Well at least some people agreed with me.

The full yap:

Stealth games almost always boil down to 3 things

1. Standing still and waiting (WOW SO FUN)
2. Trial-and-error, going the same route over and over again hoping it works this time around.
3. Random chance, literally luck based on enemy placement and behavior when you spawn.

There is no skill to stealth. It isn’t fun, it isn’t tense, it’s just tedious.

Some will argue that the stealth amplifies the horror because you can’t kill the alien so all you can do is hide from it. Yeah, after reloading a save point and replaying the same hiding section multiple times, the horror becomes replaced by frustration and boredom real fast.

Almost ALL of the weapons are useless outside of the flamethrower, bolt gun, and Molotov. There is no sense of progression outside of finding new ways to open doors.

It also has sections where all you do is hold the joystick forward and move at a literal snail’s pace until you get to a location and press the A button. Textbook definition of a walking simulator. It also doesn’t help that the game is full of quick-time events like pulling levers.

Is it scary at least? No. The alien only has a handful of kill animations that go on for way longer than they need to, quickly making them boring to sit through. And no, good graphics don’t translate to horror. I’ve played pixellated games scarier than this.

The story: Ripley’s daughter goes looking for her and finds a voicemail. You’re welcome. I saved you 14 hours.

If I had to find something positive to say, the game is well optimized. I never had any performance issues, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of Steam Deck verified games. So it definitely earns that check mark.

Why would you make an entire game on stealth alone? It’s a cool bit to put as like a side quest but what’s the point if the entire thing is just standing and waiting?

Dishonored is one game I can think of that gets stealth right, but that's because it gives you abilities like possessing rats to crawl through holes or LITERALLY teleporting between cover.

Splinter Cell Blacklist was also a pretty good game. I heard Chaos Theory is the best in the series, but Blacklist was also cool. It even gave you the option to go in guns blazing and take out every bad guy with the lock on system.

Alien Isolation has none of that. There's no way to beat or kill the alien, you can only sneak around it. And yes, most of the gameplay is hiding in a closet.