The first Alone in the Dark was great. It was scary, had actual 3D models and it was genuinely creepy. Especially if you were only around 12 years old when you first played it. Now, I have to admit I’m not a big fan of the survival horror genre with games like Fatal Frame and Silent Hill. I absolutely loved RE4 but let’s just say I don’t have the patience to go solve puzzles I’m stuck on, when there are constantly spawning enemies.

However, the trailers for the new Alone in the Dark had me interested. It looked pretty sweet, it had an inventive way of solving environmental puzzles and it had an innovative inventory that allowed you to combine items and turn household materials into weapons against the Dark.

I was wrong.

Story
The story in Alone in the Dark is a little bit better than Uwe Boll’s movie, which I rate among the worst movies I’ve ever seen (second only to From Justin to Kelly). You are Edward Carnby again, who lost his memory (innovation!). There is some evil under Central Park, but the storytelling is terrible and the voice acting is almost as bad. At one point there is a woman in a Dark infested building who breaks down and starts crying. She doesn’t stop crying for about an unskippable 30 seconds which feels like eternity while making it sound like the best work of Paris Hilton.

The developers try to keep you interested, but it just fails. You’ve seen/read the same kind of story before in countless other games, and more importantly: it just doesn’t matter.

The game is made up of 8 episodes with scenes you can skip in case you get stuck. Skipping is lame though, and you get no achievement points for finishing a level when you skip a section. More importantly: you’re not supposed to WANT to skip stuff in a game! If you thought it was the worst idea ever, well then you are 100% right. I’ve refrained from skipping anything so far, and it cost me pretty much all the remaining mental health I had left.

One nice touch is that when you continue a game, you get a brief recap of what you did before in a “Previously on Alone in the Dark” way. It’s kinda cool, but you’ll skip it anyway because you played those parts, durrrrr!



An install for a 360 game? Probably not, but it looks funny nonetheless

Gameplay
Alone in the Dark plays like a cross between RE4 without good controls and a 3rd person adventure game. The devs are absolute geniuses though, because they don’t actually let you pan the camera around. Instead, you can look around a tiny bit if you are not holding an item. If you are holding something like a chair or a fire extinguisher, then RS is used for… swinging the item! Moving RS from back to front lets you knock down a door with the fire extinguisher for instance. Moving RS from right to left lets you swing it, etc. Which would be a good idea if you had a third stick to move the camera around to see where the hell you are!!! Suffice to say, I tried to look up and down when I got my first fire extinguisher and knocked down some lady that was in front of my view. Amazing design choice!

What’s more, sometimes the camera moves to a different preset angle if you walk around, like in the old Resident Evil games. This wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t make you fall off a ledge and to your death. I think I died about 20 times just because of that. It’s also fun when you have to shimmy and climb up a small ledge, go to FPS view with the Y button to see if you have to shoot a cable, and then fall off the ledge because of the zero tolerance for moving. I’m not really a big fan of invisible walls, but they could’ve implemented them here. Or at least let Edward grab the ledge again if you just walk off it…

Imagine if you instantly died in Assassin's Creed if you fell of a ledge, without the option to grab whatever you walked off from. That's Alone in the Dark.





The FPS view itself is a horror. The controls are awful and it’s pretty hard to hit anything that moves. Thankfully the enemies are all idiots, so as long as you just run around like an idiot it’s not too bad. The enemies will just attack a random part of empty space and let you shoot them down. The general idea is that you can shoot down bats and smaller critters, but you have to burn “Humanz” (possessed humans) and other big Dark infested things. You are free to do that in any way you please, which would be a nice idea if it’s not painfully obvious that something is going to happen when you see 20 wooden objects in a small room with a fire. Basically, you pick up a wooden object, hold it in the fire, and swing it around like a madmen in the hope that you actually hit an enemy. One hit will kill them, thank god. You can also combine alcohol and other flammable liquid on your gun, giving you flaming bullets that instantly kill most enemies. The downside to that is that you can just ignore the whole concept of picking up a wooden object, awkwardly moving it to a fire, lighting it on fire and then attacking the enemy; just shoot the enemy and proceed.

What’s more, the third person controls are an absolute nightmare. You walk around like in RE4: LS forward moves you forward, LS backwards moves you backwards without turning. LS to the left or right lets you turn, so there is no panning the camera and effectively walking around and dodging enemies. There is just getting-hit-a-lot-and-yelling-at-your-TV-in-vain. Imagine if you played RE4, and you had to press a button to get into aiming mode which also gave you full FPS view. Now imagine that moving around sucks. Finally, imagine that you could walk around the map and randomly fall off ledges that make you start at the checkpoint again. Or just imagine you are playing Super Mario Galaxy with fixed cameras and try to jump from platform to platform; the experience is about the same.

Because the controls are so terrible, the whole idea of using your inventory to take down weapons gets dragged down. The inventory is realtime, so it doesn’t pause the game when you have to create flaming bullets or when you want to select a Molotov cocktail. You can assign four quickslots though, if you are willing to play it long enough to plan ahead. It works pretty well, except for the fact that you can only store a small amount of stuff in your jacket. This means that at one point you could be using plastic Molotov cocktails and at another point you’d be using a spray with double-sided tape on it. But those are different items, so it screws up the quickslot usage.


This is your face during the first hour of Alone in the Dark

Another failure is that the game tries to let you think of logical solutions yourself, but still applies certain game rules that restrict you in them. For example, at one point there is a part where the floor is covered by black ooze that kills you. The game hints that you have to use the flashlight in FPS mode. If you shine light at the ooze, it withdraws for as long as there is light on it. But there is also ooze behind you which kills you if you point the flashlight in front of you and just stand still in the middle of the section. So you think: well I’ll just point it to my feet and that should create an aura of light around my feet. Wrong! After countless retries and trying to use other light generating stuff (which didn’t have any effect), I found out that you just had to shine the light in front of you like an idiot. If you do that, no ooze will not attack you from the side or from the back for some stupid reason. So the game encourages you to think of your own solutions, but destroys you if you think things through too much.

A lot of puzzles are like that. If you have to spend more than a minute to solve it, then you are just doing it wrong and thinking about it too much. It wouldn’t be too bad if you failed at these things 20 times before getting it right, if there weren’t any unskippable cutscenes. You die, restart, get a cutscene, die, restart, get the same cutscene again, etc etc etc. It’s like being in hell.

In the early levels where you escape the burning building in the trailers, sometimes you have to shimmy and notice large ledges below you. You might think: "I'll jump on them so I don't die again 10 seconds from now". You would be wrong, because those aren't really ledges but scenery that makes you fall to your doom. Later on you might notice smaller ledges. Those, you can jump down on... It's just ridiculously illogical.



One of the things that is even more terrible than using the controls and the inventory to get through the game is driving. Seriously, the only things that will scare you in this game will hit you during the driving missions. Now, the driving isn’t that bad in itself. If you’ve completed GTA, you should be able to control and car in any game ever, so the shitty handling isn’t that much of a problem. However, there is one mission in particular which will make you scream in anger like only Ninja Gaiden Black can do.

In one level, you have to drive/escape to central park. If you drive too slowly, the Dark will catch up by destroying the road behind you and kill you. If you hit a car, you stop instantly, resulting in getting caught up and dying. If you hit a streetlight, you die. If you hit an object that for some reason needs to stick out to the road, you die. If you drive down that black path that looks like a piece of road but is actually just a black abyss, you die. When you die, you have to restart the entire driving section..

I died around 100 times there. No kidding, maybe it was even 120 times. Think Stuntman trial and error gameplay, but without the option to have fun or the option to use a car properly. It is beyond hellish, I can’t really find the words to describe the frustration of this particular mission. The scary moment comes when an achievement pops up when you died for the 80th time:

The 10 Mile Race: 20
Drive at least 10 miles with a vehicle.

I got an achievement for driving 10 miles by dying 80 times? But I wasn't even supposed to have driven that far yet, that early in the game.. That means there is even more driving later on?!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Actually yes, there is more driving! Later on, driving over a rock in Central Park can knock your vehicle to the side, only to glitch and make you drive forward again. Driving over what looks like a ramp usually kills you, or gets you stuck on top of it. In the end you’re just better off not driving: it means less risk of dying and having to redo some puzzle you did before.

Finally, the whole game is just a mess and should never have been released as is. Animation can look awful when you climb up a rope, taking huge swings with your arms as if you are some monkey who tries to grabs a banana on every part of the rope you grab. You can jump to a scripted ledge, initiating an ingame cutscene where you see yourself climbing up the ledge… in mid-air. You can push a piece of furniture into a wall and have it spin out of control to the other side of the room. The game is just not finished by a long shot, and I sincerely doubt that they will ever make any DLC episodes in the future. In fact I hope they won’t. Let the developers just continue with living productive lives instead.

Conclusion
If you are thinking of buying this game, please use any of these methods to kill yourself instead. I’ve finished Kane & Lynch. I’ve finished The Golden Compass, which is about the worst modern movie-game ever. Both these games are 11/10 when compared to Alone in the Dark. I was surprised at how bad this game is. It’s not bad in a “oh haha look at this crap game” like you have in a game like Big Rigs Over The Road Racing. It’s bad in a “oh dear, why did they do this?” way that slaps you in the face every 5 minutes, or maybe more. At least Big Rigs are laughably bad. Alone in the Dark fails to live up to the hype that it generated, fails to live up to be a decent game and fails to be scary. What gameplay there is that works feels like a chore, while not offering any kind of reward for the work you put into it.


In all fairness, I'm currently stuck at some place at the end of Episode 3 in Central Park, where I don't really have any idea where to go. I'm done with getting hit one time and dying because the game saved me on a location with 3-4 enemies with 1 health, and you have to heal yourself again after every reload. It is just too much of a pain. People have called me a masochist before, for finishing crap games like Spider-Man 3, but I won't be a true masochist until I finish Alone in the Dark. Probably, I never will. Normally I wouldn't write a review about a game I hadn't finished, but I'll make an exception to warn you: stay the hell away from this nightmare!

If you are wondering why there are so many facepalm pictures in this here blog: that is how I looked in my 4-5 hours of dying over and over, re-doing previous puzzles and watching unskippable cutscenes for the 15th time in Alone in the Dark. Exactly that look, but with my hands on the controller, furiously trying to skip a cutscene.

This game is as fun as watching your cancer ridden grandmother forget who the hell you are, before shitting herself and dying in front of your eyes when you are 10 years old. On your birthday.

0/10

Eurogamer breaks a pattern of harsh reviews by being apologetic about AitD's faults in their 7/10 review, if you want another take on it. They are wrong and probably French.