Sega posts cryptic Alien: Isolation 2 teaser: ‘A feeling of being safer than one really is’

Today, a teaser trailer called “False Sense Of Security” was posted by the Alien: Isolation YouTube account. An industrial door unlocks and opens into a gloomy, rainy cityscape, and the scene cuts to one of Isolation’s emergency phone save points. It’s hard to believe it’s been 12 years since the first game scared the bejeezus out of most everyone who played it, but here we are with a sequel approaching rapidly in the year of our Lord 2026.

That’s what I assume this is about, anyway, but the description gives precious little to go on: “A feeling of being safer than one really is,” it reads. It sounds like Creative Assembly is sticking to the overt horror of the original game, a game during which I did not feel safe at all, and that’s totally fine by me. We’ve got all sorts of Alien games about colonial marines raining down hell, but precious few about the chill of being stalked by H.R. Giger’s multi-mouthed icon.

If you haven’t played the OG, it’s a great horror game whether you care for the films or not. So great, in fact, I never ended up finishing it—not because I’m a little scaredy cat who doesn’t like to let my limbs hang off the bed because I know a shadow man will come steal them, but because the game is legendarily long due to the titular xenomorph’s legendarily smart AI. But hey, maybe I’ll see the new game and get a hankering for stuffing myself into lockers again.

It is a lot of nerve-wracking fun, though, and probing the limits of the xenomorph’s versatile AI truly feels like trying to outwit a cunning predator. PC Gamer’s Andy Kelly scored the game an enthusiastic 93 in his review, where he called it “the game the Alien series has always deserved.” As licensed Alien games go—hell, as licensed games in general go—it’s as about as good as it gets.

Hopefully the sequel can live up to the hype. As for the OG, it’s one of our best space games on PC if the thing you like most about space is not the awe or the science, but the terror of what might lurk in all that darkness.