Alone In The Dark Review

And The Night Goes By So Very Slow…

by dkpatriarch

©2008 David Hilton:

“`“You know what?” mutters Edward Carnby (the protagonist of the game) after blowing up a vampire-bat-creating-blob, “I’m dreaming of a beer”.  Believe me, so was I.

“`If I had drunk enough beer I might have started belting out old ‘80s songs, like the one by Heart that goes “And the night goes by so very slow, but I hope it won’t end though, alone…” only I’d change the lyrics to “And the game goes by so very slow, but I hope it will end soon though… moan.”  On the other hand, if I had been drunk maybe I’d have enjoyed myself more with this game.

To say that I was really looking forward to Alone In The Dark, by Eden and Atari, would be a massive understatement.  I, on hope and based on many of the pre-release videos (which to use a Heart line again, “chilled me to the bone”), even predicted earlier in the year on this very site a possible Game Of  The Year title.

“`Instead what I’ve found is an overambitious underachieving game that moves so very slow and has so many problems that it falls into the “should have been a contender” category.

“`So what the heck happened to make such a promising game with genuine glimpses of brilliance turn into a tedious frustrating mix?

“`The Xbox 360 needed another adventure game and Alone In The Dark looked to combine the adventure and survival horror styles perfectly.  It has many fantastic ideas, like the way you can combine so many items you find and have stored in your cool jacket inventory. You can then use them to light things on fire or throw and shoot them to create huge explosions against monsters or destructible doors.

Click any image for full rez view:

The ability to improvise and choose your way to deal with monsters and situations is the glimpse of brilliance.  There are many examples: if you have a knife you can puncture a car and then refill your empty bottles with more flammable petrol….or if you are being attacked you can shoot the petrol tank and make the car explode.

Grabbing a chair, setting it on fire, then breaking down a door that in any other game would be unrealistically indestructible, is a great gameplay mechanic.  If everything else had worked that well, this game would have been something special.

It begins shrouded in mystery as you click the right analogue stick to blink yourself awake and overhear the first snippets of an intriguing conspiracy involving a ‘stone’, a ‘ritual’, and a ‘path of light’.  You also discover that Carnby, who you play, has had a strange and violent past he has forgotten.

Amnesia is always convenient, but it helps with the mystery.  All sounds good so far.  Then some weird fissures in the walls start chasing you around and grabbing people and hope begins to dim.

There is a long list of detracting problems, beginning with the unforgivable sin of terrible clunky controls reminiscent of the original Resident Evil games previous generations ago.  I thought we were done with the Michael Jackson moonwalking in games, but apparently not.

When you’ve played as Altair or even Lara Croft and experienced fluid motion and intuitive controls and then you play the robot Carnby and have to press a dozen buttons to do something as simple as get out a gun, load, and shoot it, you don’t feel that immersed.  Even the NPCs walk on the spot like they are stuck on a treadmill sometimes.  You can move in both first person or third person view, but first person view isn’t much better.

The camera angles, especially in the early sections of the game (which are probably some of the worst levels), can make movement even more cumbersome and inaccurate.  The fact you use the ‘look’ analogue stick to also swing objects you are holding just makes the whole control scheme a mess.

Even though you can run by holding A, the game has a very slow feel to it.  The frustrating numbers of times you need to repeat using trial and error in unforgiving sections or solve some illogical puzzle also makes the game protracted and artificially long.

I would have said the only exception was  the initially exilirating car chase where you speed to the amazingly haunting (and brilliant) soundtrack music by the award winning Mystere Des Voix Bulgares, chased by earthquake fissures as cars blow up and fly through the air around you.  But after you repeat the section a hundred times because there is no room for error, the car handles like it was driving on ice sliding all over the place, and solid objects everywhere stop you cold and get you killed, it stops being fun and you start praying for a miracle to fluke your way through.

In theory the much touted ‘episodic’ approach of the game, where you can skip ahead whenever you want to and get a fun ‘previously on Alone In The Dark’ trailer, allows you to continue the game and solves these sorts of ‘getting stuck’ frustrations.  However, if you want the level complete achievements or just to finish the level for pride’s sake this doesn’t forgive the poor mechanics of the game that tend to lead to frustration the most.  It is good, though, for those who cannot solve some of the more difficult puzzles later on.

The game, strangely enough, is extremely linear, despite the ability to jump to any episode of the game and despite the few times you have access to the whole of Central Park.  For these ‘freedom’ sections you can run around or find and jump-start a car using one of the cool mini-games that involve wires (also used for doors and starting power generators elsewhere).

Then you can drive around (or rather slide around) the park smashing into zombies and the many indestructible objects but there really isn’t any relevant plot point for doing so unless you count the rather boring parts where you have to find and burn ‘roots’.   When driving, unless you keep to boring roads, you are more likely to slide into trees, benches, lamps, or any of the many other objects that get in the way too often.  It feels very different to the park in Dead Rising, which seems more open, despite the fact that Alone’s park is so much bigger.

The sound is well done with that fantastic soundtrack and various background atmospheric sounds, but the voice acting is average at best with a script full of unnecessary expletives that does nothing to add to the tone of the game.

The graphics seem to suffer from a perpetual gray haze and the fog in the park doesn’t help.  They just don’t seem as crisp as they did in the videos and lighting is hit and miss…sometimes really well done, other times just odd.  There are strange visuals like when the background is blurry in third person view but when you switch to first the background suddenly becomes clearer.

The game suffers from the usual screen tearing and lots of clipping too.  These problems can cause death; I was being burnt to death by a fire that went invisible and another time my car was stuck in the environment until I restarted the game.  With such a great environmental concept for a game in Central Park, there was great promise of diversity, but most game environments seem sadly underwhelming.

The puzzles are great and horrible in equal measure.  For every great forklift driving puzzle section there is a terrible ‘shine the light at the black unexplained goo on the floor’ section.  In the end you need the patience of a saint or a shameless attitude to fast forwarding.

The use of fire as a game dynamic is fantastic; it really is fun to knock a monster around with an axe then drag his sorry ass into a fire, or to use a lighter and spray can as a flamethrower.  Also the ability to replay any section of the game when you are finished is a feature all games should have.

In the end, despite some of the fantastic concepts, the game gets bogged down in the mediocre mechanics and issues, and unfortunately the poor pacing so that ‘the night goes by so very slow’ makes this game tough to recommend.

Carnby himself actually says it best when Sarah, the obligatory sexy side-kick, says: “Just one more problem.”, and he exasperatedly replies: “And I’m supposed to find this surprising?”   No, unfortunately.

In this game the problems overshadow the brilliance, and the player ends up feeling that frustration too often darkens the fun.

©2008 David Hilton:

“6/10