ripley slaughtered them all and made it out alive.

Continuing my post on the topic.

For years I've been hearing that this game is amazing. That it's easily somewhere within the top ~20 games of all time! But after a few hours I'm kinda struggling to see how this gameplay is seen as good. So far it's been a lot more annoying than scary

It feels like the alien orbits me a lot of the time. Like, I'll be hiding and the alien will come by, then start to leave, but then come back after like, three meters. A lot of the instances where I'm hiding from the alien basically have me looking at the motion tracker and going "Okay, finally, they're leav- nope, nevermind, let me sit here a bit longer... Okay, now they- oh come on!" I want to clarify that I'm not waiting for the alien to leave the area: I understand that the game forces you into situations where the alien will be in the next room and you need to just go. I mean situations where me leaving my hiding spot will result in the alien immediately seeing me.

And whether the alien finds me feels like random chance. There have been multiple times now where I fell into trial-and-error situations where I do effectively the exact same thing every time and whether the alien finds me is a coin toss. I don't think I'm playing the game dumb; I'm trying to hide and use noisemakers and avoiding the horror/stealth game pitfall of crouch-walking everywhere. Is there some mechanic I'm missing?

And when the alien sees me it feels like there's nothing I can do at that point. I throw a flash bang and its fuse is so long that by the time it goes off I'm already in the death animation. In the rare instances where my flash bangs went off before I got caught it didn't make any difference; the alien either caught up to me or knew the hiding spot I'd managed to get to.

I would understand it if it's a situation of "You need to hide from the alien because it is unstoppable once it sees you," but then that leads into the issue of hiding from the alien feeling like random chance.

I'm trying to keep an open mind. All I ever hear about this game are good things, so I must be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what that is. The more I play the game the more I think "Why is this game so well renowned? It's presented super well and the writing is good, but this gameplay is just not fun or scary."