G4TV

A lot of bad games are obvious in their badness. Often they're clearly C-list titles, they were rushed to market, or they're an obvious licensing cash-in. Those games are tough to play through, but pretty easy to review. The tough reviews happen every once in a while, when you run into a game that you really want to be good, but it just isn't up to the task. X-Play is saddened to report that Alone in the Dark falls squarely into the latter category.

Fail to remember all over again

Edward Carnby, hero of the original Alone in the Dark games, finds himself in New York City's Central Park, surrounded by demons and madness and lacking any memory whatsoever. Considering everyone around him seems to know who he is and many of them want him dead, Edward has to figure out what's going on as fast as possible. While he's at it, he'll probably want to know why he's in 2008 when his previous appearances took place in the '20s and '30s.

Alone in the Dark's story is interesting at its core, but the characters don't seem all that involved with what's going on. Everybody asks "What the f*** is going on?" fairly regularly, and the characters who do know what's going on tend to say there's "no time" to explain things, even though explaining things would have made everyone's lives a lot easier. The mysteries get built up more and more, until the actual revelations near the end of the game turn out to be underwhelming.

Interactive menus!

That said, the game does take an innovative approach to its storytelling structure. Realizing that using a two-hour film narrative structure tends to break down in 15-hour games, Eden Games sets up Alone in the Dark as an eight episode TV series. Each episode has a beginning, middle, and ending complete with cliffhanger. You can skip through the episodes at will, ensuring newcomers to horror games will be able to bypass frustrating or difficult sections and still see the end of the game. Accessing the last few sequences requires a certain percentage of the game to be completed, but it's nothing that should be too far beyond the capabilities of a casual player.

Alone in the Dark really starts to break down in the gameplay department. No survival horror game has really featured an agile protagonist, but Edward is disturbingly sluggish in combat. He can rappel down a building like a champ, but he has trouble swinging a baseball bat without awkwardness. You can switch to a first-person viewpoint at will, primarily to make gunplay easier, but just because you have the laser sight on a target doesn't mean the bullet is going to strike there. Since the enemies are so much faster than you, Edward's rather lackadaisical approach to fighting quickly becomes irritating.

Mayan panoramas on my pyramid pajamas

Compounding this problem is the fact that many of the enemies in the game are vulnerable only to fire. You can knock them out briefly, but the only way to eliminate the zombie like Humanz is to burn them. Because of this, Alone in the Dark puts heavy emphasis on combining items to create new items, mainly stuff that burns. Fire is a large part of the game, and in fact is some of the most beautiful fire ever seen in a videogame. It jumps, dances, spreads realistically, and casts light on its surroundings correctly. But having enemies vulnerable to fire means you spend a lot of time constructing fire-based methods to kill them. This requires you to fumble with the awkward "jacket inventory" which is limited and does not pause the game when you access it. Combat thus degenerates into hoping your current stock of items takes care of everyone attacking you. Otherwise you get hit a lot while you run around trying to pour gasoline on your gun to create "flaming bullets." Not only are they silly, they don't even work very well.

This is a common flaw in the game's immersion factor. Real-world thinking seems to be encouraged, such as using a burning wooden chair as a light source or breaking down a door with a heavy object, but then you're making "flaming bullets" and taping bottles of gasoline to spider monsters. This only goes so far, though, and can make Alone in the Dark feel even "gamier" than typical survival horror titles. If enemies are vulnerable to fire, why would I set a table leg on fire and swing it around until it burned my hands and I had to drop it? Why not wrap the end in bandages or handkerchiefs, douse it in flammable liquid, and set it on fire, using it as a durable torch that would last three or four fights? For all its emphasis on combining things, you're not allowed to alter the larger objects you pick up beyond smashing them or burning them to a crisp.

After a few episodes you're turned loose on Central Park itself, which is one of the few ideas in the game that really works to any great degree. Setting a survival horror title in an open environment is a pretty cool trick. Despite the emptiness of the park, it's a very eerie place to encounter monster bats and acid-spitting bugs. You can run around at will, or hotwire nearby cars to get around the large area more rapidly.

Let the fear take the wheel and steer

Here another problem crops up. The cars handle extremely poorly, sometimes comically so. Worse, Alone in the Dark also boasts three forced driving sequences, one of which is a strong contender for the worst driving sequence in the history of "Let's put a driving sequence in our action/adventure game" driving sequences. It's an exciting and ambitious scene, and would be great except that you have to interact with it. This one little part of the game packs more bugs and glitches than you can shake a QA tester at, complete with cinematic camera cutaways that still expect you to be controlling the car while they're playing. Plus, none of the forced driving sequences feature checkpoints; you do them in one go or you do it over. These sections will likely make many players glad the DVD menu system allows skipping.

This is not to say everything is horrible, as there are aspects of Alone in the Dark that shine. The music is exceptionally well done, and very distinctive. The aforementioned fire effects will likely be the gold standard for fire in videogames from here on out. Several of the puzzles are well-designed, especially a set near the end that evoke an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade feel.

Edward Carnby's return had the potential to be the next Silent Hill. What we ended up with is more reminiscent of Trespasser. To be honest, we don't like the fact that we don't like this game. This is not just some run of the mill shovelware title. It's clear the people who made Alone in the Dark were trying to make something very ambitious, and there are a lot of good ideas here. It's just that none of them work very well.

Review by: Matt Keil