Alone in the Dark

Alone Again, Naturally

Seeing as I’m often buying crap games for review, I’m used to smartass comments from clerks. You throw down money for the likes of Stronghold Crusader: Extreme and Stranger and you soon come to expect some pretty choice insults. But the one I got when forking over $50 for the new Alone in the Dark was a new one. Since Firing Squad is a nice family website, I can’t print exactly what the girl said to me, though I can say that it had something to do with all of the fun things you can do alone in the dark, and a wish that this game would be just as enjoyable as what I could be doing without my, um, joystick.

If only.

Just about anything I can think of to do alone in the dark for real--from counting sheep to sweating through a bout of West Nile to enjoying a few minutes with a skin mag (which is what I think the clerk had in mind, God bless her)--is a better option for killing time than this virtual Alone in the Dark. Eden Games’ revival of the original survival-horror game is a frustrating, incompetent mess, loaded with so many design screw-ups that it seems like the developers were crossing their stereotypical flaws off on a whiteboard while programming this disaster. Clichéd, amnesiac hero? Check. Obtuse story loaded up with expletives just to get the game an M rating? Check. Clunky controls coupled with a jumpy camera? Check.

As a huge fan of the original game, color me disappointed. The first Alone in the Dark, released way back in 1992, was something of an action-adventure revelation. It had its flaws, sure, with chop-socky action stuff that didn’t fully mesh with the Lovecraftian creep-show plot. But it also had a tremendous amount of atmosphere. Protagonist Edward Carnby really was alone in the dark, locked up in a haunted house on the Louisiana bayou with no way to get out save discovering the secrets of that crumbing old pile. There aren’t too many games that feel like places to me, but Derceto Mansion in the original Alone in the Dark is certainly one of them.

So it’s hard to believe that this reinvisioning ditches everything that made the original great. I have to wonder if anyone with Eden Games is even old enough to have played the first Alone in the Dark when it came out 16 years ago. The subtle, often literary spooks of the original have been dumped for a ripoff of a Michael Bay action flick. This version of Edward Carnby is a scarred-up muscle man as ruggedly handsome and foulmouthed as the standard action-movie hero. We’re a long way from the original game’s stuffed-shirt detective who had no problem admitting that he way out of his league when tackling the forces of evil.

Setting is even more typical to a Hollywood eyeglazer. Carnby isn’t alone in the dark at all here. He’s smack dab in the middle of New York City, battling a supernatural invasion alongside lots of other people. Many of them are zombies, or humans with the shelf life of a Star Trek redshirt, but still…what part of “alone” did you not get, Eden? Carnby even has a hot babe sidekick for virtually the entire game.

It’s pretty obvious that Eden modeled the characters and story on a formulaic Grade B action flick, not the original Alone in the Dark, which the devs apparently felt was too idiosyncratic to sell a game to consolers in 2008. Sure, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American consumer, but sheesh. If you’re going to dumb things down this much and change the core concepts of the original franchise to make everything unrecognizable, do us old-time fans a favor and don’t piggyback your new game on a famous name that actually means something to people.