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Mindless Ka-Booms

Gameplay bastardizes the original game just as thoroughly as the story and setting. Where the original was all about slow and steady exploration spiced up by regular shoot-outs and punch-ups with various ghoulies, ghosties, and other creatures that go bump in the night, here you rip forward from one explosion to another. Instead of looking for secret doors in an eerie library and searching for clues in a succession of arcane tomes pulled straight out of an H.P. Lovecraft chiller, you’re stuck hanging from the ledges of buildings while exploding wreckage rockets past you, racing a car through a shopping mall, jumping across chasms, hacking zombies to bits with axes, and generally playing the role of a protagonist in any one of a thousand third-rate action movies to hit the no-longer-silver screen over the past decade. Puzzles are practically non-existent, unless you count having to touch wires together to turn on electrical systems and figuring out how to batter down doors with heavy objects.

Dumb, dumb, dumb. So much effort is expended on establishing an apocalyptic mood that none of this tour of a war zone has any impact. Every nook and cranny of New York City has been turned into rubble, exploding rubble, or flaming rubble. Even though the game looks great, with fantastic fire effects and a tremendous amount of detail in every location, whether you’re exploring Central Park or trying to escape a sewer, the game is so relentless with its ka-booms that I was worn down by the end of the second chapter. The same goes for the dialogue, which is flat and filled with tons of random f**ks tossed in to further establish that some really bad stuff is going down (in case all of the people being eaten and buildings exploding and zombies running around didn’t already clue you in). I didn’t feel any sense of dramatic pacing or that the story was building to a conclusion. This is a real kitchen-sink job, where the devs ladle out one explosion after another in an attempt to wow gamers with short attention spans.


Awkward mechanics make it impossible to appreciate even this dimwitted action. Alone in the Dark’s controls are as horrific as the plotline, due largely to a third-person camera that constantly jumps to the worst possible views of situations. I lost track of the number of times the camera shifted to either totally obscure a jump or give me such a terrible view that I was doomed to screw it up a half-dozen times before fluking my way to success. The camera also can’t be rotated independently of protagonist Carnby. You can only move it in a narrow viewing cone in the direction which he is looking at the time, so you’re stuck tediously shuffling around to get a proper look at areas. Which is sensible, given that even supernatural detectives can’t see out of the backs of their heads, yet still deeply annoying because most games allow full range of vision just moving the right analog stick. You can ditch the third-person view for an on-demand first-person camera, but this isn’t a sensible option because the angle jumps back to third-person every time you line up a jump, grab a hanging wire, or even watch a cutscene.

Even when you can see what’s going on, stiff and unresponsive controls make it hard to maneuver Carnby past the game’s many pitfalls and obstacles. I found it ridiculously easy to fall off ledges even when I was just trying to go from Point A to Point B. Some of the game’s control gimmicks are annoying, too. It’s great that you’re able to pick up random junk like chairs and rakes to use as weapons, but it can be difficult to use them effectively in brawls because you have to swing them by rolling the right analog stick in an awkward fashion. Carnby frequently has to blink to clear his vision during fights when blood gets in his eyes or at other points when his sight is obscured. Cool on paper, I suppose, but pointless busy work in reality. Access to Carnby’s inventory is through looking down at his belt and picking from the objects holstered there. This is another promising concept that doesn’t come off well. Twitchy controls make it tough to grab the item that you want and the game doesn’t pause while you’re navel-gazing, which means that you can easily get killed while fooling around with a gun or a flashlight.