Alone in the Dark

"One of the best, and worst, games you will ever play"

If we want to get all technical, the very first survival horror game ever released was the original Alone in the Dark game way back in 1992. Granted, Capcom coined the term “survival horror” with their hit game Resident Evil four years later, but fans of Alone in the Dark have always asserted that if it wasn't for the investigations of one Edward Carnby, then the Resident Evil games would have never been conceived. Whether this is true or not is disputed, but you still can't deny the fact that the Alone in the Dark series definitely has had some influence in the survival horror genre. It's been seven years and one really terrible movie since Edward Carnby has graced us with his presence and in an attempt to revitalize the series, the developers have single handedly tarnished the Alone in the Dark legacy, despite the game's potential to be the best horror game of the seventh generation.

Like my tagline suggests, Alone in the Dark isn't all bad. In fact, some of the gameplay mechanics are nothing short of absolutely brilliant.

With the release of Nintendo's Wii console, video games have become more and more interactive and this has given birth to some brilliant gameplay. Alone in the Dark attempts to be a very interactive experience and it ends up being just that. You can pick up a lot of different weapons lying around your environment, from long swords to chairs, and you control them using the right analog stick. That might sound silly, but you can move them in any direction you wish and while it does take a little while to get used to, it does work out pretty well.

Now comes one of the game breaking flaws that Alone in the Dark possesses. In my previous paragraph, I mentioned the ability to use swords, and the interactivity that the game provides should have your mouth watering by now. Unfortunately, the only way to really kill enemies (unless they're small) is to light them on fire. In case you didn't realize this that eliminates the use of metallic weapons, like swords, because they simply cannot catch on fire.

So, besides using wooden weapons that are aflame to take down your enemies, you also have some pistols at your disposal. You have to find ammo for them, but don't worry, ammo is very plentiful in this game and some of it even re-spawns. When you use your pistol, you go into first-person in order to aim freely at your enemies. While at first this may sound a little weird, it ends up working out brilliantly, especially since most survival horror games have a combat system where damaging an enemy critically is based on luck.

Of course, pistols don't shoot flaming bullets, so how are you going to defeat your enemies with it? Bottles of alcohol and other flammable liquids are plentiful in the world of Alone in the Dark and you can literally create flaming bullets by pouring alcohol onto them (do NOT try this at home). If there is an enemy closing in on you and you just don't have enough time to be dinking around with the items, then you also have the option to throw the bottle. This puts the game into slow motion and you are given a timeframe in order to shoot the bottle to maximize its effectiveness.

The game boasts a unique menu system that I haven't seen in any title before it. Instead of going to a simple item screen like most games in the genre, the items you collect go into their own individual pockets inside your jacket. That means you are limited to how many bottles you can carry or how much boxes of ammo you can carry, but the system works effectively due to your ability to combine items in order to create more useful variations. I've already mentioned flaming bullets, but you can also put tape on the bottles, put a napkin in the bottle, and light the napkin on fire to create your very own sticky bomb.

Since this menu screen definitely isn't a traditional pause screen, you are still left vulnerable to enemies, of which there isn't that much of a variety. There are annoying little flying enemies and there are crawling spider-like creatures that spit poison at you, but there are also humanoid creatures that can pummel the hell out of you. Unfortunately, the enemy A.I. is atrocious. At one point, I had run out of bullets and the enemies literally stopped attacking me. Cautiously, I walked around the room I was cornered in, searching the corners for more ammo, and the enemies literally just sat there and watched as I made my rounds for supplies.

Let's say you get attacked by some of the enemies. Well, a variety of things can occur damage-wise. If you are knocked onto the ground, the game claims you have to tap the A button rapidly in order to stand up, but if you just wait a couple of seconds, Edward will hop up like no damage was done. You might get some visible wounds which are admittedly a nice effect because you can see them on his body in real time, though they lose their luster after a few hours into the game. If you are hurt bad enough, you may get a deep wound, which will bleed profusely, and a timer will start. In order to stop your bleeding and the timer, you have to wrap a bandage around the wound.

But like I said, there are other wounds that appear on Edward's body that aren't severe enough for a bandage. In order to treat these wounds, you have to go Resident Evil style and use first aid sprays. However, you don't just choose to use them and then automatically be healed. On the contrary, you have to use them in real time as well, with the ever looming threat of bad A.I. suddenly becoming smart and ripping you to shreds. Basically, you move the spray to each individual wound and hold down the A button until you're healed.

Unlike most survival horror protagonists, Edward Carnby is very acrobatic. He can shimmy along ledges Prince of Persia style not to mention make some pretty extraordinary leaps across some pretty huge gaps. Rappelling is a tendency that Edward has, especially on ropes that are connected to really, really tall buildings or cliffs. Surprisingly enough, these moments are some of the most exciting moments in the game as huge chunks of debris rain down on you and you have to maneuver yourself in order to remain safe.

The Grand Theft Auto games popularized the concept of having one huge sprawling place to travel in, using cars to get to your missions. Alone in the Dark attempts to copy this, but doesn't do a very good job of it. Instead of traveling around the huge, sprawling, lively Liberty City, you are limited to New York's Central Park, which is painfully repetitive to travel in as your surroundings are way too similar. Traveling on foot is nearly impossible because Central Park is way too big and the places you need to be are spread way too far apart. Cars are marked on your map, but enemies will randomly pounce on you while you're trying to drive and beat the crap out of the car, causing you to swerve into trees or other obstacles. When your car becomes too damaged, smoke will start pouring out of the hood, similarly to Grand Theft Auto, and you definitely won't be able to see where you're going.

After you enter a car, you can move around to any seat you want without getting out of the vehicle, and the view is first-person. You can look in the glove box for some items, tinker with the radio, honk the horn, and even look in the mirror. If you are lucky, the keys will still be in the ignition, but if you end up with a car with no keys, you will have to do a mini-game to hotwire it. In this mini-game, you match the wires together based on their color and once you find the right wires, you have to hold them together (using the left and right analog sticks for your left and right hands respectively) and a meter will show up. An arrow moves along the meter and when it hits the green, you have to hit the right trigger and you can now drive the car.

You can control the cars very well and fans of Grand Theft Auto IV will feel right at home as the controls are virtually identical. If you want to jump out of your car quickly, Edward opens the door at first, giving you a chance to rethink whether or not you want to leap out of the speeding vehicle. I appreciated this because sometimes you may think of a better solution to the problem than hopping out of the car.

An interesting mechanic in Alone in the Dark is that while in first-person mode, you may be required to blink. I'm not saying that your eyes get dry and you have to blink every five seconds, but you may have to clear your eyes from some blood that en enemy puked on you or some poison. Blinking is also used in more interesting situations later in the game, but I'm not going to ruin it for you as it is one of the best moments in the game.

Not all of the enemies in the game are creatures that literally walk around and try to attack you. Every once in a while, you will encounter strange fissures in the walls or ground that can easily be taken out with a flaming bullet, but if they suck you in, you will have to complete a little button press mini-game akin to games like Resident Evil 4 in order to pull yourself free. Another type of enemy that doesn't fit the main criteria is this strange black ooze that can kill you just by touching it for one split second. In order to ward this hellish substance away you must provide a light source, whether that is flaming furniture, glow sticks, or your flashlight.

One of Alone in the Dark's most unique features is that you can literally start at the very last episode if you so wish. While at first this sounded like a very terrible game mechanic that would definitely ruin the game, I actually found it quite useful during moments where the game would crash or freeze. As long as you don't abuse it, this feature can be used to do some great things and for players that don't want to sit around and figure out puzzles, this can also help you stay in the action at the cost of some of the game's challenge.

Puzzles are sometimes very simple or a little annoying to figure out, but you should be relieved to learn that you don't have to go around searching for keys to open locked doors like in most survival horror games. If you played Resident Evil: Outbreak you were probably ecstatic to learn that you could simply shoot a door open, but Alone in the Dark takes it to the next level. You can obliterate doors using a variety of means and the doors break realistically; it's really awesome.

Where Alone in the Dark really starts to hurt is later in the game when you are tasked to destroy some huge, evil roots. While this may not sound like too much of a problem, a lot of these roots are nigh impossible to even get to and Central Park is designed terribly, meaning that you will have to backtrack constantly to get where you need to go. You don't have to destroy all of them, but you do have to destroy a hell of a lot in order to progress through the game.

As soon as the opening scene started, I knew that there wasn't going to be anything special about Alone in the Dark's plot. Our hero, Edward Carnby, has no idea who he is, but he does know that there's some old man that seems to know him and monsters are killing everybody in New York. This could have been a passable tale, but the characters are not likeable at all and you could really care less about what happens to them. If you turn the game off and come back to it later, you are given a recap of the events so far, which is interesting, but it's a shame that the plot wasn't more fleshed out. After all, an integral part to the experience of a survival horror game is the story, and unfortunately, the developers didn't spend much time planning this out. Fans of the older games will be happy to know that this title doesn't abandon the previous games and there are some connections made that only true fans will be able to appreciate.

Environments are breathtaking in presentation and while the enemies aren't very original or plentiful (they remind me of Tyrant from the Resident Evil games), they at least look good. Characters are detailed, but their mouths don't match with what they say so the cut-scenes can be a little awkward. Glitches are everywhere you turn and you will find yourself getting stuck to walls or enemies, not to mention I walked through cars on multiple occasions. I saw enemies walk through walls and during one cut-scene Edward bounced in front of the screen uncontrollably. I had problems with the game freezing and crashing a couple of times as well, but the ability to skip parts of the game makes up for this. On a bright note, the environments are highly destructible, and it's amazing to throw a Molotov cocktail in a bathroom and then find the stalls absolutely annihilated.

Despite attempting to be similar to popular TV shows, Alone in the Dark is cursed with shoddy voice acting that never fits into the game properly. Characters say things that don't match their personalities and they are emotional during very inappropriate moments. The soundtrack is great and fits with the game perfectly, but I wish there were more musical jumps to induce the scares, of which there are practically none.

Alone in the Dark can easily be completed in eight hours and if that terrible “root destruction” objective towards the end was omitted, I would guess that the game could be completed in five to six hours. The beauty of most Xbox 360 games is that due to achievements, the replayability is taken up a notch, but you can unlock well over half of the achievements in the game with one play through. There is nothing to unlock and after you're done with the game you won't ever want to go back to it, so replayability is in the gutter.

Alone in the Dark does do some things flawlessly and it does some things horrendously. The game is very difficult and there are cheap deaths around every corner, but hardcore gamers should be able to find something to love here, especially if they are fans of the survival horror genre. This is usually the part where I say, “If there was a sequel made”, but I really don't think the series needs another installment. Instead, I hope that some developers take note of the things that the game does right and brilliantly and we see some of the awesome gameplay mechanics found here show up in future games, and just maybe they won't be overshadowed by game breaking design choices. All in all, Alone in the Dark is a shoddy survival horror game that, despite its good ideas, fails to have the lasting power to really matter in the seventh generation of games.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/28/08

Game Release: Alone in the Dark (US, 06/23/08)