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Alone in the Dark Review July 31, 2008 Brett Todd |
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Summary: With its episodic plot, does Eden Games survival horror game live up to its predecessors?
 Alone in the Dark | Page:: ( 1 / 4 ) |
Alone Again, Naturally
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.
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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.
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| Page 2 | Page:: ( 2 / 4 ) |
Mindless Ka-Booms
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.
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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.
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| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 3 / 4 ) |
Pros
Gory Graphics:
Nuevo Alone in the Dark at least looks pretty good.
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Cons
Dumb Story and Setting:
The original Alone in the Dark was subtle and creepy. The new Alone in the Dark is a sledgehammer of stupid.
Camera Quibbles:
The real horror here is provided by one of the worst cameras in gaming history.
Control Quirks:
Awkward controls make it hard to put Edward Carnby through his paces.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 4 / 4 ) |