Alien: Isolation 2 art director Ana Sopikova has one very simple piece of advice for anyone who might struggle to overcome their fear while playing what's sure to be a terrifying sequel: just crank down the music.

GamesRadar+ sat down with Sopikova during Gamescom 2026, and we asked about Creative Assembly's approach to balancing tension so that players feel appropriately oppressed but not consistently panicked to the point of risking a cardiovascular event. Basically, how scary is too scary? As a horror geek with the unfortunate affliction of being a total wuss, this is important information.

"My advice for all the people who are too scared is just honestly to turn the music down," Sopikova says. "Many people don't realize how much music plays in building that tension. And actually the alien might not even be there, but it's just a dark corridor, and this very low-key scary music is playing, and instantly you're paralyzed, and you just can't move anywhere."

Sopikova says things like music, lighting, and of course gameplay all go into crafting a tense atmosphere that can be dialed up and down as needed to strike a balance somewhere between boring and "on the verge of having a heart attack."

"We don't want players to constantly be on the peak of horror, on the verge of having a heart attack, because then they just get used to it, and it's not scary anymore," says Sopikova. "Obviously, it's a narrative game. There is a story to follow. So you see, we take in all the elements, both visual and audio, how everything comes together, animation, and gameplay, and we're just trying to build that experience with all the different moving parts to really support the peaks and valleys."

Alien: Isolation, along with Resident Evil 7, is one of very few games that I can admit were a little too scary for me at times. As much as I applaud Creative Assembly and Capcom for having the chops to make a seasoned horror veteran as stressed out as I was playing those games, I remember having genuinely unpleasant reactions to certain scenes, to the point where I had to take breaks to catch my breath.

I think Capcom's decision to break up the tension with Grace and Leon chapters in Resident Evil Requiem was brilliant, and I hope Creative Assembly has something in mind for the perpetually anxious in Alien: Isolation 2.

15 years after the first game made horror history, Alien Isolation 2 unleashes a smarter, meaner Xenomorph

Cyberpunk 2077 now is one of the best RPGs money can buy. But Cyberpunk 2077 then, which is to say when it was new, was not. It was pretty okay on PC, aside from a horde of bugs, but it was such a performance catastrophe on the PlayStation 4 that Sony literally booted it off the PlayStation Store. Even when it was allowed back in the building six months later, Sony slapped a notice on it warning people that it was still potentially dodgy.

Speaking to Game Developer, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski said that failure arose from the studio's ambitions for the game, which led it to develop on PC first. "We want[ed] to push the boundaries of what is doable in terms of cinematic feeling and whatnot [in Cyberpunk 2077], and PC was just the best suited rig for that," Nowakowski said. "There was this, as it turned out, false belief that toning it down to whatever was the current gen is not going to be that much of a challenge."

There was also a little bit of belief in a Polish take on the ol' Bioware magic: Nowakowski said the studio "got a bit lucky here and there" with The Witcher 3, leading it to believe that Cyberpunk would ultimately be fine too.

Of course, Cyberpunk 2077 was most definitely not fine, and with that humiliation firmly burned into its collective consciousness, CD Projekt Red is approaching The Witcher 4 with a little more care and consideration to ensure the new game runs properly on all platforms it's coming to. If development hits a snag on any single platform, for instance, the studio stops to fix it rather than simply pressing ahead and coming back to clean it up later.

"For example, technically, we should hit, let's say, 10 checkmarks," Nowakowski said. "Back in the past, if we missed one or two, we were like, 'we're gonna catch up with that later on.' Sometimes we did, but sometimes we didn't, and then two milestones or three milestones down the road, you have like four or five missing checkmarks and it's not that easy."

The net result is parity right from the get-go: "You come to the studio, you launch Witcher 4 right now. You can launch it on PC. You can launch it on PS5. You can launch it on Xbox Series X, and it's going to run," Nowakowski said.

'We're doing our best to ensure our game runs' is a low bar, sure, but given how poorly Cyberpunk 2077 went at launch it's not surprising that CD Projekt is making the point—and so, here's hoping it's able to pull it off. The Witcher 4 still doesn't have a release date (and probably won't for a good long time yet) but is currently "targeting" a 2028 release.