Alien: Blackout (2019): Plot, Lore & Game Overview

Released: January 24, 2019
Developer: Rival Games, Theory Interactive
Publisher: D3 Go!, FoxNext Games
Platforms: iOS, Android
Genre: Survival horror, strategy
Modes: Single-player
Delisted: October 31, 2023

Alien: Blackout is a survival horror strategy game for iOS and Android, developed by the Finnish studio Rival Games with Theory Interactive and released by D3 Go! and FoxNext Games on January 24, 2019. It follows Amanda Ripley, the daughter of Ellen Ripley, after Alien: Isolation, hiding in the ducts of a Weyland-Yutani station while a Xenomorph Drone hunts everyone on board. From a portable terminal she guides the four survivors of a damaged shuttle through seven levels before her power runs out. It left app stores in October 2023 but stayed playable for existing owners.

Game Overview

Blackout plays like a night shift in a security room rather than a shooter. Amanda never leaves her access point, so the player works from a holographic map of each area, switching between station cameras and floor motion trackers to find the creature and drawing routes for the crew with a finger. Each level runs on solar panels that Amanda wired into the damaged grid, and they give her only eight minutes of power before they shut down to recharge. When that clock runs out the blackout begins, and any task left unfinished means the level has failed.

The survivors are the pilot and engineer of the shuttle USCSS Haldin and two Weyland-Yutani passengers, and any of them can die if the creature catches them in the open. Losing one does not end the level, but losing all four sends the player back to its start, and a crew member who dies stays dead for the rest of the story. The seven levels are named after the station areas the group crosses, from the Engineering Bay to the Research Lab. A full run takes an hour or two, and the closing log changes depending on who made it out alive.

Plot Summary

Amanda's Distress Call

The Haldin shuttle approaching Mendel Research Station in Alien: Blackout

The story opened with Amanda broadcasting a request for urgent extraction from the Mendel Research Station, warning anyone who heard it that a deadly alien organism was loose on board. The Haldin, a Weyland-Yutani commercial shuttle carrying two crew and two passengers, docked soon after with damage of its own. Its crew had never picked up her signal, because the station mainframe had simply cleared them to dock for repairs. Amanda reached them over the intercom from inside the ducts and begged them to keep their voices down, since Mendel had become a death trap and the creature hunted by sound.

Members of the Haldin crew in the Mendel Station docking lounge, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

Executive director Naoko Yutani introduced the group, and engineer Dougal Studwick explained that the shuttle could not fly without spare parts. Pilot Miwa Saito promised to fly Amanda out if she helped them find those parts, and Amanda agreed. Yutani stayed aboard the shuttle with research scientist Andrew Thorncroft, while Saito and Studwick set out for a nearby engineering bay. Amanda warned them that trigger-happy station security had damaged the power grid, so her improvised solar panels could only run for eight minutes at a time.

Searching The Engineering Bay

On the way, Amanda told the pair that she was the only one left and that the escape pods had launched too early, with no way to know whether anyone in them survived. Thorncroft doubted that one creature could devastate a station of that size, but Amanda answered that panic had done most of the work. She revealed that she had met these creatures before and asked whether they had heard of Sevastopol Station. The crew knew it only from reports of an accidental detonation during its decommissioning, the official version of the disaster Amanda had lived through.

When Saito and Studwick reached the engineering bay, the parts they needed were gone. A note from a worker named Greg said he had taken the scrubbers and would install them soon, and one of them dryly thanked Greg for getting them all killed. Amanda explained that every service order on the station could be traced from the Administration Hub, so the group would have to go deeper inside. Before moving on, she warned them that the creature tracked human voices, which carried far through the ducts, and told them not to run unless they had no choice.

The Administration Hub

Amanda had to unplug her portable unit and crawl to a new access point before she could guide them again. Before she left, the crew asked whether she had worked on the station. She explained that the Mendel crew had pulled her out of danger and brought her aboard, but most of them were already dead by the time she came out of hypersleep. When the crew asked whether she was suggesting that Weyland-Yutani had created the creature, Amanda said no, but added that this one had been born on the station.

Thorncroft, who had worked in the company's laboratories since he was sixteen, said he had never seen anything so preposterous in any of them. The service orders were stored on a workstation that needed a crew ID, so Amanda told the group to check any uniforms they could find. They found members of the station crew zipped into body bags, and Yutani called the search distasteful but their best opportunity. The badge of a dead crewman named Pembroke unlocked the terminal, and the records showed that the missing scrubbers lay beyond the transit link, where Amanda told everyone to meet.

The Transit Station

A lit corridor near the transit platform on Mendel Station, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

Before switching access points again, Amanda asked Naoko whether she was the Ms. Yutani who led the company. Naoko answered that she was merely her second cousin, and that it was a powerful name to bear, with many responsibilities. At the platform, Studwick grumbled that he could have been a chief engineer but had turned it down because of the paperwork, and Saito replied that a week of pushing papers would have him begging to come back. The joking stopped when the platform camera turned out to be dead and the train missing.

Amanda asked Studwick to repair the broken camera, since every extra way of tracking the creature helped keep them alive. Yutani pointed out that they were one train short, and Amanda found two places on the platform from which it could be called back. Luckily, the transit system shared a backup power loop with the docking system, so the crew could summon the train while Amanda watched the motion trackers. Once they were aboard, she told them to follow the signs at the other end to PharmaLab 3 and promised to reconnect as soon as she could.

Clearing PharmaLab 3

A Xenomorph at the Mushroom Farm 3B door in PharmaLab 3, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

Amanda located the missing scrubbers beside the elevators of PharmaLab 3, but the only route to them ran through the lab's mushroom farm. The farm had been left untended since the outbreak, and its air was thick with spores. Activating the lab's pumps would replace the contaminated air, so the crew had to split up and reach the controls in different rooms while the creature prowled the vents around them. Amanda kept one eye on the motion trackers and ordered each survivor to hide whenever the red signal came too close.

Once the pumps were running and fresh air was flowing, the crew went inside and collected the scrubbers from PharmaLab 3. The crew finally had the parts the Haldin needed, and one of them thanked Amanda for getting them almost clear of the nightmare. Amanda said she would double back and stand by while they swapped in the new parts. Yutani told her she looked forward to seeing her soon, and the group returned to the shuttle believing the worst was behind them.

Habitation Zone 7A And Special Order 941

A vehicle bay in Habitation Zone 7A, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

Back at the shuttle, Saito admitted that the Colonial Marines had taught her to fly and that she could handle a pulse rifle, but it had done the station crew no good. The Haldin was ready, yet its docking clamps could only be released from the station side. Amanda sent the crew through Habitation Zone 7A to a docking observation tower that could disengage them. One door on the route was malfunctioning, and Amanda asked the crew to check it by eye, while others turned out to be welded shut and had to be forced open before the group could reach the tower.

When the tower came online, Amanda accessed the docking systems and found that the clamps could not be unlocked. The station had refused under Special Order 941, and Amanda realized that the company was protecting the creature. The order echoed Special Order 937 aboard the USCSS Nostromo and Special Order 939 on Sevastopol, both of which put a specimen ahead of human lives. The only way to free the shuttle was to go to the station's AI Core and release the clamps there.

Sabotaging The AI Core

A Haldin survivor moving past consoles in the AI Core, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

Amanda said she had had bad experiences with mainframes and would not try to reason with this one. Since the machine would never reverse a special order, she decided they would have to get physical, and Thorncroft called it a brutish measure that the circumstances justified. While they moved through the core, he and Yutani discussed the Yutani orphanage initiative, a program that dated from before the merger and to which Thorncroft said he owed everything. One of the crew mocked him for flattering his boss, and Amanda reminded them that the clock was running.

Detaching a few key connections was supposed to return the clamps to their basic operating state, so the crew began pulling them while Amanda watched the trackers. Instead, the sabotage triggered a fail-safe built to destroy Mendel if its mainframe was ever compromised, and the reserve reactor destabilized and began heading for critical. Moments later the motion trackers filled with blips pouring out of the vents, showing that the station now held more than one creature. Amanda told the others to run and leave the creatures to die in the blast.

Escape Through The Research Lab

A Xenomorph standing in a gas-filled room of the Research Lab, seen through a security camera in Alien: Blackout

The only way back to the shuttle ran through the station's Research Lab, an area Amanda had avoided and could not vouch for. Its back wall was right against the docking area, but there was no door through it. Searching the lab for something explosive, Yutani found an outlet giving off sparks next to two gas nozzles. A volatile mix of the two gases would let the sparks blow a hole through the wall, as long as the crew got the gas flowing and cleared the room before its door closed automatically.

The final level was a race against the failing reactor, with only minutes left on the clock and creatures emerging from several vents at once. Amanda ordered Saito, Studwick, Yutani and Thorncroft to hide in turn as the creatures closed in, while the gas built up in the sealed room. When the blast tore open the wall, the survivors ran for the Haldin, and Amanda ran from her last access point to join them. Lead writer JD Sorvari later said that nothing in the lab, including a body found there, had been included at random.

Leaving Mendel Station

The Haldin flying away as Mendel Station explodes behind it in Alien: Blackout

The Haldin pulled away as Mendel exploded behind it. Amanda then recorded a log from the courier ship, reporting that the research station had been destroyed and its crew were dead. She said the Haldin was on course for the KOI-125.01 manufacturing colony and should arrive in three days. In a run where everyone survived, she listed Captain Saito, who joked that she was only acting captain, Engineer Studwick, Executive Director Yutani and research scientist Thorncroft, and Yutani added that Engineer Ripley should be commended.

Amanda closed the log by saying that she intended to continue from the colony to Earth. The exact wording of the ending depended on who had survived, and if Yutani made it out, the log also mentioned her plans for a full report on the incident. Amanda's story continued back on Earth in the comic Aliens: Resistance, where she teamed up with Zula Hendricks. That series was written separately from the game, and it does not refer to Mendel or the Haldin crew.

Key Characters

Concept art for Naoko Yutani from Alien: Blackout

Amanda Ripley was an engineer and Ellen Ripley's daughter, who survived Sevastopol only to wake from hypersleep on Mendel Station after its crew had died. Hiding in the ducts with a portable terminal, she guided the Haldin survivors with cameras, motion trackers and doors, and she sabotaged the station's AI to break Special Order 941.
Miwa Saito was the pilot of the USCSS Haldin and became its acting captain. She said the Colonial Marines had taught her to fly and that she could handle a pulse rifle. She promised to fly Amanda off the station in return for her help finding the shuttle's missing parts.
Dougal Studwick was the Haldin's engineer, a joker who claimed he had turned down a chief engineer's post because of the paperwork. He repaired the broken camera at the transit platform and helped the crew recover the scrubbers from PharmaLab 3.
Naoko Yutani was a Weyland-Yutani executive director traveling aboard the Haldin. She was the second cousin of the company's Ms. Yutani and called it a powerful name with many responsibilities. She found the sparking outlet and gas nozzles that opened the way out of the Research Lab. She is one of the members of the Yutani family.
Andrew Thorncroft was a research scientist from Weyland-Yutani's science division, where he had worked since the age of sixteen. He said he owed everything to the Yutani orphanage initiative, doubted that one creature could wreck an entire station and called the plan for the AI Core brutish but justified.
The Mendel Xenomorph was born on the station and killed most of its crew before the Haldin arrived. It tracked voices and noise, attacked Amanda's access point when she made too much sound, and was later joined by more creatures that emerged from the vents after the AI Core was sabotaged.

Gameplay And Features

Each survivor follows a drawn path and takes simple orders such as stop, hide, come out or hurry up, but rushing makes noise that the Xenomorph can hear. Cameras cover only part of each map, and they cannot see into the vents, so the player also relies on floor-based motion trackers that show the creature as a red dot. Cameras, trackers and doors all draw on a small power supply, and closing a door can block the creature or lure it away. Senior producer Josh Austin said that the blind spots were deliberate, because a security terminal was never meant to track everything.

The danger also reaches Amanda herself. If she gives too many orders, the creature can come for her own access point, and the player has to slam the emergency duct door, which cuts power to the whole station until it recovers. Austin said the core idea came from the scene in Alien: Covenant where David closed doors to funnel the creature, and reviewers compared the format to Five Nights at Freddy's. The developers promised that the creature would never behave the same way twice, although critics found its patterns easier to exploit on repeat attempts.

Timeline And Canon

Blackout picks up after the ending of Alien: Isolation, in which Amanda blew herself and a creature out of the Torrens airlock and a searchlight passed over her face as she drifted in space. The game confirms that the Mendel crew rescued her and put her into hypersleep, though it never says exactly how much time passed. It is generally placed in late 2137, before Amanda returns to Earth in Aliens: Resistance and long before the events of Aliens (1986). Its place in the wider Alien timeline therefore falls in the same short gap as Isolation.

Fox described Blackout as a standalone game that shared Amanda Ripley as a main character but was not a sequel to Isolation. The story itself follows directly from that game, though, and it adds a second Xenomorph source to the period between the first two films, since Amanda says the Mendel creature was born on the station. Characters such as Yutani and Thorncroft had never heard of the creature, which fits the idea that nearly everyone who met one before Aliens ended up dead. The game also introduced Special Order 941 to the line of company orders that put specimens ahead of crews.

Behind The Scenes

Development

Blackout was made by Rival Games, an independent studio in Turku, Finland, whose earlier titles were The Detail and Thief of Thieves. The studio worked with Theory Interactive, and D3 Go!, known for Marvel Puzzle Quest, acted as publisher alongside FoxNext Games and brought the team together with Fox. Lead writer JD Sorvari said the game went from pre-production to post-production in less than a year. The team studied the original 1979 film closely, taking large numbers of screenshots to get the proportions of its environments right, and used Alien: Isolation as another major reference.

Fox let the developers look at some of the Isolation assets as reference, but Sorvari said the mobile assets were built from scratch, because PC assets could not simply be flipped onto phones. Andrea Deck returned as the voice of Amanda Ripley. The credits name Ina Vuorisalo as creative director, Markus Tervola as character designer, and Tommi Hartikainen as audio director and composer, who said the team set out to capture the atmosphere of the first film above all. The credits also thank the creators of Alien: Isolation and the local game developer community in Finland.

Writing The Story

Sorvari served as both lead writer and narrative designer, helped pitch the game to Fox, and wrote the plot, characters and dialogue. He said Amanda was not originally meant to be the main character, but she fell naturally into the role as the plot was streamlined. Naoko Yutani was his own invention, created to bring the Yutani side of the company forward and to add Asian representation to a franchise built around a half-Japanese corporation. Theory Interactive's Alpo Oksaharju chose the name Haldin, continuing the tradition of naming ships after Joseph Conrad novels.

Sorvari said Mendel was the only name the station ever had, a tribute to geneticist Gregor Mendel that matched themes of hybridization explored in early drafts. The PharmaLab was meant to show that Weyland-Yutani also ran research with nothing to do with Xenomorphs, producing medicinal components until the untended mushroom farm got out of hand. He also said the team only found the similar 1984 Commodore 64 Alien game after it had settled on its own idea. Much of the backstory, including how the creature reached the station, was written but left hidden beneath what reached the screen.

Announcement And Backlash

The title first surfaced in November 2018, when 20th Century Fox registered Alien: Blackout as a trademark covering game software with the European Union Intellectual Property Office. Fans hoped it might be a sequel to Isolation or the Alien shooter being made by Cold Iron Studios, which later became Aliens: Fireteam Elite. In the days before the reveal, the official Alien account teased the announcement with the hashtag #ReadPlayWATCH. The game was formally announced on January 7, 2019, as a mobile release for iOS and Android, together with a trailer on the D3 Go! channel.

Many fans reacted angrily that the first new Alien game in years to star Amanda Ripley was a mobile title, and some dismissed it as a cash grab before anyone had played it. Some coverage compared the response to the reveal of Diablo Immortal a few months earlier. Within hours, Fox told Game Informer that Blackout was a standalone game and not a sequel to Isolation, and the official Alien account promised fans that there was still more to come. Sorvari later said the studio was never seriously worried, because the team believed in the game and only had to wait for people to play it.

Release And Reception

Alien: Blackout launched on January 24, 2019 on the App Store, Google Play and the Amazon Appstore. It was sold as a premium game with a single upfront purchase, and Fox and the developers stressed that it contained no microtransactions at all. The iOS version holds a Metacritic score of 68, based on reviews from thirteen critics, which the site rates as mixed or average. GamesBeat and TouchArcade praised it highly, with TouchArcade arguing that it lived up to the legacy of a console game even if it was not the sequel the reviewer had wanted.

Other critics were cooler. IGN gave it 6.3, praising its authentic Alien style, voice acting and death animations, but said it lost its tension once players learned how to exploit the creature's behavior. Metro GameCentral called it shallow and repetitive but surprisingly tense, and several reviews pointed to its short length. Many reviewers agreed that its atmosphere and sound captured the original film well, and FoxNext vice president TQ Jefferson spoke of possible ports to other platforms such as the Nintendo Switch. No port was ever released.

Delisting

D3 Go! was acquired by 505 Games in 2022 and became 505 Go, which announced in October 2023 that it had made the hard decision to sunset Alien: Blackout. The game left the App Store, Google Play and the Amazon store on October 31, 2023, and all development and support ended on that date. Anyone who had bought it before the cutoff could keep playing. Coverage noted that the closure was unusual for a premium game with no live service to maintain, and suggested that licensing terms or the publisher's turn toward free-to-play games were more likely reasons.

Sorvari had said in 2019 that nothing was planned to continue the Blackout story, though another game could follow if there was enough interest. He also said that, to his knowledge, no additional content was planned for the game, and none was ever released. No sequel appeared, and the Isolation line only moved forward again with the announcement of Alien: Isolation 2. Owners who kept the game installed can still play all seven levels, but new players have had no official way to buy it since the 2023 shutdown.