In a way, Alien: Isolation was one of the first games to support VR. All the way back in 2014, two years before the consumer Oculus Rift would release, Oculus headed to E3 with a playable demo of the game for its shiny DK2 headset along with other games like Lucky’s Tale.
The demo was a terrifying experience, taking a slice of the first-person horror game that aimed to capture the dim atmosphere and chilling scares of the first Alien movie. Sadly, full support never made its way into the game and developer Creative Assembly has since moved onto new projects. Around release, DK2 owners were able to get the game running on their headsets with makeshift support, but it was impossible to do the same on the consumer VR headsets released last year. That is until now.
A team of modders has just released an alpha version of MotherVR, which allows the entire game to play played using either an Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Simply download this patch, copy the DLL file from the archive into the game folder and you’ll be ready to go (provided you have bought the game itself, of course). That’s still with a gamepad, mind you; the team has done a great job converting the original game into the uncharted territory of the VR port, but it sticks with the original controls (mouse and keyboard are also compatible).
Be warned, though, this isn’t a professionally-made VR port, and thus you can expect some comfort and immersion-breaking issues throughout. If walking with artificial locomotion isn’t your thing then you’ll have to give this one a miss and, even if you’re not, forced camera turns and other issues might get your stomach rolling a little. If you’re up to it, though, there’s a lengthy and worthwhile campaign to see through, and staring down the iconic Xenomorph in VR is truly a frightening ordeal. You can even play the DLC expansion that released later on, retelling the events of the original movie.
This is probably as close as you’ll ever get to playing the full game in VR, so show the team some support if you can.
