Eidos Montreal is reportedly developing a new game based on the Alien franchise

 

Here’s what’s really going on beneath the headline.

On paper, “Eidos Montreal is making an Alien game” sounds like a neat, confidence-boosting headline. In reality, the details attached to it immediately set off every industry alarm bell at once. Development allegedly began in 2020, the project has cycled through multiple internal code names, switched developers several times, and is now being pitched with the wonderfully vague descriptor of “Shadow of the Tomb Raider with xenomorphs.” None of that suggests a clean, focused production. It suggests a project that has been passed around like an awkward conversation no one wants to finish.

Let’s start with the comparison. “Shadow of the Tomb Raider with xenomorphs” is not a design vision; it’s a marketing shorthand. It tells us nothing about tone, pacing, or systems beyond “third-person action-adventure, probably with stealth and set pieces.” Alien, as a franchise, lives or dies on tension, vulnerability, and horror. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a game about empowerment, skill trees, and athletic murder tourism. Mashing the two together could work, but only if the Alien part is more than just cosmetic. Otherwise, you don’t get Alien—you get Lara Croft in a Halloween costume while the xenomorph waits politely for its turn to be stabbed.

Then there’s the development history, which is the real story here. A project that’s been in development since 2020 but has changed names and studios multiple times isn’t “ambitious”; it’s unstable. Code names changing is normal. Developers changing midstream is not, especially repeatedly. That usually means shifting ownership, shifting scope, or shifting expectations—often all three. Each handoff costs time, cohesion, and institutional memory. By the time the project settles somewhere, it’s less a vision and more a pile of inherited compromises.

Eidos Montreal itself is an interesting choice. The studio has pedigree in immersive systems and narrative-heavy action games, but it’s also coming off years of corporate limbo, cancellations, and restructuring. Being handed a long-running, already-turbulent licensed project could be an opportunity—or it could be yet another case of a studio being asked to “fix” something that was never properly defined in the first place.

And then there’s the Alien franchise problem. Alien games have a long history of wildly uneven quality. For every Alien: Isolation—a game that actually understood the horror—there are multiple action-leaning adaptations that mistake xenomorphs for target practice. Hearing that this project has been drifting for five years raises a worrying question: does anyone involved actually agree on what kind of Alien game this is supposed to be?

So yes, an Alien game from Eidos Montreal could be compelling. But the reported history doesn’t sound like creative confidence—it sounds like corporate inertia finally finding a studio to park the project in. Until there’s evidence of a clear direction, stable leadership, and a gameplay pitch that’s more than “popular game, but with aliens,” this feels less like an exciting reveal and more like another licensed property still trying to figure out what it wants to be.