Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

"Another RE Clone? Perhaps. A Great Game? Oh Yes."

Gameplay: 9/10
Just a few things plague this game from getting a ten here, and those are: the saving system; a la Resident Evil, you have items called ‘Charms Of Saving’ which you use when you want to save your game. You can run out of these, however, and it’s THE most frustrating thing to want to save, only to find you have none due to your cautious nature early on in the game. On the plus side, unlike Resident Evil, you can save wherever you want. No more of this ‘typewriter-only’ lark… and the control system; Resident Evil started it, and it’s still as clunky as ever. Press up, you move forward. Press down, you move backwards. Press left and right turns you (you guessed it) left and right. It’s infuriating to have a situation like this: “Okay, let’s go towards that room over there… wait a minute, I’m walking towards the screen… oh wait, I see, I’m facing the screen so the controls are reversed.” Although, given that the game has pre-rendered screens, when the camera changes the controls would likely be switched around, so you would have found yourself running back the way you came every camera switch. Still, it sucks. The game is a LOT of fun to play, though. From the amazingly detailed and exciting introduction movie, you can tell it’s going to be a great adventure. I didn’t like the Resident Evil series because of a few issues. Firstly, the majority used pre-rendered backgrounds and the characters looked weird on them (more on that later). Secondly, you had a maximum number of items you could carry. It added a strategic element to it, but facing a room of zombies with just a knife because you needed room for item A and item B was just annoying. Luckily, you can store as many items as you want in AITD. Overall I found this game a better experience to play, and actually wanted to play this game to the end for another reason than ‘just wanting to get my money’s worth’.

Story: 8/10
Charles Fiske, a friend of Edward, is found dead near the mysterious Shadow Island (zero points for the name, but we’ll let that slip by for now…). Edward’s investigations lead him to Fredrick Johnson, who reveals that Fiske was looking for three stone tablets with inscriptions never before deciphered. Johnson asks Edward to continue with the investigation, and sends along a young translator named Aline Cedrac to help. During their flight to Shadow Island, ‘something’ attacks the plane and forces Edward and Aline to parachute to safety. Edward lands in the depths of a woodland area, while Aline injures herself landing on the roof of a mansion. That’s where your adventure starts… the storyline remains the same no matter which character you play as, and crosses over along the way via meetings and conversations with the other character.

Graphics: 10/10
It may have started life as a PlayStation game (you know, that grey box in the corner slowly gathering dust), but the graphics in this game rival those seen in Shenmue as the most realistic. Each character is made of about 2,000 polygons, giving them an amazingly realistic look. The two heroes have around 300 animations each, which blend together easily to make swift fluid actions. The backgrounds are pre-rendered, unlike Resident Evil: Code Veronicas’ real-time locations. It may not be the type of thing you bought your 128-bit machine for, but they actually look a lot better than most real-time scenes in other games. As the characters are textured so realistically and the backgrounds are high-res and full of colour, the two blend together almost seamlessly. And the lighting effects from your torch… wow. You’ll have to pinch yourself because you’ll think its 3D. Which is good, because if it were just plain 2D this section would get a 4. The light from your torch and from the environment bounces off of objects such as chairs with amazing lifelikeness. And special mention has to be made to the shadows. Easily the best ever seen in a game, ever. A perfect example of what the Dreamcast can do. Now can someone explain to me why they pulled the plug!?

Sound: 8/10
The introduction movie (where Edward prepares for his flight) has some classic-style horror music, but the majority of the game has some well-suiting action beats, like something from The Matrix. Although, the actual amount of music is little, as most of the areas have an atmosphere made up of slight sounds, making for a spookier atmosphere. The most criticized part of games is the voice acting, which in games like this ranges from ‘good’ to ‘so poor you’ll think it’s a sick joke’. Personally I think it’s fine, nothing to cringe at, but voice actors will never catch on to the type of acting common to big films. So a warning for the voices, you may love them or hate them.

Ingenuity: 7/10
You may say, “It’s just another poor ‘survival-horror’ game, a ‘Resident Evil’ clone.” Well bear in mind that the original Alone In The Dark kicked off the Survival-Horror genre. No one seems to complain about more Resident Evil games, so I don’t see why anyone should complain about this. Just because it’s not as ‘famous’ a name as RE doesn’t immediately mean it’s bad. In fact this is (in some ways) better than RE: Code Veronica. It may not be particularly original now the Dreamcast has Survival-Horror games falling out its ears (RE:CV, Dino Crisis, Evil Dead: HTTK), but it does a damn better job than most.

Replayability: 6/10
Sadly this is where the game falters, but it’s not really its fault. Horror games are really only fun the first time, when you don’t know what’s going to jump out of the corners when. That said, the game is on two GD-ROMs, so it’ll take you a fair while to get through the adventure the first time. And then there’s the second character to play as, so this game will keep you occupied for a fair while. Ghost trains are a lot of fun for the first ride, but after an hour they can’t help but get boring.

Buy Or Rent?: Buy
If you suck at Survival-Horror games you’ll want to buy this, because even though it’ll be tough you’ll want to play all the way to the end with both characters. If you’re amazingly gifted at Survival-Horror, rent it first to check it out, but I expect you’ll end up buying it anyway. You’ll want to go through each location and just swing the torch around to marvel the effects. Meanwhile, some creature will jump out and start to gnaw at your leg. You won’t mind though because he looks so damn realistic you’ll be too busy drooling to do something. This is a class product. For the money, you could do a lot worse (was that a cough, Bruce Campbell?). Buy it now; after all it’s one of the last great games to be released for the Dreamcast.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/10/01, Updated 07/10/01