Sorry, sir, but this game has nothing to do with you. She can stay.

I’ve been looking forward to Alone in the Dark for some time now.  I’ve watched probably several hours worth of gameplay videos and developer interviews, each one making my itch for the game that much harder to scratch.  Unfortunately, the game left me battered and bloody along the side of the road after it had its brutal, uncaring, but somehow (at times) exciting way with me.  It’s definitely not as bad as the movie, but the game does come close at times.

This Alone in the Dark is actually a continuation of the story started in the original Alone in the Dark that came out in 1992. Even though it’s something like one hundred years after the originals, the story centers around Edward Carnby, a man who wakes up in an unimaginably horrible situation made even more unnerving when he realizes he not only has no idea what’s going on, but he’s forgotten who he is.

Alone in the Dark is set up like a DVD of a hit TV show, you can skip back and forth between levels, though when you do this you start off with no inventory except the essentials the game forces you to carry, like your gun and flashlight.  When you load a saved game or skip to a chapter, there is even a brief sequence of “Previously, on Alone in the Dark” that makes the game feel even more similar to modern television shows like Lost or Battlestar Galactica.  Strangely, when you first start the game you can skip right to the last episode if you wanted to, though you’ll have to do a bit of running around to just finish the game from that point.

Things start out pretty good for the game.  Your character wakes up and the game forces you into first-person view mode, allowing you to look around and try and figure out what’s going on.  In a short time, the story progresses and you get to play in third person.  Pretty much right away things get exciting as quite literally all hell starts breaking loose and you are forced to just try to survive the destruction of the building you found yourself waking up in.

Once out of the building, you have to flee in a car as hell or something destroys the ground behind you.  Think giant groundhog chasing you through the streets of New York city.  It really started off pretty awesome as buildings were exploding all around and hell was pretty much tearing itself out from the bowels of the city.

It becomes quickly apparent, however, that the designer of the vehicle physics must have called in sick most of the time, or else was part of an outreach program because the vehicle controls are HORRIBLE.  See that?  All caps HORRIBLE.  You’ll find yourself spinning out for no reason, flipping around for no reason and getting stuck on curbs… for no reason  What started out as a pretty exciting car chase turned into an exercise in frustration.  I received the achievement for driving ten miles before I even finished the first driving sequence, if that tells you something.

Unfortunately, things don’t tend to get better after that.  One example of the apparent laziness of the developers is the names of the bad guys.  The fissure-controlled zombie people are called, of all things, Humanz.  With a Z.  Okay, whatever, stupid name, but I’m sure it was just a bad choice, right?  Wrong.  The little headcrab dudes are called Ratz and the flying demon bat things are, get this… Vampirez.  I thought maybe they were Batz, but I guess they wanted to be original or something.

In general, the controls for the game are okay, especially considering the innovative nature.  The left stick moves your character, and the right stick moves the camera around a little bit, unless you have a weapon like an axe or hammer.  In this case, the RS moves the weapon around.  Move it slowly, and you can use it for some puzzles or, if it’s on fire or emitting light in some way, it brightens up certain areas as you explore.  Move the stick around quickly, and you swing fast, almost a simplified Fight Night-type deal.

This is pretty neat at first, but is a bit twitchy and prone to be unresponsive at the least convenient moment.  It does feel satisfying at times, like when you’ve knocked a Humanz down and just keep pummeling him with a baseball bat to try and keep him out long enough to get some fire on him.  Further complicating the controls, however, is that to fire a gun or use Aqua Net flamethrowers, you must switch to first person, with standard FPS controls.  It wouldn’t be to bad but through the course of a fight, jumping from one to the other because you need to use different weapons can be disconcerting.  It can just get confusing in a heated battle and never feels intuitive.  You’ll be fighting the controls right up to the end of the game.

Further complicating matters of combat is your extraordinarily sparse inventory.  You’ll get a few slots on the left of your jacket for things like bandages, batteries and bullets, and a few more slots on the right for larger objects, like bottles, cans, and flares.  I sort of let it go at first, as this is survival horror and things are supposed to be this way.  You shouldn’t have an arsenal of weapons to attack the enemy — you should be forced to play it smart, but it just doesn’t work in this game for a few reasons.

First, nothing is as good at killing most enemies as the picked-up melee weapons like axes or steel pipes, which you can’t keep.  The only melee weapon you can opt to keep is the knife, but that thing blows so fucking hard that there’s no point using it as a weapon.  Secondly, there just isn’t enough stuff laying around to even bother using them as weapons unless you absolutely have to.  It is just infinitely easier to save the gas in your bottles until you knock all the enemies down than to try and blow them up.  Blowing them up probably won’t kill them, and it uses the whole bottle, while pouring a bit of gas on them while they’re knocked out only takes a few ounces of the stuff, and you still have the bottle, which can be refilled by puncturing a fuel tank.

This also is a pain, though, because the “A” button is also used to pick up objects, including dragging dead bodies, as well as to use some items in your hand.  More than once I tried to dump fuel on a beat up Humanz and was rewarded with dragging his body around instead, only to have him then wake back up and smack the shit out of me before I could catch him on fire.

Also, first aid spray gets incredibly hard to get as you go along in the game.  In the beginning, you find them everywhere — it’s like everyone who was in central park was throwing this stuff around instead of frisbees, but right around the mid-point of the game, it just disappears.  Yeah, you can go back to some places and pick it up again, but it’s a lot of backtracking, and the monsters that were there have probably respawned, making it pretty much not worth the time or energy to bother. You’ll likely come out just as beat up as before and end up using the spray you just worked so hard to get.

This wouldn’t be too bad if you could just stock up and just use it later, but with the other stuff you’ll want to keep, you’ll be lucky to ever have two on you at a time. Towards the last few episodes you’ll probably be forced to carry only a half full can with you, if you can even find one.  I finished nearly two episodes, including a boss battle, without finding a single can of first aid spray.  It got to the point where one hit from anything and I was dead.  It was just more difficult than it needed to be, especially when any first aid spray you find is probably falling out of a Humanz’s pocket or surrounded by Vampirez or Ratz.

The inventory problem only gets worse as you go along, as you’ll get another object that you have to carry around with you, eating up another slot in your jacket.  Not only does this object take up a space, but it’s completely useless except for in a few puzzles.  Unlike the lighter, it won’t help you in a single fight.  The whole situation revolves around a useless “key” and really makes me wonder what pants Carnby is wearing that he doesn’t have any pockets.  Furthermore, where does he keep his phone then if his jeans are pocketless?

It’s just very frustrating when you have to make decisions on what to carry in basically three pockets when there are things that, I feel, you just need, like a screwdriver/knife.  I can’t put that in my belt or something?  Again, I understand this from a survival/horror perspective, but I feel it’s just taken a bit too far and detracts from the gameplay.  Even just making a knife holster where the gun and flashlight are would have made a huge difference.  As it stands, I feel that being forced to eat up my super-limited inventory space with story-related objects is a slap in the nuts.  Let me put my god damned Zippo in my pants pocket!  I have to choose between batteries or bullets because I have to carry around some kind of flashlight key?

Most of the time in Alone in the Dark, unfortunately, is spent wandering around Central Park.  To me it just felt tacked on, not only to prolong the game’s fairly short play time, but to go with the whole open-world environment that is oh so popular these days.  I think the game would have been better served with more linearity so that the story could be more focused.  As it is, whenever I was forced to spend a significant amount of time wandering around the park, I somehow managed to feel both frustrated and bored at the same time.

Once again, the driving comes up as a major flaw in the game.  Luckily, you don’t have to drive if you don’t want to, and most of the time I avoided it as much as I could.  On top of the crap physics and controls, the monsters in the game seem to be all but made to kill you if you’re in a car.  Try to run them over and they will jump out of the way or just jump onto the car.  If you do hit them, it actually damages the car, and it hardly seems to hurt them at all.  When they jump on the roof or hood of your car they’ll basically get a few free punches off right into your face.

The only way to get rid of them is to speed up or run into something, and sometimes it just seems to take a long time to gain enough speed to scare them off, and more than a few times I’ve slammed into a tree, damaging myself and the car, only to have the Humanz punch me a few more times.  The Humanz also have the ability to kick the car several yards or just rip the door off and drag you out of the car like you’re Reginald Denny, making running into stuff even more of a losing proposition.

Furthermore, there is no way to carry along the melee weapons in a car, and fighting without them is difficult at best.  That means that most of the time when I was playing I was running around Central Park carrying a hammer or axe just in case I saw a bad guy I had to fight.  This also means that, thanks to the way the sticks are used for melee, any time I’d run up a hill I was basically blind as I couldn’t move the camera “up”.  I also had to stop and look left and right if I thought I heard anything, as if I was Ram Man and neckless.

Now, if all you had to do was run from Point-A to Point-B all the time, this wouldn’t be all that frustrating, but things are not so easy when the forces of evil take over and make game design decisions.  At some point in the game, you’ll see weird little circles of static on your GPS.  If you’re like me, you’ll think What the hell is that? and go check it out.  Well, later on they explain that it’s evil roots and you have to kill them to increase your vision power, which lets you solve some puzzles and see enemies’ weaknesses and the like.  The problem is that they start appearing fairly early on and nothing is explained about them until much later, when more and more have already appeared.

Further frustration is caused when they tell you that you have to destroy them in order to progress the story, which just happens to be approaching the climax.  I was spared this frustration a bit as I had already run around killing them as they popped up, which I recommend anyone else do as they play the game.  Otherwise, you’ll have to spend at least a few hours before you can continue the story.

To be perfectly honest, I have not finished every section of each of the episodes.  Eden must have realized that there were some downright shitty areas in the game because you can skip ahead whenever you want, which I did at every single stage that had me driving for more than a few seconds.  These driving stages are like timed races and, thanks to the physics, are some of the most infuriating stages of any game I’ve ever played.  Thank you Eden for at least realizing how crappy it was and letting me skip it.

Maybe I missed some great gaming moments because I skipped these stages, but if I was forced to play them, I would be writing this review from prison after using my 360 to bludgeon innocent neighbors to death.  Also, maybe skipping some of the stages gave me some kind of different ending, but all the endings I managed to get were horribly disappointing.  I won’t ruin anything for the few of you that decide to play the game, but the “good” ending is four seconds long and the “bad” ending is probably six.  Between the sudden abeyance of the story because of the roots and the crap ending, I was more than a little disappointed.

The truth is that I’m glad I played the game.  It was different than most games and had more than a few moments that were truly amazing.  Like so many great ideas, it was brought down by it’s own innovative design.  There just hasn’t been enough people doing this type of thing to get the kinks ironed out.

If there is a sequel, I’m sure it will be much better, but as this stands, I just can’t recommend it for anything beyond a rental, if that.  The ability to skip sections of the game that are frustrating is a boon for this though, and a casual gamer should be able to knock out the game in a solid weekend of play — that is if they skip the god-awful driving stages.  Otherwise, this game may turn into your very own version of hell.

What does this score mean? Check out our review scoring breakdown.

Tags: alone-in-the-dark, Atari, batz, Eden, Edward Carnby, humanz, stupidz, vampirez

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