General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Alien: Isolation – The Digital Series

Alien: Isolation – The Digital Series is a seven-episode American animated science fiction horror web series released on February 28, 2019, that retells and extends the story of the 2014 survival horror video game Alien: Isolation. It was produced by 20th Century Fox with Reverse Engineering Studios (RES), DVgroup, and TitraFilm, and released exclusively through IGN's website and YouTube channel, with all episodes available at once from 9 a.m. Pacific Time.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Format	Seven animated episodes, each 8–14 minutes, roughly 73 minutes in total²^•³
Release	February 28, 2019, exclusively on IGN.com and IGN's YouTube channel, all episodes at once¹
Key creatives	Director Fabien Dubois; writer Jeff Juhasz; story credits also include Dan Abnett and Dion Lay²^•⁴
Production companies	Reverse Engineering Studios (RES), DVgroup, TitraFilm, 20th Century Fox, IGN²
Source material	The 2014 video game Alien: Isolation by Creative Assembly, using its cutscenes and first-person footage⁵
Setting	In-universe year 2137, fifteen years after the events of the 1979 film Alien (2122)⁵
Lead cast	Andrea Deck as Amanda Ripley, with Anthony Howell, Emerald O'Hanrahan, and Sean Gilder⁶

Spoilers

Premise

The series follows Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley, fifteen years after her mother disappeared aboard the deep space towing ship Nostromo. A Weyland-Yutani team travels to the remote Sevastopol Station, in orbit around the gas giant KG-348, to recover the Nostromo's flight recorder, which may hold clues to her mother's fate. Separated from the others during a spacewalk, Amanda enters the damaged, silent station alone, where she encounters violent survivors, androids that no longer obey, and a creature hunting everyone on board.⁵^•⁷

The story is framed as a message Amanda records while adrift in space near KG-348, recounting her trip to Sevastopol.⁵ According to the episode guide, the later episodes follow Marlow's account of how the alien came aboard the station, Amanda's partnership with Colonial Marshal Waits to hunt the creature, and a finale in which she finds the infestation grown beyond her worst fears and her only hope of survival is a shot in the dark.⁷^•⁶

Production

Development moved quickly. On February 13, 2019, Bloody Disgusting reported that two Alien television projects were in development, one animated and one live-action. On February 20, 2019, Axis Animation announced that a seven-episode animated adaptation of the 2014 game was underway, and on February 27, 2019, IGN announced its series order, with release set for the following day.² A launch trailer released on February 27 confirmed the premiere date.²

Construction from game assets. Kinga Smith of Reverse Engineering Studios and Fabian DuBois of DVgroup described the adaptation in an IGN interview: the team made storytelling choices aimed at going deeper into Amanda Ripley's psychology, "to discover her demons, her fears, her motivations." The finished series combines three kinds of scenes: brand-new scenes rendered from scratch, cinematics taken directly from the game, and first-person gameplay segments that were re-shot, edited, and given a CG model of Amanda Ripley. Smith stated that the series "doesn't repeat the Alien: Isolation story, but completes it."⁸

The cast of the original game reprised their roles, including Andrea Deck as Amanda Ripley, Anthony Howell as Christopher Samuels, Emerald O'Hanrahan as Nina Taylor, and Sean Gilder as Henry Marlow; Kezia Burrows provided motion capture and likeness for Amanda. Recurring and guest roles included Richie Campbell as Ricardo, William Hope as Marshal Waits, Jane Perry as Diane Verlaine, George Anton as Axel, and Melanie Gutteridge as Catherine Foster.² Music was composed by Joe Henson, Alexis Smith, and Christian Henson.²

Reception and context

The series was positioned as a way for people who had not played the 2014 game to experience its story: instead of a playthrough running over eight hours, the seven episodes could be watched in about an hour.⁹ A Middle of the Row review praised the Xenomorph's menace and the tension of sequences seen from the hunted character's perspective, while criticizing the weaker, "sloppy" animation of the newly added scenes, particularly the characters' mouths, which looked jarring next to the game's footage.⁹ STARBURST noted that the shift from the game's first-person view to a predominantly third-person presentation made the retelling feel fresh and let Amanda read as a fully developed character.³

The series sits within a cluster of 2019 supplementary Alien media alongside the mobile game Alien: Blackout and the comic miniseries Aliens: Resistance, both of which also continue Amanda Ripley's story.¹⁰ In the franchise timeline, its story takes place in 2137, fifteen years after Alien (2122) and five years before Alien: Romulus (2142).⁵ The episodes remained available on IGN's YouTube channel, where the first episode was published by the Alien Anthology channel in March 2019.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Genre web series: horror, thriller, science fiction, and mystery

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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