deadly alien life-form ends up stalking the space station she's stranded on.
"Alien: Isolation" received high praise for its unsettling atmosphere and tough adversary. It "succeeds as a genuine effort to capture the spirit of the film franchise in playable form, rather than a lazy attempt to use it as an easy backdrop for a cash-in with an ill-fitting genre," noted Josh Harmon of Electronic Gaming Monthly.
But the game also has detractors, with many pointing out the repetitive nature of its gameplay.
Thanks to the wonders of modern video game modding, those worries are a thing of the past. Video game modder [Lebowski]-=ThArK=- has discovered a way to make the Alien harmless.
"The way to do that is making a little mod on the file ALIEN.BML that the game uses to set the alien attributes. At the end of the file there is a line that sets the alien behaviour with "alien_behave" and I replace it with "NoBehaviour" so the alien still is there in some vent but doesn't make anything. It is freezed," the modder stated, according to the Irish Examiner.
Some might argue that this mod defeats the purpose of the game, as EuroGamer noted. But others have stated that the Alien's A.I. was just too good.
"The alien appears to have an approximate knowledge of your location at all times, popping up wherever you are, which keeps things tense and uncertain. It doesn't outright notice you (except for the times it glitches and does) unless you fail the stealth game aspect of gameplay. This is great for maintaining the horror movie tension, but sometimes the game stretches a bit too much and it starts to feel fake. Occasionally, the game's so focused on crafting tension that it forgets about something far more important: immersion," an early review from Kotaku notes.
It's this too-good-for-its-own-good mechanic that has many gamers relieved to discover the Alien nullifying mod. "Walking around such a faithfully-recreated version of the original 1979 film's universe was great! Being chased the whole time by a giant monster was not," Luke Plunkett noted on Kotaku.
