Despite wanting to cringe and close our eyes and shut the game off, we can’t stop playing it. We want to find out what happens next, the same way we can’t stop watching a gory horror flick. This almost perverse reflex accompanies anything that’s really scary–regardless of how badly it scares us, we want to continue.

This is the magic of fear, and it’s what Alien Isolation does best.

A graveyard haunted by a very real phantom

The game takes place 15 years after the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien movie, with Ellen Ripley’s daughter, Amanda, searching for answers on her mother’s mysterious disappearance on board the Nostromo.

Amanda is an engineer in the heavily industrial 22nd Century where megacorporations rule the stars and faster-than-light travel is a thing of the past. After coming across a report that the Nostromo‘s black box has been found aboard the Sevastopol space station, Ripley sets out to unlock the secrets of the past once and for all.

What she ends up doing instead is venturing into the hungry maw of hell itself.

The Sevastopol feels like something hallowed, like a great tomb in the stars.

There’s an air of finality to it; its cold fluorescent light spills out like something dead, and the atmosphere swirls with ghosts. But the phantom that haunts this starship isn’t incorporeal.

It’s very real, and very, very deadly.

The crew of the Sevastopol were felled by a perfect alignment of catastrophic circumstance.

Helmed by the faultering Seegson Corporation, the ship was decommissioned after failing to sell its Working Joes–creepy synthetic androids that were phased out after attacking humans–and ultimately was in the process of being stripped. The station was moving on and soon it’d be another empty vessel floating in space.

The ship itself is like a city. It has a vast number of areas with a webwork of trams and elevators, and an expansive populace of workers, civilians, doctors, etc.

Now that the Sevastopol was shutting down, it was time for Seegson to send transport ships so that it could be sealed up like an abandoned house in space. Everyone was ready to disembark to their reassigned locations.