Welcome back to the PCG Q&A. Every week, we ask our panel of PC Gamer writers a question about PC gaming. This week: what's your favourite game world or setting? We also welcome your answers in the comments. 

Shaun Prescott: Sevastapol Station in Alien: Isolation

At the risk of sounding masochistic, Sevastopol Station in Alien: Isolation is the space that springs immediately to mind. The most appealing part of that game (in stark contrast with the least appealing part: the alien) was the coldness of its environment, and how eerily it channeled the moods of both the films and others, like 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also appealed to my love of hard science fiction: the clinical, whitewashed futurism of imagined space outposts, the inherent weirdness of a life spent in the stars. Several games have attempted this in the past and at least one since, but none have prompted me to stand in a control room for minutes at a time, silently marveling at the colour palette and wondering what it's meant to mean. Equally, few have made me feel as lonely and isolated like this game has. I think this game may have scarred me.

I felt a similar sensation among the stars in Elite Dangerous. And I’d hoped to feel something similar in Prey, but that game felt too contemporary, with its imagined former citizens arranging Dungeon and Dragons sessions and chatting lightheartedly in emails. Sevastopol Station feels like it belongs to a wrong, parallel future, one that we imagined in the ‘80s, and you can see Creative Assembly channeling that in the VHS grain of their menu screens. I’ll occasionally boot this game up just to relish that mood, only to shut it down in a hurry once something wants to kill me. 

Jody Macgregor: the City in the Thief trilogy

I like that the setting of the original Thief games was only ever called "the City". I like that there's no exposition at the start so you discover things like the fact it has electricity by stumbling across humming streetlamps and power generators. I like that you almost always see it at night ('Break From Cragscleft Prison' takes place during the day, but you're outside the bounds of the City during that level). I like the Tudor houses and the washing lines strung between them and the sounds of people having fun that seep out tavern windows like the flickering light. I like that the City changes, that it moves into the Metal Age and becomes more high-tech without ending up with lame steampunk affectations like goggles on top hats. I like that there's an entire district walled off to keep the living dead in and a haunted madhouse that doubled as an orphanage and yet people still live near those places because what are you going to do, move to the country? Of course not. The City is great. I'd live there.

Philippa Warr: Proteus

The island changes every time, but the feel of the world is constantly wonderful. I boot that game up sometimes to take a kind of desk-holiday from whatever is stressing me out. I can chase after rabbits or watch for owls. There are rain showers which pass overhead and blossom floating from trees. There are the grave stones and the little cabin and the ruins. Small crab-creatures pepper the shore line. There are mushrooms in the welcoming fug of autumn and a crystalline chill in the winter. I know the elements of the world by heart, but I'll always be taken by surprise by some new configuration or by something I've forgotten popping into view. Proteus, for me, is a mixture of comfort and delight—a little digital sanctuary sprinkled with blue chickens. 

Jarred Walton: Wasteland

Every since I was old enough to read, I've had this strange fascination with nuclear weapons. So when Wasteland came out on my Commodore-64 in 1988, you can imagine how pleased I was. And the game didn't disappoint. Guns, robots, radioactive mutants, religious crazies, and more made it one of the formative experiences of my youth. The later Fallout games were a great spiritual successor, followed by an official sequel with Wasteland 2 several years ago. Not surprisingly, I backed that, as well as the more recent Fig campaign for Wasteland 3.

What is it that draws me to the wastes? I blame my love of the outdoors—there's nothing better than a campout in the mountains, roasting food over a fire and hanging out with friends. The wilderness survival instinct in me enjoys exploring the radioactive ruins of our modern world, and without any of the nasty bug bites, blisters, or death that I might have to deal with in the real world. If there's ever a real apocalypse—and I somehow manage to survive—you can expect to find me roaming the countryside, wearing a badge and trying to bring back some semblance of law and order. I've had a few decades of virtual practice now, so I'm ready.

Andy Chalk: Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl

I remember the first time I decided to stay out late in Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. I'd gained some familiarity with the Zone, and what I thought was a halfway-decent gun, so as the sky started to darken I didn't make my usual beeline back to camp. To my horror, I discovered that unlike most games, where nighttime simply means a different color palette in the sky, Stalker's evenings were dark. Really dark. Long story short, I made for a fire I saw in the distance, got jumped by a two-headed Carthaginian war elephant that breathed fire (although in hindsight, I'm pretty sure it was just a pseudodog), screamed like it was my first time on a roller coaster, and through it all, somehow, did not die. It was nothing but stupid luck and three half-drunk bozos around a campfire that kept me alive that night.

But it was also the moment that I first came to appreciate something else that was different about Stalker. The Zone doesn't care. It's not there to fuel and funnel your superhero fantasies about saving the world; it just is. If you forget that, it'll happily kick your ass and not even tell you why. There's something about that uncaring, unscaling indifference to the very fact of your existence that I adore. Sure, you'll eventually end up a tough guy, with big guns and great armor. But there are lots of other tough guys roaming around out there too, and they'll stick it to you without blinking if you give them half a chance. How do you not love that?

Austin Wood: Fallout 4

I get why everyone is kind of down on Fallout 4. The main story is a wash and it's a far weaker role-playing platform than Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, but it also nails Fallout's uniquely flavored apocalypse. It's overflowing with what are, to me, the two definitive Fallout characteristics: found shelters and '80s sci-fi. 

From Diamond City's settlers to the Brotherhood of Steel's zeppelin to that pirate ship full of robots, the people of the Wasteland are more like hermit crabs than refugees. They hole up in whatever they happen upon and gradually build it up, so you wind up with these unorthodox, flavorful settlements and structures that feel handcrafted and genuinely lived-in. They might be surrounded by sprawling, generic shacks, but there's always something unique at their core that dictates how they sprawl. Which dovetails with my second point: Fallout 4 isn't just any future, it's the future envisioned by '80s scientists and filmmakers, all lasers and robot assistants and nukes beyond the dreams of avarice. It's this absurd, distinctive mix of the Jetsons, the Matrix and Mad Max, but it works because of the flexibility of the nuclear MacGuffin and because humanity is the through-line. 

Samuel Roberts: Liberty City in GTA 4

Clearly, GTA 5's Los Santos is the king of open world environments. I'm just saying this so you don't think I'm being a contrarian, because technically it's a way more impressive open world than the ageing Liberty City. And yet, the heart says GTA 4's open world is more evocative. Its golden skies and densely packed streets feel eerily close to real life, but it feels a little bit magical, too—like someone's half-remembered living in New York a decade ago, and captured the life of the place, if not exactly what it was like. It's still my favourite Rockstar environment. Well, while Red Dead Redemption isn't on PC, anyway.

But what about your choices? Let us know below.

You wouldn't know it from the intimidating pile of Alien Isolation and Rise of the Tomb Raider DLC on offer, but there are some good deals in the Humble Store's Female Protagonist Sale. The aptly titled sale is now live and will run through 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific) this Friday, October 13. It boasts a small but strong selection of big and indie games alike, including such highlights as:

• Crypt of the Necrodancer: 80 percent off
• Life is Strange - Complete Season: 75 percent off 
• Her Story: 75 percent off 
• Alien: Isolation: 75 percent off  
• SteamWorld Heist: 66 percent off 

On top of the aforementioned DLC stampede, you'll also find more modest deals on Bayonetta's excellent PC port (25 percent off) and Tacoma (20 percent off).

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

I have never seen a more tragic comments section than the one from a few weeks back when we asked our readers to share their most tragic save file disasters. Over 200 of you shared stories of despair and woe as hard drives crashed, Uplay cloud saves glitched, or a simple misclick spelled doom for countless hours of gaming.

We've collected the saddest, most heartbreaking stories below so that you can wallow in their misery. And if you didn't get a chance to contribute your own story, do so in the comments.

The lost library 

This one hits hard because the emotional loss is so apparent. It's one thing to fall in love with your Morrowind character and your adventures together, but Bear's story of losing his entire library of collected books in Morrowind because of a virus really stings.

Commenter: Bear

My first Morrowind character. I had made an Argonian and enjoyed the wonders that the game had to offer, discovered mods a number of hours in, got myself a few decent ones, joined House Telvanni to appreciate the irony of being an Argonian and of Telvanni, and progressed very little on the main questline but became deeply infatuated with the world.

I kept telling myself, I'll do the main quest later, and something would come up. When the "something" was the Thieves Guild, I became captivated with in-game theft, and I claimed a home that was empty after I'd murdered the owner as my loot den.

I use the word loot loosely. I was only interested in one type of item to steal: books. I ventured back and forth across the continent stealing every book I could manage, piling stacks of books as high as I could manage in my den of ill-gotten goods, occasionally tossing other stolen things on the floor, but my pride were the hundreds of books stacked taller than my Argonian. The small room would take a good ten minutes to load because of the sheer amount of books. I'd take detours while exploring just to raid places looking for books. Even if I got one book, I was pleased to be able to add it to my collection.

This was the first time I'd pumped so many hours into any game, ever. It was probably 2003 or 2004, and I had a PC that was rough around the edges at best. It was passed to me by my father as a reject for his own uses, no doubt in hopes that I would get my 12 or 13-year-old behind off the family PC with minimal trouble, and it worked. Until my young self made an uneducated choice in my forays on the internet and I picked up a particularly nasty virus while trying to download some free graphics editing software. The PC wouldn't boot. My father refused to help me fix it (apparently he had regrets for giving me my own PC, because my internet usage increased rapidly) and I couldn't figure it out.

My father finally just reformatted the hard drive and when I went to restart Morrowind, my hundreds of hours and couple years of gameplay was lost. I'd just lost the one thing that helped let me escape the troubles of being a bullied, friendless kid so easily before.

Lost in space 

Not all of these stories have to do with losing a save file entirely. Some deal with the existential horror of being trapped in one location, never able to escape. Of course, that horror becomes a lot more tangible when there's a giant xenomorph rapping at your chamber door.

Commenter: Bob McCow

Alien: Isolation is a bit mean with the saving system. You have to find what looks like a retro telephone booth and dial a number, making sure that Mr. Alien is not about to skewer you with his tongue or show you his six freaky fingers. You can only go back two save points, so you have to be very careful.

After a month spent hiding in lockers and wetting myself, I'd progressed through the game painfully slowly. I was escaping from the nest and it looked like I was finally getting Amanda off Sevastapol for good. I only had to take a lift up to a safer level. Sadly, I dropped a gun while being chased by the Alien and it got wedged in the door in a very glitchy way. The glitch meant that although I could take the lift, the next level wouldn't load. I was stuck! I couldn't retrieve an early enough save file to avoid the glitching gun. I haven't had the courage to replay the entire game to get to that point, so I'll never know if Amanda made it.

She's left forever in that lift with the Alien banging on the door outside.

It's not you, it's Witcher 3 

Listen, people make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes can hurt us, but I'm not sure if I'd ever end a relationship over a lost game save. But I guess The Witcher 3 isn't your average game.

Commenter: Piantino

Some time ago, my ex girlfriend wanted to play The Witcher 3 and I shared it from my Steam library with her. One day she played it in my PC, and when I came to play I realized that the save files in The Witcher 3 are the same when you share from your Steam library, and she saved her game in the same slot as mine. I lost my lvl 55 Geralt, my witcher gear and swords—everything. My time in Ard Skellige looking for treasures didn't serve for anything. I broke up with her some time ago and I use this story to explain why she is now my ex hahahaha.

Happy birthday 

I'm sure parents are equally as responsible for deleted saves as failing hardware. But there's something especially tragic when it all happens because they were trying to do something nice for you.

Commenter: Robáird Mac An TSaoir

In the late nineties, my dad surprised me for my birthday with some PC upgrades: a new monitor, bigger hard drive, and new graphics card. Of course, he'd wiped my old hard drive. Ten years of save files, writing, gig upon gig of films and music, all gone.

Commenter Grom Hellscream sums up the tragedy perfectly:

"Happy birthday, son. I formatted your entire childhood."

Groundhog Day 

If you've ever saved immediately before your demise only to find that you're now stuck replaying your death over and over, you can sympathise with Berty Bennish's story.

Commenter: Berty Bennish

I was playing the first Call of Duty back when it first came out. I would regularly save my games but in this instance, my last save was a couple of levels before the incident. It was the daylight St. Mere-Eglise level. After destroying the tank that comes out of the wall I ran round the corner heading towards where you would get in the car. I killed a couple of guys and ran a bit further. Game decides to auto save right when a German soldier pops round the corner and blasts me in the head. Instant death.

Game loads.

Instant death.

Game loads.

Instant death.

and so on…

What's hilarious about this particular story is that another one of our commenters had nearly the exact same problem.

Commenter: ImpatientPedant

When I was playing Call of Duty, way back in the day, there was a tank section. I hadn't saved for the entirety of the (rather long) mission, and contrived to save at the exact moment a shell was fired in my direction, a shell which would wipe me out.

Every time I tried to reload, the shell would fire and I would die. Over and over. I was shattered.

If a psychologist interviews me years from now and asks me why my dreams often have intermittent flashes of light, this is 100 percent the reason. Poor old toddler me.

Sorry, Mom 

Parents have unwittingly destroyed thousands of hours of time invested into games, but Zach Fathaigh's story flips the script. I'm assuming his mother had a hard time looking at him for a few days after.

Commenter: Zach Fathaigh

1996's The Realm is a fun proto-MMO that my mom was obsessed with. You get four or five character slots, I can't remember which. My mom let me have one of those slots (thank you, Mom). My older brother asked me what the game was like and I wanted to show him how fun it was to start a new character. So I looked at the list and saw Mom's two really badass characters, my character, and a level 1 naked character. I deleted that one to make room for my brother's character.

The deleted character was a mule with hundreds of hours worth of loot. I forgot about this incident entirely until my mom reminded me of it over the weekend.

Sorry, Mom.

Double whammy

We've all had hardware fail. Picking up and starting a game from the ashes of an old save is awful. Having to do it twice? No thanks.

Commenter: Kyosho

Christmas of 1999, I get the one game I really wanted under the tree. That big, ugly (beautiful?) orange and purple box. Planescape: Torment. From Christmas day until just before New Years, I put about 25-ish hours into the game. I was really into it. Then my hard drive crashed. I was devastated. I had the computer fixed within a week, but it took me another month or two to work up the nerve to start the game over from scratch. I did it, though. Even made some slightly different choices. It was a bit tedious to read ALL that text again, but after a good 15 hours or so, I got back to where I'd been. Played another 20-ish hours and... BAM, another hard drive crash.

Here's a tip, kids: Don't skimp out on your power supply when building a PC. It killed two hard drives before I knew the cause. Anyway, to say it was soul crushing was an understatement. I haven't beaten Planescape: Torment to this day. I've tried going back to it, but I end up losing interest before I ever get back to where I was. Best RPG of all time? Maybe. It's too painful for me to be able to ever know.

Tower of Trials 

Speaking of hard drive failures, I can't stress enough how important it is to back up important projects. We had countless stories about people losing game saves, but entire games? Seriously, don't wind up like Matt.

Commenter: Matt Pruitt

I once made an entire game in RPG maker VX-ACE. It was called the Tower of Trials. It was short and utilized only the assets the game provided. It had some random elements, little story, and was intended for short-runs about 30-40 minutes long. I worked on it for two years, starting on my old laptop and eventually finishing it on my first PC. It was my own little project and only a few of my friends played it. Then I discovered why people told me not to buy cheap HDDs. My hard drive crapped out on me and two years of work was lost. My oldest version of the game was on my old laptop and only had three floors of the tower completed. Needless to say, my current rig is running on a Samsung SSD.

Harry Potter and the Computer Thief 

It's one thing to lose a save file, but to lose the ability to play a game altogether? Now that's tragic.

Commenter: dxdy

Back in elementary school, 2001 or so, I really liked Harry Potter. Neither me nor my parents could afford a PC or anything to play modern games (had an Atari 130 XE though), so I was very happy when someone left Philosopher's Stone installed at the school's computer lab.

I could only play video games for a limited time after classes, so I only made it to Herbology Class over the course of several months. The game felt amazing to me, probably because I was reading Harry Potter books around the same time.

Once I went to school as usual, but after arriving I noticed it was completely deserted. Normally, entire halls would be filled with sounds of children playing but there was not a single soul in sight. I went upstairs. After walking around for a minute, I was spotted by the principal's assistant who rushed me to the cafeteria.

When we arrived there, I saw that all students were crammed inside. I quickly learned from colleagues that the school was robbed overnight. Robbers broke the window and stole a boombox, whole bunch of chocolate bars from school's kiosk, and every single PC from the lab. I lost not only the save file I worked for what felt like eternity, I lost the ability to play my beloved game in the first place.

These were just a few of the great stories our commenters told us. For the rest, be sure to check out the comment thread from last week.

Some comments were edited for grammar and clarity.

The new Humble Spooky Horror Bundle has some very good things in store for fans of horror games. It starts with Dead Age, DreadOut (including the Manga and OST), DreadOut: Keepers of the Dark, and the Lakeview Cabin Collection for $1. But as usual, it gets a lot more interesting when you beat the average price. 

For just under $7 right now, Layers of Fear: Masterpiece Edition, the outstanding Alien: Isolation, and the latest addition to the Five Nights at Freddy's series, Sister Location, will be added to the bundle. Drop a tenner on it and you'll also get Dead By Daylight, the four-on-one survival horror game where "death is not an escape." 

The default charity for this bundle is the Delaware Aviation Museum Foundation Corp., but as always, you can select an entirely different good cause if you prefer. 

The Humble Spooky Horror Bundle is live now and will be available until September 5.   

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

The job of a concept artist is an important one. Before a single model or texture has been created, they’re responsible for establishing a game’s atmosphere and tone. The things they create might not even make it into the final game, but their work underpins the aesthetic of everything from incidental props to entire worlds. And so, to celebrate the work of these talented individuals, here are some of my favourite concept images from the last few years.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus / Christoffer Lovéus

MachineGames has repeatedly proven itself to be one of the best world-builders in the business. Its vision of a 1960s America that has been conquered and twisted by the Nazis is hugely compelling, which this atmospheric concept art by Swedish artist Christoffer Lovéus helped bring to life.

Alien: Isolation / Brad Wright

Recalling Ron Cobb’s detailed, functional designs for the 1979 film, Creative Assembly’s Brad Wright produced some stunning concept art for Alien: Isolation. These evocative images of Sevastopol station and the Anesidora are particularly striking, capturing the cold, industrial atmosphere of the Alien universe.

What Remains of Edith Finch / Theo Aretos

At the heart of Giant Sparrow’s unforgettable journey through the lives of the Finch family is their grand, clumsily stacked house. These concept images were created by artist Theo Aretos early in development to get a sense of what the strange old house might look like, and are works of art in their own right. 

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate / Tony Zhou Shuo

The Creed series has always been more concerned with capturing the romantic image of its cities and time periods than creating perfect, historically accurate recreations. These images by Tony Zhou Shuo paint a vivid picture of Victorian London,  using iconic landmarks to give them a rich sense of place.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West / Alessandro Taini

Ninja Theory's post-apocalyptic epic remains one of the prettiest ends of the world we've seen on PC. Rather than being bleak and gloomy, this ruined Earth sizzles with colour. And it's perhaps no surprise that these pieces of concept art by Alessandro Taini are just as vibrant and evocative.

Fallout 4 / Ilya Nazarov

The mood of the Commonwealth is constantly changing as the weather and time of day shift in real-time around you, which these elegant paintings by senior Bethesda concept artist Ilya Nazarov capture beautifully. I especially love the subtle use of colour, reflecting Fallout 4’s brighter, livelier wasteland.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided / Frédéric Bennett

The grim dystopian future of Deus Ex was imagined by a talented team of concept artists who designed everything from entire cities to individual props. Art by Eidos Montréal’s Frédéric Bennett, including this dramatic image of Golem City, helped establish the game’s distinctive, recognisable visual style.

Mass Effect: Andromeda / Ben Lo

These remarkable images by BioWare concept artist Ben Lo perfectly capture the scale and majesty of Mass Effect’s grand space opera. Refined, understated art direction is one of the series’ defining features, echoing classic ‘70s science fiction: an aesthetic these paintings are wonderfully reminiscent of.

Dishonored 2 / Sergey Kolesov

The unique painterly style of Dishonored’s visuals mean the game is a lot closer to its concept art than most. These exquisite paintings by Arkane concept artist Sergey Kolesov wouldn’t look out of place hanging on the walls of a lavish Karnaca apartment—particularly the image of Duke Abele on his palanquin.

The Long Dark / Trudi Castle

Hinterland’s survival game just left Early Access, and although the visuals have steadily improved over time, its dedication to that gorgeous hand-painted art style has never wavered. These atmospheric concept images by Trudi Castle skilfully capture the lonely, melancholy atmosphere of the game.

Star Wars Battlefront / Anton Grandert

Getting to work on a Star Wars game like Battlefront must be a dream job for any professional concept artist. These vivid, dramatic paintings by EA DICE’s Anton Grandert are reminiscent of Ralph McQuarrie’s iconic Star Wars concept art, evoking the chaotic, operatic drama of the films’ battle scenes.

Sega showed off a VR mode for the first-person horror game Alien: Isolation, running on an early version of the Oculus Rift way back in the summer of 2014. It never evolved beyond the prototype stage, but the files that enabled the VR mode were still present in the game when it shipped. They were hidden, however, and more to the point inoperable, thanks to the many changes made to the Oculus SDK between the Development Kit 2 (which the demo ran on) and the release of the consumer version a couple of years later. But thanks to the magic of the MotherVR mod being developed by Zack "Nibre" Fannon, it's working (with some limitations) once again. 

Fannon told Road To VR that the old Oculus development kit doesn't rely on external files to operate, but "gets statically compiled directly into the game," and is thus very difficult to modify. "This limitation is the main reason why support has been restricted to the DK2 and older legacy runtimes for so long,” he said. “How I’ve been able to circumvent that is by patching every SDK call in the game when it launches, to redirect it to my own ‘fake’ SDK code. I then take these requests from the game, and reinterpret them to the current Oculus SDK, translating and fixing things along the way.”   

Technical issues aside, Fannon said that some of the limitations of the VR mode, including "mandatory smooth turning, head-locked aiming, broken re-centering that doesn’t correctly align the game horizon with the real world horizon (that was terrible before I fixed it), body positioning in VR (objects way too close), [and] forced head animation," simply reflect how the field of VR development has changed over the past few years. 

"To be fair to the developers though, in 2014 we really didn’t know as much regarding VR methodologies as we do now. So with that in mind, their VR support was actually pretty good for the time," he said.   

He also warned on the MotherVR Github page that Alien: Isolation VR is designed for seated play only. "By playing this Mod any other way than seated, you do so at your own risk. You may be able to stomach this standing, but I absolutely cannot recommend it at this time. Roomscale does not work whatsoever right now." 

It's still very early in the process—the currently available version is alpha 0.1.1—but Fannon said he wanted to make the mod available "so people can play with it while I continue to work on it." It only supports the Oculus Rift at the moment, but he hopes to have "basic Vive support" operational soon, and support for VR controllers like the Oculus Touch added at some point in the future. 

A video of the Alien: Isolation VR prototype in operation can be seen below.

Warning! Spoilers ahead for Alien: Covenant.

Since the release of Alien: Covenant I’ve seen a few people ranking the famously inconsistent series from best to worst. Resurrection reliably festers at the bottom of most people’s lists, and for many Covenant isn’t that far off. But I also noticed a lot of people including Alien: Isolation in their list, and often rubbing shoulders with the acclaimed first two films. This is a testament to the quality and authenticity of the game, but also suggests that people are getting something out of it that the latest film failed to provide.

Covenant was marketed and described in preview coverage as a return to Alien’s horror roots. But anyone expecting a slasher flick in space with none of the earnest philosophical melodrama that weighed Prometheus down will have been disappointed. Covenant is Prometheus 2: Prometheus Harder, book-ended by a retread of the original film minus any the mystery or suspense. People complained about the absence of facehuggers and xenomorphs in Prometheus, and this is the result. Proof that you should never listen to people.

I have a lot of issues with Alien: Covenant. I had (perhaps blinkered) faith in Ridley Scott, convinced he had one more great Alien movie in him, but I left the cinema feeling much the same as I did when I emerged blinking and bewildered from Prometheus in 2012. But one of its biggest problems is showing you far too much of the alien. The original film hid the creature in the shadows, giving you only brief, close-up glimpses of it. This was because Bolaji Badejo’s rubber suit would have looked unconvincing under the glare of a bright light—a limitation that ultimately made the movie scarier.

In Covenant, however, Scott had no such limitations. And thanks to the ‘magic’ of computer animation, the last quarter of the film is heaving with brightly-lit shots of the alien scuttling about. Not only does the CG feel weightless and unconvincing, but it turns the enigmatic creature that terrorised the crew of the Nostromo so effectively into just another movie monster. It simply isn’t scary anymore, and the frustrating thing is, Scott knew it. “Fans wanted to see more of the original monster,” he said in an interview. “I thought it was cooked, but I was wrong.” See what I mean about never listening to people?

But the blame doesn’t lie with the xenomorph itself. It’s how it’s used. One of Isolation’s greatest strengths is that it understands that the creature is just as scary—and, arguably, sometimes scarier—when you can’t see it at all. Just hearing the distant thud of its footsteps or it clanging through a vent is enough to make your heart race. And it makes those rare moments when it finally does reveal itself, slithering out of the shadows, even more powerful. And I think this is at the core of why many consider the game to be a more effective, genuine Alien experience than anything in the last two films. Because it reminds us that the xenomorph still has the innate power to terrify.

Not to mention the fact that there’s no ponderous, long-winded section in the middle of Isolation where one Working Joe teaches another how to play the flute. The scenes in the Engineer temple in Covenant are Scott at his most indulgent and pseudo-philosophical. It grinds the film to a halt and fills your head with tedious exposition. It answers questions that didn’t need to be answered, hammering the final rusty nails into the coffin of any beguiling mystery this series once had. Knowing David created the xenomorphs adds nothing and takes everything away from them.

When the Nostromo lands on LV-426 and the crew discovers the derelict ship, the fear of the unknown is palpable. Giger’s ship is utterly alien and inscrutable, which makes the descent into its bio-mechanical depths simmer with suspense. The same scene is repeated in Covenant on the Engineer planet, but the near-identical shot of the crashed ship has no impact whatsoever. You immediately know that it must have once belonged to some blue guys, and that it’s probably filled with facehugger eggs or vials of black goo.

On the other hand, Isolation keeps the mystery intact. It tells a small story about one character in one space station and is all the better for it. There’s a lot more to it than the first Alien, of course, with acres of backstory about Sevastopol to devour. But it’s still positively parochial compared to the bloated, sprawling mythology set up in Prometheus. The story is the weakest part of Isolation, but it’s really just an excuse to lock you in a confined space with an alien—and that’s all it needs to be. The really interesting stories in Isolation are the ones you create yourself when you’re evading and outsmarting the alien.

Scott has more Alien sequels planned, and with each one I feel like it’ll sail deeper into the pack ice. When he made the first film he was a bold, untested young director with an uncompromising vision and a remarkable eye for detail. And I feel like that’s what the next film needs. An emerging talent who can come at it from a fresh, contemporary perspective and make it vital again. But until then, unless the next film really is a return to its horror roots, Isolation is the closest thing we have to that original masterpiece.

The Humble Store Spring Sale is in full swing, and all the developers and publishers seem to be getting in on the party. Today, the SEGA Spring Sale begins, and lasts until Friday, May 19. 

In this deal you'll find the likes of Total War: Warhammer, Company of Heroes 2, the Alien: Isolation Collection, and much more for far cheaper than you'd normally find them.

Total War: Warhammer is one of our favorite strategy games of the last few years, and it's down to £20 / $30 in the sale. Check out our review if you want to know more about it.

Company of Heroes 2 is down to £7 / $5 for the rest of the week. It's several years old now, but it's got a fairly lengthy single player campaign and great multiplayer if you can find other people playing.

Alien: Isolation is, according to our review, the game the Alien series has always deserved. Grab it for £3.74 / $10 if you're looking for some horror this week.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

We loved Alien: Isolation when it came out back in 2014. Andy's review says it's "the game the Alien series has always deserved. A deep, fun stealth game set in an evocatively realized sci-fi world." If spooky games are your thing, or if you love the Alien universe and haven't tried out Isolation yet, then it's your lucky day. You can grab the Alien: Isolation Collection on Bundle Stars for 82 percent off for the next 24 hours, taking the price down to £6.29 or $8.89.

For the whopping discount you get the base game plus a whole bunch of DLC. You're essentially getting the Season Pass and everything that's been added on in the past couple of years. You'll get The Trigger, Lost Contact, Safe Haven, Last Survivor, Crew Expendable, Corporate Lockdown, and Trauma add-ons. These bring new maps for the various game modes, and new characters to play as. 

As for the main game itself, you play as Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen, and it's set 15 years after the original film. You search space station Sevastopol for clues to your mother's whereabouts, but it's clear there's something seriously wrong on the station when you arrive.

Bundle Stars' deal is an even better price than on Steam, where it's a mere 75 percent off right now. You don't have long to take advantage of the sale though, so grab it before 5pm BST / 9am PT tomorrow, May 13. 

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. 

I really don’t want to die. Someday I will, though, and it will probably suck. I worry about drowning, being burned alive, bears having me for dinner (it happens where I’m from), or tripping and bashing my head open on a gumball machine—and most popular horror games are good at turning those fears, other than the gumball one, into palpable threats. But in focusing so much on depicting the act of dying, they ignore why I’m scared of dying. 

Games are good at delivering terror. They specialize in the apprehension that precedes an awful revelation. But once you’ve died, which is the horrific revelation part, suddenly there’s no longer anything to anticipate, and therefore nothing to be terrified of. Death becomes a certainty, and in traditional try-again games, it’s making the experience far less scary than it could be. 

In my review of Outlast 2, I said that its “commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.” Most scenes take about five deaths to figure out. Five deaths is enough to see a monster, learn its simple AI routine, and memorize your escape route as well as your walk home from work. Since you know that finishing the game requires staying alive until the end, the overarching narrative tension also loses strength. And because you can die and restart at the last checkpoint, those spooky punches lose more of their sting with each attempt. Sure, sometimes you’ll get a grisly animation, and if getting your dick split in half over and over can sustain your interest here into oblivion, great. But even Resident Evil 7, which starts off with some of the best innovations in horror game history, falls into the same shoot or hide or die death trap over time. 

Popular horror games in the same style know how to tap into fleeting dick-splitting fears and often confront deeper psychological fears in their overarching themes, but the threat of death and repetition is still the dull captain steering the tension. It’s about time they stop trying so hard to kill us.  

Death to death

Death has always been games' most popular punishment. You can fail to perform a task and in the fiction of the world, die. Bummer! Back to the last checkpoint. Threatening the player with lost time through death is an easy way to build tension, but the tension is entirely detached from the fiction. There’s no time to focus on the monsters chasing us. 

During my second playthrough of Frictional Games' SOMA, I installed a mod called “Wuss Mode” that turns off predatory enemy AI. Instead of sneaking around the monsters, I got to know them—and yeah, I know what it sounds like. I watched them lumber around each environment like blind dogs. I didn’t feel physically threatened, but in observing the creatures, I started to sympathize with them. Like Frankenstein's monster, they were only dangerous in appearance, fearsome only in their most recognizable human qualities. What were they thinking? Why were they thinking? I had time to consider SOMA’s headier themes on what it means to be alive, to be a human. I was fine the first time I played it, but without obligatory videogame baddies shoving me through the experience, I soaked it in like a good novel, pausing on moving passages at will.

I still felt scared, not because I was being bludgeoned with a biomechanical arm, but because because I was confronted with some awful, scary truths about the nature of life. There’s terror in the build up towards a horrific revelation in finding out what the monsters represent, and uninterrupted time to reflect those ideas back onto myself. Consciousness, man. What even is that stuff? Hell if I know. And that’s scary enough. Some of the best horror games are built around the same idea, of producing horror without death as a system.

But some just want to be schlocky fun, a ride through some spooks and gore and dim hallways. That’s all good and wholesome, but the issue remains: death and repetition are still a tedious, emotional dead end. If they’re a necessary part of the experience, how can games sustain interest and scares five attempts in?  

Systems make great painkillers

What games like Outlast 2 and Amnesia get wrong is often cited as their boldest design choice: putting limitations on or completely removing combat. I don’t mean to say that I want to kill every enemy in those games, but restricting players to a tiny set of interactions is also a good way to stunt their creativity. If the enemies are on full alert and I’m stuck hiding, I only have two primary options: sneak or run. Chances are I’ll die doing both, and I’ll need to make several attempts to learn patrol routes or where to sprint next to trigger a checkpoint. 

I can’t pick up an errant plank and bash a cultist over the head with it or grab a torch and light an oil drum on fire as a distraction—there’s no incentive to being clever and terror only works if you don’t know where the boogeyman is hiding. But as opposed to one right way and one wrong way to navigate an area, taking a more systems-driven approach to horror game design can give you a dozen ways to get through with style, 10 ways to barely scrape by, and countless ways to screw up and die.

In Dishonored 2, if I’m backed into a corner, I can still improvise an escape plan. Maybe I toss a bucket to distract and then swan dive into my doppleganger from six stories up. Or possess a guard, hop to a rat, and scurry away. It’s not the perfect example because it turns the player into a clever god, but still makes me wonder what a horror version of such a system-focused game would look like.

Imagine one that has the kind of player freedom that enables this astounding Dishonored 2 run, but instead of killing dozens of guards, you knock over a stack of books in the library to throw the monster off your tail. Then you sneak up and stab it with a broken broomstick, which permanently slows the monster down, giving you time to cover yourself in mud to hide your scent or build construct some combustible traps out of found objects in the workshop.  

With that kind of systemic variety, something like Resident Evil 7 could feel like an unsanctioned Home Alone sequel where the burglars want to eat your face. I’d love nothing more than to see Jack react to a barrage of swinging paint cans to the mug.

The more options a player has to evade a threat, then the more deaths can be justifiably blamed on the lack of player ingenuity rather than narrow level design or failing to do the prescribed sprint-and-stealth dance. To be clear, the kind of systems I’m suggesting should not make the player feel more powerful than their pursuer. They just need to provide more exit routes and the chance to think creatively in desperate moments. I just want to run through a few more options before going with ‘die and try again.’ I want to feel solely responsible for my survival and I want surviving to be a new process every time. 

Still, the problem of the horrific revelation remains. When the player dies and gets to try again, smart systems can make terror renewable, but what about the comedown after you see the monster? And what if it backs you into a corner, helpless? Should that be game over? If terror can be a renewable resource, then so can horror. 

Variety is the spice of death

While I don’t consider it to be the second coming of survival horror so many do, Resident Evil 7’s first few hours house some of the best ideas for dealing with death I’ve seen in popular horror games. All videogames have the death problem, convinced that as soon as a bad guy gets you, they’ll just kill you and call it a day. A villain that just murders as quickly and efficiently as possible is a boring one.

Jack Baker, the first monster you meet in Resident Evil 7, is a more complex, charismatic dude than a tag-‘em-and-bag-‘em killer looking to just clock out for the day. He’s the kind of guy who wants to take his time. He calls out your name like a schoolyard bully, compares you to a pig and summons you for dinner, grins and laughs and stares directly at you from across the room. And he never outright sprints for you, opting for a steady, brisk walk as if your end is already assured. 

When Jack does catch you, the majority of deaths end with a gruesome animation and a game over screen—the terror falls off and diminishes as we start again. But during a few specific instances, death is not the end.  

Early on, Jack can corner you in a room behind the kitchen and knock you to the floor after which he chops off your leg with a shovel. You can pick up your leg and add it to your inventory, which you’ll need to do if you want to survive. And that’s the surprise, that you can survive the whole ordeal. In any other game, I’d expect to just bleed out (and you can), but Jack crosses the room, crouches, and taunts you with a bottle of healing medicine.

If you manage to crawl over and grab the bottle, you can put your leg back in place, pour some magic medicine on it, and watch it fuse back together. You put your goddamn leg back on. And then Jack slams his shovel down, let’s you know daddy’s coming, and the chase is back on. 

These scenes, rare as they are, all teach the player that Jack is a true madman. They also inform you about the state of the world (and strange regenerative state of Ethan, the main character), as well as delivering a punchy horror scene. When I watched my leg fuse mend and then heard Jack coming for me again, I was terrified of him as a person and horrified of what he might be capable of. He was no longer strictly a walking game over state. 

Death, like horror tropes in film, can and should be subverted in order to maintain tension before and after scares take place. Players shouldn’t be able to predict what happens before or after they shake hands with a threat, be it a monster or a man or a bunny with vampire teeth. Horror games are best when they strive to stay unfamiliar, and in adopting a familiar die-and-try-again videogame death system, they’re knocking the wind out of their scares already before anyone presses start.  

For more on horror, check out list of the best horror games on PC, our list of the horror game clichés that need to stop, and our hands-on impressions of Serious Metal Detecting, which isn't a horror game but playing it is like staring into a dark mirror and feeling nothing, forever and always.