While Krafton wanted to "inherit the entire development team" (as per a statement from Krafton PR, shared by Stephen Totilo in both his GameFile newsletter and on Twitter) the publisher hasn't managed to get the full breadth of talent it made the "acqui-hire" for. Here's the full statement:

"KRAFTON plans to transfer approximately 50 development staff from Tango Gameworks to KRAFTON's Japan subsidiary. These transferred staff will continue to work on new projects, including the expansion of the HI-FI RUSH IP, at KRAFTON."

That's almost exactly half of the studio's previous size (via Genki_JPN on Twitter). Given Krafton's explicit statement that it wanted to get the entire team transferred, it's a reasonable assumption that most of Tango Gameworks' former staff have found new employment—or, more pessimistically, ducked out of the industry entirely, which is not an impossible prospect considering just how grim things have been.

The deal, as Totilo writes, was "effective Aug 1"—leaving a roughly three-month gap between the initial closures, which took place in May, and the certain knowledge that Tango wouldn't be closing its doors for good.

Tango Gameworks' current website has several job listings available—animators and programmers, as well as sound, environment, and UI designers, plus VFX, character, and concept artists are all wanted at the studio. That's a wide roster of talent, though whether Krafton intends to replenish its numbers back to the pre-closure times remains to be seen.

As per Krafton's initial statement earlier this week, the studio appears focused on the Hi-Fi Rush IP in particular—which tracks. While Ghostwire: Tokyo didn't do abysmally, Hi-Fi Rush captured more of the public's imagination as an exciting and vibrant new IP and, in Aaron Greenberg of Microsoft's own words: "was a break out hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations". Which, as you might imagine, makes Tango's closure all the more perplexing.

Giving away half-a-billion game copies a year, even when paying a small fraction of each copy's list price, is not cheap. Thanks to documents that came out during Epic's legal fight with Apple, we learned that the company spent $11.6 million on free games in just the first nine months of the program. Epic has been giving away games for six years now.

However, responding to a question about Epic's free game strategy on a call with press earlier this week, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said that it's been a "very economical" user acquisition program, with the bonus that the budget goes to game developers—a group it's in a game store's interest to see thrive—rather than toward Facebook or Google ads.

"Giving away free games seems counterintuitive as a strategy, but companies spend money to acquire users into games," said Sweeney. "For about a quarter of the price that it costs to acquire users through Facebook ads or Google Search Ads, we can pay a game developer a lot of money for the right to distribute their game to our users, and we can bring in new users to the Epic Games Store at a very economical rate.

"And you might think that this would hurt the sales prospects of games on the Epic Game Store, but developers who give away free games actually see an upsurge in the sale of their paid games on the store, just because their free game raises awareness. And it's so much that often developers, when they're about to launch a new game, come with us wanting to work closely on a timed release of a free game, just to drive user awareness of their next game. That's been an awesome thing. And it's been by far the most cost effective aspect of the Epic Games Store."

Epic's other big method for attracting new Epic Games Store users has been to strike exclusivity deals with publishers like Ubisoft. It's been an unpopular strategy, and hasn't gone as swimmingly.

"We spent a lot of money on exclusives," said Sweeney. "A few of them worked extremely well. A lot of them were not good investments, but the free games program has been just magical."

Back in 2021, we learned that Epic was likely to lose over $300 million on just the exclusivity deals made up to that point. Epic seems to have slowed down on pursuing exclusivity deals, although it hasn't dropped the strategy.

Epic Games Store exclusivity now also applies to games Epic is funding through the publishing division it started in 2020. The first of those Epic-published games to release was Remedy's Alan Wake 2, which hasn't made a profit yet.

The free games, though: that's a hit. If you want to see what Epic is giving away right now, and every game it's given away in the past, we're keeping track in our Epic Games Store free games list.

Epic didn't get the ruling it wanted when it sued Apple over this issue in the US, but the story is different in Europe. The European Union's 2022 Digital Markets Act now requires Apple to allow third-party marketplaces on iOS devices, which means that Epic can finally sell Fortnite V-bucks in Europe without paying Apple a cut for the privilege of accessing one of the world's largest mobile device markets (except in the form of a brand new fee Apple has devised in response to the law, which Epic also takes issue with).

The time has finally come for the two companies to put the law into practice: Epic has announced that the Epic Games Store is launching on iOS today in Europe, and worldwide on Android. For now, it'll house just three games: Fall Guys, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fortnite, the latter of which has notably been unavailable to download on iOS since Epic intentionally broke Apple's TOS in 2020 in an act of corporate protest.

The catch is that Apple has not made it especially easy to install the new Epic Games Store iOS app. On a call with press earlier this week, Sweeney accused Apple of "malicious compliance," saying that the company has technically done what's required by the EU, but has been "terribly obstructive" to Epic and other companies along the way (at one point, Apple revoked Epic's developer account). 

One way Apple has been obstructive, says Epic, is by designing an off-putting 15-step install process for third-party marketplaces.

Some of the installation steps are normal, such as clicking an "install" button on the Epic Games website, and Epic stretches the definition of "installation step" by counting both returning to the main iOS screen after installation and opening the newly-installed app. But the process does look long, and throws up what Epic refers to as "scare screens," prompts telling users they need to change their iOS settings to allow external marketplaces (implying risk), and "dead ends," which are steps that don't automatically return the user to the install process.

"For now, the process of installing the Epic Games Store on iOS and Android is lengthy due to Apple and Google introducing intentionally poor-quality install experiences laden by multiple steps, confusing device settings, and scare screens," Epic said today. "We are continuing to fight in courts and work with regulators around the globe to eliminate the anticompetitive terms that Apple and Google impose on developers and consumers, so we can build a better store for everyone."

Epic expects this complicated install process to deter many from installing the Epic Games Store on iOS, but believes motivated European Fortnite fans will make the effort to finally play Fortnite on iPhones and iPads again. Epic hopes those players will lead the way in building an install base before it starts adding third-party games to the mobile Epic Games Store.

Sweeney's vision for a giant game store, launcher, and multiplayer platform that is totally independent from the hardware and software platforms it runs on—what he used to call the "metaverse," but the term's started to go out of fashion—is one step closer to reality. He expects to launch the Epic Games Store on iOS in Japan soon, too, once new regulations take effect. 

In the United States, however, no progress has been made since Epic and Apple's big trial.

"It's been a massive failure of the United States regulatory and political system that there is not a crisp, clean action to stop the monopolization occurring in the United States and in the whole world by a US company," said Sweeney on this week's call. "That's been disheartening to see, but hopefully over the coming years, somebody will continue to take that on. 

"In the meantime, we foresee being locked out of the iOS App Store worldwide, with the exception of these territories, for the foreseeable future, for perhaps years more, as we continue to fight worldwide."

Epic is also launching Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys on AltStore, another new third-party iOS marketplace which is taking advantage of the Digital Markets Act in Europe. 

Why's that, John?

"Because first you get a fat guy spike, and then you get the fat guy dance!"

John Madden was a football player, a great football coach, and an even greater football announcer, but what's been underrated was John Madden's ability to play himself. The lines above from his role in football flick The Replacements starring Keanu Reeves, Gene Hackman, and a somehow-constantly-foaming-at-the-mouth Jon Favreau have lived rent-free in my head for at least 20 years. Even if he was reading someone else's script, everything John Madden said just came out like a John Madden line, a trait he shares with Nicolas Cage—I can't imagine more exciting casting for a John Madden biopic.

Announced today, Cage will be playing the late announcer in a a film that is at least in part "the origin story of Madden NFL, one of the biggest videogame franchises of all time," according to The Hollywood Reporter. Honestly, I think it could work. The usual sports biopic is all about the glory, and I really don't think we need two hours of teens/twenties/thirties Madden becoming the Master of Football before a final scene where he dramatically dons a headset and steps into the announcer's booth—cut to black over the roar of the crowd. At the same time, an entire film dedicated to the making of the videogame would be as eyeroll-worthy as last year's flick about Air Jordans. Maybe meeting in the middle will result in something that's not entirely conventional and not a pure Ode to Brand.

Whatever kind of script we're looking at, I expect Cage will harness some true Big Dog energy here. He's the kind of actor who knows better than to try a perfect impression; he's going to come up with some wild take on Madden's voice and an embodiment of Madden's oversized personality that feels right, whether or not it's "accurate." Cage is also very good at playing himself, and has done it twice recently—in his film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and in Dead By Daylight, where he promised "when you're playing the Nic Cage survivor, I want you to know that we're one, that we're fused."

I'm sure he'll be bringing the same dedication to a scene in which he teaches a bunch of computer nerds how to make a football tackle feel genuine on an Apple II. When he lets loose a surprise BOOM! they'll all do a little jump. It won't be in the script; he'll just feel it.

I do wish someone else was directing this movie for Cage other than David O. Russell, who's been accused of some pretty gross stuff and bad behavior on movie sets over the years. Just days ago George Clooney called Russell "a miserable fuck" unprompted during an interview, so he's clearly still bitter over the movie they made together 25 years ago. Not really the good vibes I'd hope for from a Madden film, to be honest.

"Nicolas Cage, one of our greatest and most original actors, will portray the best of the American spirit of originality, fun, and determination in which anything is possible as beloved national legend John Madden," Russell said in a casting announcement about the film. "Together with the ferocious style, focus, and inspired individualism of Al Davis, owner of the underdog Oakland Raiders, the feature will be about the joy, humanity and genius that was John Madden in a wildly inventive, cool world of the 1970s."

No word on when to expect the film, but I'd bet sometime later next year.

For the cover feature, PC Gamer traveled to Paris, France, to go hands-on with the game for several hours, both in its single-player campaign and co-op multiplayer modes, as well as interview key team members working on the project. And, from what we've played so far, this is the most epic-in-scope depiction of WH40K's world to date. Grimdark greatness awaits!

In addition, this issue also features another fascinating deep dive feature, with PC Gamer's own Strategic Director, Evan Lahti, digging into the current rise and dominance of weird little indie games on PC. From Manor Lords to Balatro to Animal Well and beyond, small little games are cleaning up on PC right now and, as Evan discovers, it sure looks like the trend isn't going to end any time soon. A fascinating read.

This issue is jam-packed with quality previews, too, including going hands-on with portal-filled new arena shooter, Splitgate 2, as well as Zephon, Promise Mascot Agency, Concord, Surpervive, Norland, and various indie games from the OTK Expo. 

Meanwhile, in terms of reviews, the PC Gamer team delivers authoritative verdicts on new gods and guns souls lite Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, as well as Anger Foot, Zenless Zone Zero, Dungeons of Hinterberg, Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail, Schim, Once Human, Riven, and Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, among other games.

All that plus a group test on some of the best PC case fans you can buy today, a reinstall of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, a hijinx-filled new diary following Fallout 4's luckiest guy, a detailed look at the superb new Thief campaign, The Black Parade, a feature on the joy of being a wheelman in online multiplayer shooters, a comprehensive guide to discovering all of Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree's secrets, a special report on how Nintendo 64 classic game Perfect Dark has found a great new home on PC, the latest dispatch from The Spy, a new case to be cracked for the PCG Investigator, Dick Ray-Tracing, and much more too.

Finally, this special landmark issue of PC Gamer comes with our annual Top 100 games to play supplement, a special 32-page mini mag that ranks the very best games on PC today, as voted for by the PC Gamer team. This year's competition has been incredibly fierce and that's led to some very interesting final standings, as well as a brand new number one pick. If you're looking for inspiration for what to play on PC next, then this is a must read.

Issue 400 is on shelves now and available on all your digital devices from the App Store and Zinio. You can also order directly from Magazines Direct or purchase a subscription to save yourself some cash, receive monthly deliveries, and get incredibly stylish subscriber-only covers.

Enjoy the issue!

GitHub, a massive repository for open source software, is currently unavailable.

"All GitHub services are experiencing significant disruptions," reads the GitHub status page.

The outage started just after 4:00 pm Pacific time when GitHub noted "We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions, Pages and Pull Requests." Since then, the problem has escalated to the entire website, with the status page noting that GitHub suspects the issue is "a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back."

At 4:45 pm PST, GitHub noted that it was rolling back the changes it believed caused the current issues and already "seeing improvements in service health."

It's a rare outage for GitHub, which is used by millions of developers to host the code for open source projects. Microsoft purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion in 2018, and it's only grown in prominence in the six years since. 

According to Krafton's statement the move won't impact the availability of Tango Gamesworks' back catalogue, which also includes The Evil Within and Ghostwire: Tokyo. It also says it will collaborate with Xbox and ZeniMax "to ensure a smooth transition and maintain continuity at Tango Gameworks, allowing the talented team to continue developing the Hi-Fi Rush IP and explore future projects".

Reading between the lines, I think that means Krafton either has no interest in making further The Evil Within and Ghostwire games, or else it hasn't purchased those IPs. I've reached out to Krafton for clarification and will update if I hear back. One thing seems pretty certain, though: Hi-Fi Rush is not dead.

Tango Gameworks was founded in 2010 by horror veteran Shinji Mikami, who left the studio last year before its closure was announced. Hi-Fi Rush was its most critically successful title, despite being a huge departure from the studio's horror roots. 

Microsoft announced the closure of Tango Gameworks in May alongside other ZeniMax studios including Arcane Austin, Alpha Dog Games and Roundhouse Studios. According to Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty, "These changes are grounded in prioritising high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda's portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades."

Apart from PUBG Studios, Krafton also owns The Callisto Protocol studio Striking Distance and Subnautica studio Unknown Worlds, among others.

So it's a bit of a mess. But things have now gone from bad to worse, as it turns out the film has even failed to credit key production staff behind one of Borderlands' main characters. Robbie Reid, who goes by the helpful handle "Robbie Reid the Rigger", says he worked on rigging the movie's Claptrap model for five months straight, the process which essentially gives a CG model a skeleton that animators can then manipulate. It is obviously a crucial job and, when it comes to Claptrap, we're talking about arguably Borderlands' most recognisable figure.

"This time 3 years ago I was rigging the CG asset of Claptrap for the Borderlands movie," said Reid on X. "I worked on him for 5 consecutive months. Neither I, nor the artist who modelled him (Who I worked with the entire time), got a credit for the film."

Reid goes on to say that this is the first time such a thing has happened to him, so he's "exceptionally lucky", but nevertheless "it just stings that the one to finally break the streak was the last film I worked on at a studio. And for such a significant character too."

According to the IMDB list of all cast and crew, Borderlands credits eight riggers from various disciplines (electrical, visual effects, stunts), but Reid's name isn't among them.

The Claptrap model Reid worked on appears to be the one used in the final movie, and Reid speculates the omission may just be because he and the artist left their former studio in 2021 and "it took the film this long to come out". In response to someone trying to pin the blame on Randy Pitchford (!), Reed stresses this is "a common problem in the industry. Definitely not the fault of any singular person, and would be wrong to suggest this."

The Borderlands movie is an action comedy with a stacked cast: Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, and Cate Blanchett, among others. Not that it seems to have helped, with Blanchett even saying she took the role thanks to a "touch of covid madness" after doing nothing but gardening. Naturally PC Gamer is on it, and today sent hardy volunteer Joshua Wolens to watch the thing: pop back tomorrow to find out if it really is a load of old claptrap.

An official from the BTK outlined four reasons for the ban to the publication Turkey Today. First is "sexual exploitation concerns", with the ban "primarily driven by reports of sexual content on Roblox that allegedly exploits children." The second is "rampant reports of pedophilia", with "the platform’s virtual parties accused of being a gathering spot for pedophiles", which ties into the third problem: Robux. The BTK claims Robux is used "to incentivize children’s participation in the aforementioned problematic activities" as well as gambling. 

Finally, the BTK says "the inability to effectively monitor and regulate inappropriate content on Roblox was a critical factor in the decision." It says that Roblox Corporation's "oversight mechanisms" are insufficient to address these issues, hence the ban.

Turkey's Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said Roblox "contains content that could lead to the abuse of children," later adding on Twitter that "It is everyone's duty to look out for, protect and support the best interests of our children, the guarantors of our future."

Roblox Corporation has subsequently issued this statement to BBC Turkey: "We are aware that Roblox is currently unavailable in Turkey and we have contacted the relevant authorities to find out why and ensure we are back online as soon as possible."

However the decision to simply ban Roblox, and the Instagram context, has infuriated some prominent Turkish figures. The Mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, said that "after Instagram, it is incomprehensible that access has also been banned to Roblox, an online gaming platform with over 15 million users where users can develop games. Those who make these decisions are minds that are unaware of the new world, economy and technology."

Roblox has faced huge criticism in recent years over its safety record, with several high-profile cases demonstrating how predators use the platform to target children. The horrifying case of a paedophile who abducted a 15 year-old girl after meeting her on Roblox has been the most recent example to make the news, but data reported by Bloomberg shows US police have arrested two dozen people since 2018 "accused of abducting or abusing victims" they'd met on Roblox.

Even so, an outright ban seems like no kind of solution at all: the Roblox Corporation repeatedly makes the point that these issues are not unique to Roblox, and toots its various safety initiatives now and over the years. The efficacy of those initiatives remains a source of debate, but that's the kind of argument that won't cut the mustard when you're dealing with the autocratic regime of Recep Erdoğan, a conservative figure who has recently taken umbrage at western tech companies and what he sees as interference in Turkish political life. Only last week, Erdogan described Instagram as "a digital fascism that is disguised as freedom." Or to put it another way: Why did Roblox Corporation get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks.

At the time, staff writer Andy Kelly called it "probably the bravest, most subversive 'AAA' game of the year." 

"I've played through the game twice now, and the alien still surprises and scares me," he wrote then. 

Coming up on a decade later, Andy's definitely played through Alien: Isolation more than twice—and probably thought and written more about it than anyone on the planet outside game developer The Creative Assembly. Today he's publishing a book about a game that has firmly etched itself into the PC gaming canon, and we invited him back to PC Gamer to share a snippet of it. 

Here's Andy: 

The only thing I've obsessed over more in my life than Ridley Scott's 1979 horror masterpiece Alien is Creative Assembly's 2014 horror masterpiece Alien: Isolation. So much so that I've written an entire book about it—an unofficial companion to the greatest horror video game ever made—an excerpt of which you can read below.

This chapter is taken from Perfect Organism's Mission Guide, which makes up the bulk of the book. It's a huge level-by-level deep dive into the game that analyses the art, AI, audio, movie connections, level design, easter eggs, development secrets, and other illuminating nuggets of trivia and insight. The book also tells the story of the game's creation, reveals content that was cut, looks back at its legacy 10 years after it launched, and more. — Andy Kelly

Disclosure: Andy Kelly was a writer for PC Gamer for eight years. He departed in 2021, and now works for game publisher Devolver Digital. We knew he wouldn't be able to resist getting Alien on the website one more time.

Mission 1: Closing the Book

A figure in a welding mask hunches over some unidentifiable piece of futuristic machinery. Sparks fly from a plasma torch, but their work is interrupted by a voice: 'Ripley?' They raise their mask, revealing a woman's face with dark, intense eyes and a forehead moist with sweat. This is our introduction to Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, an engineer working in a remote corner of space. The man—or, more accurately, artificial person—is Samuels, a representative of the powerful, space-conquering Weyland-Yutani corporation. 'I'm Samuels,' he says. 'I work for the Company.'

This is a loaded word in the Alien series. Weyland-Yutani's reach extends so far, and the organisation is so entrenched in the everyday industry, politics and economics of space, that the need to refer to it by name has long since passed. Ripley pointedly pulls her mask back down and reignites her torch. This makes her attitude towards the corporation clear. Her mother was on their payroll when she went missing, and she understandably holds a grudge.

In the comic Aliens: Resistance, written by Brian Wood and published by Dark Horse Comics, we learn that Ripley's attempts to get a straight answer from Weyland-Yutani about what happened to the Nostromo and her missing crew have been frustratingly fruitless. 'They string me along, give me just enough bureaucratic red tape to wade through to keep me hoping,' she tells a Company-appointed therapist she suspects has been hired to encourage her to move on and stop asking questions. 'They want me on a leash.'

Then Samuels mentions something that makes her drop her guard. A commercial salvage ship, the Anesidora, has located the Nostromo's flight recorder: a potential clue to the whereabouts of her mother. It's being held on Sevastopol, a backwater space station, and Samuels wants her to go there with him. As he details the mission, Ripley makes him a cup of coffee—a nice callback to Aliens, where her mother did the same for Carter Burke and Lt Gorman as they tried to convince her to travel back to LV-426 with them.

'I've been cleared to offer you a place on the Torrens if you want to come along,' says Samuels, referring to a ship that we'll be visiting soon. 'Maybe there'll be some closure for you.' The camera lingers on Ripley's face as she processes everything she's just learned. It's clear she doesn't want to play ball with the Company, and doesn't trust Samuels, but can she really give up an opportunity to find out what happened to her mother?

The next thing we see is Ripley emerging from a transparent, sarcophagus-like hypersleep pod aboard the Torrens. This octagonal, padded room is quiet except for the distant rumble of the engines and the chirps of nearby computers. This location will be instantly recognisable to anyone who's seen Alien, as it's a near-perfect replica of the hypersleep chamber from the 1979 movie. This iconic set was designed by Benjamín Fernández, a Spanish art director, who used hidden hydraulic rams to make the flower-like pods open slowly.

Ripley inserts an ID card into a terminal, presumably to alert the crew of the Torrens that she's awake. Explore the room and you'll find a few interesting objects, including a book with a medieval coat of arms on the cover titled War in Totality—a reference to developer Creative Assembly's popular Total War series of military strategy games. There are several photos stuck to the walls too, including a picture of the White Cliffs of Dover. Details like these make the Torrens, and later Sevastopol, feel real and lived-in.

The hypersleep chamber also marks the first of many appearances of Alien's famous drinking bird. This novelty toy, whose head bobs up and down as it appears to sip from a glass of water, was one of many strange knick-knacks decorating the Nostromo—which Alien writer Dan O'Bannon explained as being 'from various gift shops around the universe, wherever they stopped off. I figured that wherever you go there will always be gift shops.' Sevastopol and the Torrens are similarly littered with toys and other assorted junk collected from around the galaxy. Life in deep space is hard, so it's no surprise that people want to liven up the places where they live and work.

Ripley leaves the hypersleep chamber and it's immediately obvious from the layout of the ship that the Torrens has a lot in common with the Nostromo. Both vessels are Lockmart CM-88B Bison towing ships, but the Torrens has been refitted as a transport vessel, used for moving people around rather than large cargo like the refinery in Alien. This is reflected in its appearance, which is more comfortable and less industrial than its 1979 counterpart. It's not quite the Enterprise-D, but for a spacecraft in the Alien universe it's positively luxurious. Warm colours and soft lighting set this vessel apart from its submarine-like cinematic counterpart. As Ripley moves through a corridor, fluorescent lights flicker on and make it feel like the ship is waking up alongside her.

Move the camera down towards Ripley's feet and you'll notice that she's in her underwear. Ridley Scott originally wanted the crew to be completely naked in their hypersleep pods, but the studio was dead set against it. Scott actually shot the scene twice—once with the cast wearing underwear and once without—just in case they had a change of heart. 'I wanted to have a total sense of reality and rawness to this whole film,' he said in a director's commentary recorded for Alien's original DVD release. 'Because the realer and truer you get, the scarier it gets later. But I lost that argument for obvious reasons.'

In a nod, perhaps, to influential first-person shooter Half-Life, Ripley locates a locker with her name on it and retrieves her clothes. You can take a shower, too, whether you already have your clothes on or not. A crew roster on a screen reveals who she's travelling to Sevastopol with, including Christopher Samuels (the synthetic human we already met in the intro), another Company employee named Nina Taylor and the Torrens' skeleton crew: Diane Verlaine, the ship's owner and captain, and William Connor, her second officer.

Nearby, a random assortment of papers is stuck to a wall—including one bearing the name Weylan-Yutani, without the D. This is what the Company was named in the original movie, before it was retconned to Weyland-Yutani in Aliens. According to production designer Ron Cobb, who came up with the name, he originally wanted to call the company Leyland-Toyota, suggesting an alliance between the British and the Japanese in this vision of the future. But this wasn't allowed for copyright reasons, 'so changing the letters gave me 'Weylan', and 'Yutani' was a Japanese neighbour of mine.'

This otherwise unremarkable scrap of bureaucratic paperwork also has the lesser used 1979 version of the corporation's logo printed on it, which Cobb based on the winged sun: a solar symbol associated with divinity, royalty and power that was used by the Egyptians, Persians and Mesopotamians in ancient times. Alien: Isolation is impressively zealous when it comes to honouring the original movie and using it as the primary source material, but all other references to Weyland-Yutani in the game, including later appearances of the logo, are based on the series' current official post-Aliens canon. This random piece of environmental decoration, possibly left over from an earlier iteration of the game, makes me wonder if this wasn't always the case.

Exiting the locker room, you can now decide who to speak to first: Samuels in the medbay or Taylor in the communal kitchen/lounge area. The dialogue changes slightly depending on who you bump into first, but not in any significant way. You can also head straight for the bridge if you're feeling anti-social, but you'll miss out on some interesting world-building.

In the medbay, Ripley asks if Samuels woke up early. 'Well, I don't really need as much sleep as the rest of you,' he says, pointedly reminding us that he's not made from the same flesh and blood as the rest of the crew. He notes, as if we hadn't guessed already, that the Torrens is a 'very similar model' to the Nostromo. Ripley says she's worked engineering jobs on ships like this before. We get the sense that space travel is nothing special for her, which is a nice echo of the original film, where it was treated with a similar lack of reverence. This is not the final frontier: just a place where people go to do a job.

The medbay is a brilliant recreation of the infirmary set from the movie. It even has a functional CT scanner—based on a design by Ron Cobb—which folds away into a concealed, glass-covered chamber when a button is pushed. The room's ambient background noise, including a rhythmic, pulsing sound that sweeps in hypnotic waves, is also lifted directly from the film. Fans of Ridley Scott's other masterpiece, Blade Runner, may recognise this sound. It was reused as part of the futuristic ambience of Deckard's apartment.

In the lounge, Taylor is struggling with the hangover-like after effects of hypersleep. 'I don't do long-haul very often,' she says. 'Most legal execs don't travel further than the coffee machine.' Ripley reassures her that you get used to it, another clue that our hero is accustomed to travelling in deep space.

Taylor is, as her previous dialogue suggested, part of Weyland-Yutani's legal team. She's been tasked with overseeing the handover of the Nostromo flight recorder and compiling a final accident report detailing exactly what happened to the missing ship. In a revealing line of dialogue she notes that this will look great to her superiors—before realising how insensitive that sounds. Ripley is unfazed. 'It's okay. We'll both get what we want, right?'

The lounge will be instantly familiar to anyone who's seen Alien, being a near-identical replica of the room where Kane famously 'gave birth' to the xenomorph that terrorised the crew of the Nostromo. In the kitchen there are replicas of the futuristic-looking coffee dispensers that appeared in the movie. Alien's set designers used a pair of real-world Braun Aromaster KF20 coffee machines as the basis for these, as well as a Krups 223 coffee grinder—which also appeared, more famously, in Back to the Future Part II as Mr Fusion, the 'home energy reactor' retro-fitted to Doc Brown's time machine.

Overflowing ashtrays, discarded beer cans and other junk give the Torrens a similarly untidy, lived-in feel as the Nostromo's shared spaces; although Verlaine's ship isn't quite as grimy. On a nearby terminal, Ripley reads a message sent to Taylor outlining the Nostromo incident and listing the missing crew. The author, a Weyland-Yutani employee named Saul, writes about this tragedy in the cold, matter-of-fact way only a true Company man could.

Ripley moves to the bridge and meets Verlaine face-to-face for the first time. The captain is wearing a clean, neat uniform, reflecting the pride she takes in her ship. Under the jacket we catch a glimpse of a pink paisley shirt, which recalls Brett's Hawaiian shirt. Sartorial details like this reinforce the idea that Alien: Isolation is presenting us with a seventies vision of the future.

While Ridley Scott was overseeing the construction of the Nostromo bridge set, he asked the carpenters to lower the ceiling to add to the crew's feeling of isolation and claustrophobia. Even though the Torrens' bridge is much brighter, this dropped ceiling still gives the place an oppressive feel. It's a subtly brilliant piece of off-the-cuff set design from Scott, and one that informs many of the new areas Creative Assembly went on to design for Sevastopol.

You can also catch a tantalising glimpse of the Torrens' humming, womb-like MU-TH-UR supercomputer chamber here through a window—but, alas, it's sealed off. You can only access this iconic location for yourself, albeit on another starship, in the game's Nostromo DLC missions. Then, when you're done exploring, it's just a matter of picking up a briefing file and triggering a dramatic cutscene that sets Alien: Isolation's story fully in motion.

Bringing an image of Sevastopol up on a flickering CRT screen reveals that the station is seriously damaged—including, in a stroke of bad luck for Ripley and co., the dry-dock bay. This means Verlaine is unable to dock the Torrens and attempts to contact the station for help, only to receive a garbled radio message from someone named Waits, a Colonial Marshal. Through the static we can make out the words 'serious situation', but not much else.

Ripley, Samuels and Taylor are left with no choice but to strap on the Torrens' yellow pressure suits and spacewalk over to Sevastopol via a precariously long cable. Then, suddenly, disaster strikes. An explosion sends a hulking chunk of metal debris hurtling towards the cable, snapping it and sending the three characters spinning off in different directions. Ripley manages to grab hold of the station before she's swept away into the darkness of space, narrowly escaping into an airlock, unaware of the nightmare that awaits her.