games: Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark seems to be trying very hard to be a stand-out game different from the rest of the horror crowd. And kudos to Eden, it feels different and there’s a lot of innovation here including a TV-like structure which allows you to skip to any part of the game. Albeit barring the finale, but it gives you teaser trailers and plot summaries for each episode. Alas sadly there are still too many things holding this game back for it to become a genre re-defining classic.

You play Edward Carnby a grizzled amnesiac who has somehow gotten caught up in a supernatural plot involving the Lightbringer, a chap called Theophilus and other pseudo-religious hoo-hah. It’s set in New York and the action converges on Central Park, now inhabited by various zombie-like monsters, invariably pluralized by the addition of the letter ‘z’.

Trite as that sounds, the first level is actually pretty cool, as the apartment building you start in is gradually demolished by a malevolent force which manifests itself by opening living cracks or fissures in the building and sucking people into them. A damn cool idea, both for a horror story, and for motivating some of the rather nifty platforming and puzzle solving as you have to make your way past rubble, live wires and fire.

The art work also has its moments, with cool things like creeping up on your own shadow or your reflection in a mirror, which really adds to the atmosphere. The bloody impressive fire modelling steals the show, but in general the look is pretty standard and the graphics a little clunky with some really quite horrible character animation in places.

But sadly, while there is a decent core to the ideas of Alone in the Dark, it does have a number of problems. The game crashed on me a couple of times and I also ran into a number of bugs, but the main issues were with the camera and the controls.

The camera switches between first and third person depending on what you’re doing. Both cameras were pretty monstrous, but in 3rd person, you looking arc is ridiculously narrow and fighting the camera to see what I was doing left me feeling sea-sick nearly every time I played.

The controls are atypical, and also really damn complicated, even for simple things. It’s a great idea to have realistic limitations and opportunities, e.g. having to discard your fire extinguisher or sword in order to climb up a cable, or being able to make a molotov cocktail, but sometimes it gets so finicky, particularly when trying to use the painfully clunky inventory system, that it gets in the way of the realism it’s trying to achieve.

The game starts with you having to control your characters blinking. It’s a great way to get you into the horror mode at the beginning, but is also a little worrying. Combat is unbearably cumbersome with having to pull back your melee weapon before striking, and the driving portions feel under weighted and overly scripted even if they do add a nice bit of variety.

Another double edged sword was the sound - I’m incredibly impressed with the soundtrack composition, but the audio never has the intensity you want from a game like this, no matter how much you turn it up. And this lack was a distinct characteristic of much of the game. The physics lacks a reactive intensity, so smashing down doors feels rather underwhelming, and with Carnby’s persistently leisurely amble, even in combat there’s little sense of urgency.

And so even though this has some really good and original ideas, the execution and game-play-mechanics really do need to be re-examined, leaving the score at a rather nonchalant 3 stars!

For the best of the rest:

EuroGamer:
At sea in an ocean of blockbusters, Alone in the Dark has no choice but to punch above its weight: high production values, biblical clashes between good and evil, and precociously elaborate game mechanics unite, embraced by a rigid but versatile single location and tempted in every direction by a developer unafraid, perhaps even desperate, to sling every idea at the wall and hope the majority stick.

Game Trailers:
The game that started the popular survival horror genre returns! Players control Edward Carnby, the main character from the original Alone in the Dark, on a thrilling journey through a dark and terrifying re-creation of New York’s Central Park.

IGN:
Ever heard of Wind Waker Syndrome? It’s that point in an otherwise majestic game where, for reasons obvious to nobody with even a modicum of common sense, a single game mechanic of such staggeringly misjudged magnitude comes along that you immediately want to sling your console out the window, write a stern letter to your local MP then spend the rest of the afternoon sobbing in the corner of your room in silent, endless frustration.