Alone in the Dark

I wanted to believe. Eden Studios had created the most excellent Test Drive Unlimited, which is based upon the most brilliant concept ever. Wasn't flawlessly executed, but the concept was so ingenious it didn't really matter. Alone in the Dark had similarly ambitious ideas and I was hoping for a spiritual sequel, if you could call it that.

You start off in a room, dizzy and barely conscious, you have no idea what's going on as you suffer from that old chestnut amnesia. What has actually happened is some silly, generic supernatural poppycock which in a thinly veiled attempt tries to be mature and edgy. Meaning it's all still very silly, only the characters say ”fuck” and ”shit” a lot. Characters which are all rather forgettable. Particularly this..Sarah(?) person. Supposed to be your female sidekick throughout the game, but I ended up trying to run her over with a pick-up truck and cheering the monsterz on as they took her away.

The silly story is a largely irrelevant flaw though, since there are lots of other flaws with a far greater overall impact. What Eden has tried to create is a game where you're free figure out “your own” logical solutions to the obstacles presented to you by combining various items you find. Hairspray + lighter = flamethrower. Bottle of flammable liquid + rag = molotov. Sticky tape + flare. Etc. MacGyver, as we all know, is awesome. Sometimes AitD is a bit like MacGyver. But mostly it isn't. The control system is quite possibly the worst ever. It's so bad it's scary. Perhaps that's what they were going for?

The game is so full of design issues and stupid design choices this review would never end if I started listing them. But for one, you can't aim your flashlight or gun in third person. For some unexplicable reason you're forced to switch to first person whenever you wanna do that. It's just...pointless and dumb. The inventory is real-time, meaning you get attacked as you fumble around with your bottles and sticky tape. The camera will switch to a static third person view every now and then, sometimes for no apparent reason, making you disoriented since the controls are relative to the camera. The melee combat is thoroughly borked. Oh I'll stop now, before it gets out of hand.

The controls however, isn't the most frustrating part of the game. The driving sequences are. The initial drive through New York as you're chased by this thing that makes everything around you collapse certainly looks very cool, but it's ridiculously stupid. For some reason someone thought it'd be a good idea to force the player to replay the section over and over and over again until they learn it in its five minute entirety and don't make any mistakes. Sometimes even that doesn't work as the screen just inexplicable faded to black on me when I was driving up a ramp.

There are more similarly frustrating parts like that. It can be terrifically stupidly designed. Really, I imagine their meetings must've went something like this:

Joe: “You know the deal people. New ideas on how to piss off the player please?”
Bill: “What if we have this instakill goo on the ground which scatters when light is shined on it?”
Joe: “Hmm, yeah, then we could force the player to use the flashlight, but since he can only aim it in first person he won't be able to see when the goo creeps up behind him and kills him. Excellent idea Bill.”

During short periods the game opens up and you get more freedom to experiment with different combinations and whatnot, making you able to have some actual fun. But you know that something just around the corner is gonna make you wanna punch a moose in the face again. It has potential, but sadly mostly to be the most frustrating game you've ever played.