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Alone in the Dark

Oh, The Horror...

While a laughable B-grade storyline is almost a given for a survival-horror game, this time the story truly scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The crappy dialogue tries to be "edgy" by overusing the F-words and you are constantly assaulted by highly implausible events that keep you on a tightly pre-determined track. Walk to the "wrong" direction? The roof will collapse and block your way, or a fire will break out and stop your mis-step. To add some dramatic shock value, AITD also employs fancy insta-deaths that will surely get you killed the first time you walk into them. Even the enemies that keep pouring into your path have such innovative names as "Humanz" and "Batz". Oh dear.

Sure, Alone in the Dark manages to horrify, but for all the wrong reasons. The game is riddled by the worst control system I've seen in a modern game. The main character is stiff as a corpse and the camera constantly switches between first person, third person and fixed third person - with the controls changing as your viewpoint is switched. While the game is almost playable in the first person mode, it's good only for moving, shooting with a gun or operating some of the items such as a fire extinguisher. Melee combat is possible only in the third person mode and in this mode your mouse (or the second analog stick) does not control the camera. Instead, you use it to flail around with whatever item you have in your hand(s). To make things worse, the game "dramatically" forces your view from a third person mode to a fixed third person mode at specific points. It feels like the game constantly wants to wrestle the control away from you, and when it can't do it, it tries to confuse you by switching the point of view or insta-gibbing you with a canned event.

One of the highly frustrating driving sections - complete with crappy physics and instant death should you make even the slightest mistake.

Whoops, stuck on a pixel again. I guess I wait here until the ground crumbles away - as it always does.

Driving sections have controls that are a bit more sane, but if you thought that would make them fun, don't worry - other epic design and implementation errors save the day. The poor physics engine and the twitchy collision detection will kill any resemblance of fun. What's left over is a clumsy linear driving challenge with constant pre-scripted events that turn the driving sections into a glorified re-hash of Dragon's Lair. One wrong turn and you are toast. Thank your favorite deity for the DVD-style controls that allow you to skip the driving bits. In fact, thanks to the DVD-style controls you can skip all the poor bits of the game, but that leaves you with precious little to play.

Switching from mouse and keyboard to a Xbox 360 gamepad improves the situation ever so slightly, but no matter what you use as a controller, the controls are poor and the gameplay universally clumsy and not fun to play.

Messing With The Inventory

Alone in the Dark is littered with great innovations that actually don't work in practice. The inventory system is a good example - all items end up inside your jacket, and should you need to grab something from your inventory while being chased by angry zombies, you can pretty much kiss your ass goodbye. Slots are also very limited, and often you have to leave useful items behind, only to find yourself scrounging for more just a bit later.

The clumsy inventory system in action.

Pro tip: Flammable liquid can be useful for toasting up some zombies.

You can experiment with the items you find, combining them in various ways. Sometimes the combines are logical - a bottle of flammable liquid, a piece of cloth and a lighter equals an improved Molotov's cocktail. Some not so much - I didn't know that pouring flammable liquid on bullets turns them into incendiary rounds, but apparently it does. Most combines result in a fancy way to burn stuff up.

Items also include various bits used to patch up the main character. Designers have again innovated - instead of a more traditional health bar, the hero gets cuts all over his body when the monster population get overly close and personal. Sure, it looks "realistic", but in practice you can't really tell if you are about to die or not. The only clue is that your view loses all color for a moment when you are badly hurt - and usually by then it's too late. To heal up, you switch to a special "healing view" that shows your injuries, and then fumble around with bandages and medical sprays to fix things up. Sounds great on a design document, but is actually very clumsy in practice.

Fire! Fire!

Visually the most striking feature of Alone in the Dark is the fire - it looks fairly good, and it's everywhere. It also rapidly turns into deus ex machina as the zombies will happily ignore your bullets and remain unimpressed when you whack them with an axe. The only reliable way to kill the vast majority of the enemies is to burn them, and as the parts for all those fancy combined items are always in short supply, most of the time that means chasing the enemies while swinging around with a burning chair - and trust me, it's exactly as lame as it sounds.

You can also burn yourself while playing with fire, and when you consider that the controls are horrendously bad, you tend to accumulate self-inflicted injuries while trying to poke the zombies with random burning objects. Realistic? Sure! Fun gameplay? Nope.

Still Thinking Of Buying AITD? Enjoy SecuROM!

In case there's someone still around who might forgive all these gameplay flaws, be warned: The PC version of Alone in the Dark is riddled by the new version of SecuROM requiring online activation. SecuROM is a remarkably hostile piece of DRM that limits the number of installs to two, and any reinstalls on same hardware to three. Sure, you can "recover" installs by deactivating them, but no matter how you put it, the system is overly restrictive and cumbersome. Effectively you let the publisher decide when and where you are allowed to install the game, and what counts as a different "install". As a final insult, Alone in the Dark still requires you to keep your DVD in the drive! Give me Steam's proven online authentication system that doesn't care where and how many times you install the game and forget this silly SecuROM junk, thank you.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals, PerfromancePage 4: Conclusions

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