Alone in the Dark

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Call me crazy but I was mildly excited about this game as I figured it would be a decent romp to tide me over until the release of Fable 2. I also I got ten bucks off of it for reserving it which in retrospect should have probably been my first warning sign. Another problem I have was apparently being the only person among my friends, coworkers and associates who remembers the original Alone in the Dark from 1992, where you were just a dude in a haunted mansion, and I was somehow unaware they made like 5 or 6 more games which involved more guns and less housing. So needless to say I thought I was in for a badass next-gen haunted house survival game. Even when I found out that was untrue, I figured it would still be fun. This is what I get for being optimistic.

What’s so hard to understand is how Alone in the Dark got so much right and yet it manages to all go so horribly wrong. All of its various infuriating game mechanics would actually sound good on paper, however the design team should have realized they weren’t working out when put into application and, I dunno, maybe tried something else?

Now I know what some people who, for reasons I can’t comprehend, actually like this game will say. Oh did I just want another button masher and the same old same old? Well no, it’s good when a game tries to be unique but you can really overdo that kind of shit and, well, end up with something horribly broken. Case in point, this game.

While you attempt to mess around with
bottles of dubious fluids in a
Macgyver-like fashion demons are
slaughtering the entire world

The controls are the worst. Bear in mind I played it on the Xbox 360 but I’m sure it’s similar on the PS2 and PS3; I can’t say much for the Wii version. The camera is pretty awful, picking "cinematic" angles to view the area seemingly at random and generally making it difficult to see where you’re going or what you’re doing. Your inventory is difficult to scroll through and you do so in real time with your character literally opening up his coat and looking down into it (which, again, sounds good on paper) meaning while you’re fumbling around trying to make a molotov cocktail some horrible beast of hell could pop up behind you and bite your neck off. Granted this makes the game more realistic but it is a game in the end and there’s a pretty thick line between "challenging" and "making every detail bowel tearingly frustrating". However, all that I can deal with. The fight controls, I can not. If these were better the entire game would be bearable, maybe even a little enjoyable. You fight with the joystick. That’s it. That’s how you swing objects, and if you bank to the right even the slightest amount you’ll end up swinging a flaming chair over the head of a monster rather than driving it down into it leaving it a perfect opening to leap up and tear off your nuts. Using something like a gun works alright but the game forces you to switch between first and third person to use certain weapons which can be incredibly disorienting.

Even the widely touted fire mechanic falls short: you’re always either putting out fires or lighting things on fire, so get used to it if you play this game. The fire sort of melts away in a watery fashion when sprayed with an extinguisher which messes with my head in ways I can’t even begin to describe. And you know it’s just a little undignified to have to walk over to a chair, pick it up, shuffle over to a convenient open fire, light the chair on fire, and trudge back across the room in order to set ablaze the demon you just bludgeoned to death with a shovel or shot in the face with a gun because ONLY FIRE CAN KILL THE EVIL! I don’t care if it’s a plot point, or about all the "kill it with fire" jokes that could be jovially made if this game were actually fun, it just makes me look like a tool.

The plot doesn’t really carry the game at all, it’s disappointingly generic, the acting is terrible, and the writing is terrible. Clearly, I have no problem with profanity, but having your characters say "fuck" literally every other sentence doesn’t make the dialog sound grown up. And it doesn’t help that all the speech is just stilted and unnatural anyway. At one point the character I was playing gruffly quipped  "Well I suppose you’re the answer man then, shithead?" I mean, really? You call this writing? Not to mention your main heroine is insufferably annoying, and seemingly indestructible as monsters will look right at her before making a beeline for you, and she’ll just whine and complain obnoxiously if you accidentally hit her stupid ass with an axe or shoot her while she’s standing directly in the way of everything. With that harpy hovering around you’ll wish you really were alone in the dark. It’s false advertising I tell you! You see other people every 2 feet, even if most of them do die 5 seconds later.

And isn’t the guy I’m playing from the 1920/30’s? Should he be using funny period slang and, you know, possess linguistic phrasing somewhat noticeably different from that of people living over half a century later? I guess amnesia suddenly makes a man speak in modern idioms? I’m not even bothering with a spoiler alert because this game is not worth it: Yup, another amnesiac main hero in a video game. Twenty three ski-goddamn-doo, like this hasn’t been done a million times. At least he speaks, no matter how banal every word out of his mouth comes across. And he either quantum leaped into some modern guy or was brought to the future with a black magic ritual gone awry or hell I dunno, and I really don’t care, I kept skipping around the game trying to find some redeeming qualities. And yes, the game itself recognizes it’s so bad that it lets you skip ahead to a different "episode" with a recap of what went on before it. You even only have to complete most of the episodes in order to unlock the final three.

Has swinging a flaming chair over your
head ever been a particularly good idea?

And here and there I did find some pretty cool stuff, but it was immediately bogged down by all of the game’s problems. There was one driving section that was pretty spectacular: buildings falling down around me yet making convenient passageways in their wreckage in the road, cars flying everywhere, cars on fire whizzing by, and some horrible unnamed, unseen horror chasing me ripping up the New York city streets from below. It was thrilling, it was incredibly cinematic, the only problem was I kept dying. Now, sure, it was my fault sometimes, but the first problem was I had no idea where to go, so I had to keep building my knowledge of my path to Central Park each time I died and got a little further. But there were many instances in my constant retries where I was held up by little glitches and bad design. At one point I got caught on a tiny little rock that should not be able to stop a sizable taxi and the unknown road-ripping horror caught up with me and sent my car careening into the air. Another time the roads were falling apart but I made it over a crack, only for the back wheel to get hopelessly caught on the edge. I could only watch helplessly as the roads slowly crumbled around me and I had to start over from the beginning. At that point what should have been fun just began to get irritating. I had to make alot of jumps as well, which of course immediately go into a GTA-style slow motion scene that I have no control of, and would sometimes land me right on a crack on the side of the road and kill me instantly.

I really wanted to like this game, I really did. But it made me loathe it. As you may have seen it’s not received much in the way of favorable reviews, most notably with a reviewer on IGN slapping a no-nonsense 3.5 score on it. I’m going to be trading it in tomorrow, along with a few other things (including Eternal Sonata which I did finally beat), because even after giving it a second chance I just couldn’t warm up to it. Avoid this one, rent it if you really want to but the most heartbreaking part about Alone in the Dark was it had so much potential to be good and quite a few parts of the game make me think "this should be fun, why isn’t this fun?"

I’m keeping the soundtrack that came with it though. It’s pretty sweet.