Quality survival horror games are woefully hard to come by on consoles these days, and it's easy to understand why. As hardware gets more powerful and gamers' expectations grow, building a big, beautiful world full of mind-bending puzzles, creepy creatures and compelling storylines is an increasingly Herculean task.
But it's a job Atari's Eden Games studio bravely took on with Alone in the Dark, an ambitious adventure game set in and around New York's Central Park. Alone in the Dark (only nominally connected to its genre-spawning predecessors) follows the tale of a paranormal investigator who wakes up in a burning building, unable to remember who he is and how he came to be surrounded by menacing thugs.
He soon learns that he is Edward Carnby, a foul-mouthed tough guy who's mixed up in some devilish doings. As he makes his way out of the crumbling skysc****r he meets up with the feisty Sara, and they flee into Central Park to uncover the mystery of Edward's background and the secret behind a stone with mysterious properties.
I love a good yarn, and I was hoping to find one in Alone in the Dark. Instead I was introduced to yet another amnesiac fighting demons and carrying around a spooky stone. It doesn't help that our hero is challenged in the dialogue department, having been endowed by the game's writers with a nasty blue streak. You can count on hearing the words f--- or s--- nearly every time our scarred-up hero opens his mouth, an attempt at gritty realism that comes off as adolescent and trite.
It's a shame that there's not more depth beneath the surface of Alone in the Dark, but it's not just the tired storyline that makes it a disappointment. There are many genuinely inventive ideas at play in Central Park, but few of them work as well as they should and most are failures. As a result, the game feels loosely cobbled together, and the experience ends up being full of inconsistencies, aggravations and contradictions.
It's been a point of pride with the developers of Alone in the Dark that they've implemented realistic fire effects in the game, and they have reason to boast. Flames lick the walls to stunning effect; objects catch fire and can be used against enemies; puzzles, especially near the end of the game, make use of fire's destructive properties; and flames can help light your way in dark corridors. At times, the flames behave so realistically that you forget they're an illusion. Now that's a feat.
The problem is, fire is the only way to kill enemies (inexplicably named "Humanz"), which is interesting at first but quickly becomes tedious. Although, there are many different methods you can use to dispatch your enemies – lobbing Molotov ****tails, blowing up cars, using makeshift blowtorches, touching monsters with burning furniture – your gun (you only have a single handgun throughout the entire game) is useless against them.
Unless, that is, you pour flammable liquid on your ammunition to create "fire bullets." Even then, you can only kill monsters by hitting them directly in their "fissures," which are glowing fiery scars on their bodies. Most of the time, you'll find the access to explosive items severely limited, which means the most effective and consistent way to kill monsters in Alone in the Dark is to touch them with burning chairs. Yawn.
Unlike the Resident Evil series, which scatters storage chests around the game for quick access to your stockpiled items, Alone in the Dark restricts you to only a few slots in your jacket. And each side can only hold a certain category of items. Manipulating items in videogames can be cumbersome enough without having to delve into a jacket and poke around while monsters attack you in real-time. Combining items to make new ones, a central part of the game, is also frustrating. Want to combine a wick with a bottle? You can't select the bottle first – it has to be the wick. Good luck sorting out inconsistencies like these when "Ratz" and "Batz" are nipping at your heels. What was intended to add tension and challenge instead creates a situation in which you must constantly wander around the game combing glove compartments and trash cans for disposable weapons. And once in your arsenal, they're deployed inconsistently at best, both against enemies and the environment.
At the beginning of Alone in the Dark, we learn that our jacketed hero can smash in doors with objects found in the world. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. That's partly because the controls are awkward and partly because the collision detection and physics in Alone in the Dark don't work well. Sometimes doors bend and buckle on the first few hits. Other times, they don't budge, leaving you to just blow them up in frustration. But even that method is inconsistent.
In the sewers beneath Central Park, I tried to get creative, taping a bottle of explosives to a steel door and stepping back to shoot it. Nothing happened. But when I lobbed the same bottle in the air and shot it in front of the door, it burst into pieces, opening the way before me. Alone in the Dark gives the impression that it rewards creative thinking with inventory items, but after being burned a few times, you'll want to stop playing with fire.
Combine this restrictiveness and inconsistency with cumbersome, unintuitive controls and you have a real problem on your hands. Alone in the Dark uses an odd mix of third and first-person views – the former is tank-like, and the latter is less than smooth. And they're both made more frustrating by the fact that the game forces you to swap between them. Melee combat can only be handled in third-person, but you can only fire your weapon in first-person. Being shoved back and forth between the two while solving puzzles and fighting creatures with Zs at the ends of their names is enough to drive a bloke crazy.
But even without the perspective problem, the combat system would remain more annoyance than entertainment. Pick up a melee weapon like a shovel or axe and you'll use the right analog stick to swing it. It's a nice idea that ends up feeling clumsy and imprecise. Dispatching evil monsters should be rewarding, but the melee controls in Alone in the Dark offer only frustration. Carnby moves around Central Park like a hung-over convalescent, awkwardly swinging burning baseball bats as if he has two broken arms. He can't even climb a set of stairs without lifting the item he's carrying into the air to avoid getting stuck.
But it's a job Atari's Eden Games studio bravely took on with Alone in the Dark, an ambitious adventure game set in and around New York's Central Park. Alone in the Dark (only nominally connected to its genre-spawning predecessors) follows the tale of a paranormal investigator who wakes up in a burning building, unable to remember who he is and how he came to be surrounded by menacing thugs.
He soon learns that he is Edward Carnby, a foul-mouthed tough guy who's mixed up in some devilish doings. As he makes his way out of the crumbling skysc****r he meets up with the feisty Sara, and they flee into Central Park to uncover the mystery of Edward's background and the secret behind a stone with mysterious properties.
I love a good yarn, and I was hoping to find one in Alone in the Dark. Instead I was introduced to yet another amnesiac fighting demons and carrying around a spooky stone. It doesn't help that our hero is challenged in the dialogue department, having been endowed by the game's writers with a nasty blue streak. You can count on hearing the words f--- or s--- nearly every time our scarred-up hero opens his mouth, an attempt at gritty realism that comes off as adolescent and trite.
It's a shame that there's not more depth beneath the surface of Alone in the Dark, but it's not just the tired storyline that makes it a disappointment. There are many genuinely inventive ideas at play in Central Park, but few of them work as well as they should and most are failures. As a result, the game feels loosely cobbled together, and the experience ends up being full of inconsistencies, aggravations and contradictions.
It's been a point of pride with the developers of Alone in the Dark that they've implemented realistic fire effects in the game, and they have reason to boast. Flames lick the walls to stunning effect; objects catch fire and can be used against enemies; puzzles, especially near the end of the game, make use of fire's destructive properties; and flames can help light your way in dark corridors. At times, the flames behave so realistically that you forget they're an illusion. Now that's a feat.
The problem is, fire is the only way to kill enemies (inexplicably named "Humanz"), which is interesting at first but quickly becomes tedious. Although, there are many different methods you can use to dispatch your enemies – lobbing Molotov ****tails, blowing up cars, using makeshift blowtorches, touching monsters with burning furniture – your gun (you only have a single handgun throughout the entire game) is useless against them.
Unless, that is, you pour flammable liquid on your ammunition to create "fire bullets." Even then, you can only kill monsters by hitting them directly in their "fissures," which are glowing fiery scars on their bodies. Most of the time, you'll find the access to explosive items severely limited, which means the most effective and consistent way to kill monsters in Alone in the Dark is to touch them with burning chairs. Yawn.
Unlike the Resident Evil series, which scatters storage chests around the game for quick access to your stockpiled items, Alone in the Dark restricts you to only a few slots in your jacket. And each side can only hold a certain category of items. Manipulating items in videogames can be cumbersome enough without having to delve into a jacket and poke around while monsters attack you in real-time. Combining items to make new ones, a central part of the game, is also frustrating. Want to combine a wick with a bottle? You can't select the bottle first – it has to be the wick. Good luck sorting out inconsistencies like these when "Ratz" and "Batz" are nipping at your heels. What was intended to add tension and challenge instead creates a situation in which you must constantly wander around the game combing glove compartments and trash cans for disposable weapons. And once in your arsenal, they're deployed inconsistently at best, both against enemies and the environment.
At the beginning of Alone in the Dark, we learn that our jacketed hero can smash in doors with objects found in the world. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. That's partly because the controls are awkward and partly because the collision detection and physics in Alone in the Dark don't work well. Sometimes doors bend and buckle on the first few hits. Other times, they don't budge, leaving you to just blow them up in frustration. But even that method is inconsistent.
In the sewers beneath Central Park, I tried to get creative, taping a bottle of explosives to a steel door and stepping back to shoot it. Nothing happened. But when I lobbed the same bottle in the air and shot it in front of the door, it burst into pieces, opening the way before me. Alone in the Dark gives the impression that it rewards creative thinking with inventory items, but after being burned a few times, you'll want to stop playing with fire.
Combine this restrictiveness and inconsistency with cumbersome, unintuitive controls and you have a real problem on your hands. Alone in the Dark uses an odd mix of third and first-person views – the former is tank-like, and the latter is less than smooth. And they're both made more frustrating by the fact that the game forces you to swap between them. Melee combat can only be handled in third-person, but you can only fire your weapon in first-person. Being shoved back and forth between the two while solving puzzles and fighting creatures with Zs at the ends of their names is enough to drive a bloke crazy.
But even without the perspective problem, the combat system would remain more annoyance than entertainment. Pick up a melee weapon like a shovel or axe and you'll use the right analog stick to swing it. It's a nice idea that ends up feeling clumsy and imprecise. Dispatching evil monsters should be rewarding, but the melee controls in Alone in the Dark offer only frustration. Carnby moves around Central Park like a hung-over convalescent, awkwardly swinging burning baseball bats as if he has two broken arms. He can't even climb a set of stairs without lifting the item he's carrying into the air to avoid getting stuck.