Reviews
[Review] ‘Alien: Blackout’ Delivers Pocket Horror With Some Small Issues
Amanda Ripley returns in an even more claustrophobic slice of sci-fi horror. Read our Alien Blackout review to see if it continues the good work of Isolation on a new platform.
There’s no denying that Alien: Blackout arrives under a bit of a cloud. Rumors, hints, and teases for the first Alien game after 2014’s superb Alien Isolation led to a certain level of expectation. That level was lowered somewhat when it was found that while Blackout does continue the story of Amanda Ripley, daughter of the legendary Ellen Ripley, it’s not exactly a direct sequel to Isolation, rather, it’s a mobile game. That in itself is perfectly fine, and Blackout does the important thing in making this feel like an Alien game should, but that doesn’t help it shake the looming shadow of the game that preceded it.
What Alien: Blackout brings in terms of gameplay is quite the departure. Taking the framework of kid’s horror fave Five Nights at Freddy’s, a light dusting of puzzling, and draping the Alien aesthetic over it, Alien: Blackout sees you back in the sneakers of Amanda Ripley, who fresh from the hell she encountered aboard Sevastopol station, finds herself in another Xenomorph-shaped mess, and ends up hiding in an air duct, guiding other survivors to safety and leading them to key cards and items important to their continued existence.
This is done via two methods. Watching through the cameras Amanda has hacked into, and checking with the interactive security floor plan. The floor plan is the most useful part as it allows you to see where exactly the survivors are, and you can easily activate doors to block the Xenomorph off or trigger sensors to keep an eye on where it’s coming from.. The downside is you can’t see where the Xeno itself is bar a vague red flicker in the general direction it is coming from. Flicking to the security cameras can give you a horrifying glimpse at the beast stalking the crew, and you can in some instances shut a door in the nick of time.
Naturally, there’s a slight catch to these murder avoidance puzzles. You only have a limited amount of power to play with, meaning you have to open and close doors to juggle the power, and it usually means it’ll leave an easy opening for the Xeno to come through. This is relatively easy to manage early on and you should be able to rescue everyone on a level with minimal stress, but the juggling gets increasingly more hectic and you soon learn a sacrifice needs to be made if you’re going to progress.
It’s wickedly macabre that you can essentially lure a poor crew member to their death just to save another, but wholly necessary at times. Perhaps a little too necessary, as there doesn’t appear to be any design or story choice behind this, it seems more like an oversight that allows you to cheese it through tougher stages. Not a bad thing, but having an easy way out belittles the puzzles challenge to some degree.
The alien can also find your hiding spot, so you have to occasionally look up from your work to check it isn’t barrelling down the ductwork to eviscerate you. You can shut yourself in if it does come calling, but that acts almost as an EMP for the systems on the level the survivors are on, meaning the doors are temporarily all unlocked, leaving them vulnerable to a sticky end.
As you can imagine, things can get intense and panicky. The formula is tried and trusted, and in its own small way, Alien: Blackout captures the fear factor of Alien Isolation, albeit in a more stationary form. The highly expendable nature of the survivors take an edge off that tension, diluting the horror that the game is trying so hard to maintain.
There’s also not enough background on the space station and its history. That was a big part of what made Alien Isolation‘s Sevastopol a part of the atmosphere. It had such a rich background to be discovered, and its internal issues being explained made the pressure-cooker hostility of the place really bubble over with the introduction of the Xenomorph. There’s still some background here, just not as much as I’d have liked.
Alien: Blackout is still a pretty good game though. For a reasonable price you get a competent, occasionally scary (headphones really help) Alien game, and while it’s natural to feel disappointment at it not being Alien Isolation 2, it’s not Colonial Marines 2 either. If anything, it’s one of the better Alien efforts from the past few decades.
Alien Blackout review code provided by the publisher
Alien Blackout is out now on the App Store, Google Play and the Amazon Appstore.
There has never been a better time to be a fan of survival horror. While the successful resurrection of some of our favorite video game franchises is already cause for celebration, the triumphant return of good old-fashioned Resident Evil clones might just be the best thing that has ever happened to the genre. Not only do the retro aesthetics inherent to these titles mean that even smaller developers can get in on the fun, but ever-advancing technology means that these indie releases have the power to be bigger, better, and cheaper to produce than the classics of yesteryear.
However, this more accessible environment also means that, for every Tormented Souls 2 or Ground Zero, we get a deluge of overly familiar cash-grabs that cherry-pick mechanics and imagery from classic survival horror games without really understanding what makes the genre work in the first place. That’s why I was only cautiously optimistic when I first saw the trailer for Tainted Pack’s Flesh Made Fear, a stylish throwback that was originally released on Steam back in October of 2025 and is now making its way over to the PlayStation 5.
In the game, you select between Reaper Intervention Platoon (R.I.P.) agents Jack and Natalie as your team is sent on a mission to stop the nefarious Victor Ripper – a former CIA researcher who appears to have set up shop in an isolated town. Naturally, things take a turn for the worse when the agents discover that the area is now overrun with undead mutants created by Ripper in an attempt to perfect his previous MK Ultra experiments. What follows is a retro horror adventure that takes you from secluded woods all the way to a familiar mansion-turned-laboratory as you track down a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein and his army of gruesome goons.
The setup is standard enough for a survival horror title, with the R.I.P. squad obviously riffing on the S.T.A.R.S. team and Ripper’s manor standing in for the iconic Spencer Mansion, but it’s really the over-the-top presentation that makes Flesh Made Fear stand out from its peers. The high-contrast comic-book aesthetic and stylized menus give the title a certain B-movie/exploitation flick vibe that’s rarely seen in this kind of game, with the exaggerated violence and memorable characters often making it feel like you’re playing through a grindhouse picture.
Although the low-poly graphics here are meant to harken back to classic PSX (and even early PS2) releases, a lot of care went into adjusting the textures and lighting in order to make the most of simple character models and environments. In fact, I can’t think of a single vintage horror title with the same amount of visual flair as Flesh Made Fear, despite the fact that you don’t really visit that many unique locations throughout its 6-8 hour runtime.
Unfortunately, Tainted Pack didn’t go the extra mile when it came to actually writing the game, as Flesh Made Fear suffers from a script that aims for camp but lands in cheap mockbuster territory – and I don’t mean that as a compliment. While the aforementioned R.I.P. team is consistently entertaining despite the amateurish voice-acting (which is more of a quirk of the genre than anything else), the epistolary tapes and notes that you find around the map suffer from prose so generic that I wouldn’t be surprised if large portions of it were actually written by Artificial Intelligence.
This is a huge shame, as the visuals and sound design are so lovingly crafted that the lack of narrative effort stands out like a sore thumb. While the original Resident Evil games never really focused on story as much as gameplay and atmosphere, the developers at Capcom at least went out of their way to include satisfying bits of bite-sized horror like the infamous “itchy tasty” and even Lisa Trevor’s side story in the remake of the first game. Flesh Made Fear has no such luck, with the game’s narrative elements serving as little more than an excuse to revisit age-old mechanics.
Speaking of mechanics, it’s been a while since I’ve played a game so dedicated to its retro premise that it also manages to bring back some of the less savory aspects of the genre it’s attempting to revive. From unpolished combat to awkward camera placement that often hinders level traversal, which is especially annoying when you’re left to rely on a disappointingly vague map, there are plenty of frustrating elements here that I remember showing up in many of the less popular survival horror releases of yesteryear.
Of course, it’s easy to look past most of these blemishes when the experience of hunting down Victor Ripper by solving inventory puzzles and exploding copious amounts of undead heads is so damned addicting. Flesh Made Fear won’t be joining the Mount Rushmore of survival horror anytime soon, but there’s plenty of fun to be had with this brief yet entertaining tribute to classic genre thrills. And while veteran fans may not appreciate the mostly linear level design (and I still wish Tainted Pack had invested more time and effort into writing), you’ve got to love a standalone horror game with fixed camera angles and limited saves that can still be casually completed over the course of a lazy weekend.
Flesh Made Fear is available now on PC and PS5.
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