Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

Undoubtedly the biggest breakthrough for me in learning how to play Alien Isolation was to stop panicking and simply listen to my surroundings. The positional audio in the game is absolutely superb. All of the enemies make characteristic sounds and you can pinpoint their position by sound alone. Not only can you tell where they are you can usually also tell where they are going. The Alien itself is particularly noisy as it stomps about the place and many times I managed to evade an alien with very limited cover simply by moving myself about in response to sound prompts ensuring that I never fell into its line of sight. I cannot recall positional sound every having been as important to me in a game. Please note you don't need surround sound speakers to experience the positional audio I played with stereo headphones and stereo speakers. The headphones are better but the stereo speakers work just fine. Learning to use sound was so important to my enjoyment and mastery of the game th

A deeply flawed masterpiece in my opinion but a masterpiece none the lest. The best stealth horror in any game I have seen. I actually got a neck cramp from the tension of playing the game. The flaws? Well the game is too long and far too repetitive.

I still suck badly at Alien Isolation. But I am making a bit more progress. One lesson I have learned is that my natural inclination to get as far away from the alien as possible just doesn't work. The creature, it seems is attached to the player by an invisible rubber band. If you do try and sneak away to the far side of the map the Alien will pop  out of a nearby vent  and surprise you. The safest place in the game bizarre though it seems is to creep around behind the alien. If you can see the creature then it cannot surprise you. I am also convinced that the conveniently placed lockers and boxes that appear all over the game with big "hide here" pop ups are death traps. In the first instance the make an almighty racket getting in and out. They also restrict your vision and restrict the motion tracker. The alien can and will attack you in there and you have no escape route. If you must hide then sneaking under a take is a much better bet especially one you can exit fr

I have slotted Alien Isolation into my gaming rotation and I am not enjoying it as much as I expected. This survival horror game has won tonnes of accolade and it is both true to the movies and also genuinely scary. The trouble is I suck at the game. I keep getting eaten by the Alien which is not a pleasant experience. In my defence I offer that part of my frustration stems from the fact that while the game is very atmospheric the developers (Creative Assembly) have prioritised game play over atmosphere in a number of areas. The stealth parts of the game are genuinely tricky in addition to being scary. Further more the monster is obviously scripted to always be "some where near you" so you cannot really hide from it. For me this means that instead of sneaking through an area and being scared I try to sneak through an area, get eaten and then try again. After a few more deaths deaths I slowly  learn the pattern of the monster and instead of a scary game it becomes a Simon Says

I am in a unusual position (for me) at the moment that I am actively juggling several games and not getting frustrated by it. I am playing a long campaign of Rome 2 Total War (Iceni start) which is true Total War fashion is sometimes very engrossing and sometimes tedious. It makes sense to intersperse my Total War sessions with a it more action so I have also been playing "Call of Duty Ghosts" single player. If you want a militaristic on rails interactive shooter movie then Call of Duty is probably still the best in the business and I do enjoy short bouts of shooty entertainment. However I do tire of the bizarre morality of modern shooters so when Call of Duty tires me I switch to "Blades of Time". This is a fantasy third person action adventure in which a scantily clad young heroine slaughters hundreds of assorted chaos monster who have taken over a mythical land of treasures. Blades got mediocre reviews but I am enjoying it a lot. It is very linear but the combat