After seeing Nour Polloni’s walkthrough of the tech demo the other day (and your response), it’s clear that I wasn’t the only one to be impressed by the footage of Alone in the Dark 5. No doubt about it, Eden games has done a fantastic job of piquing our interest for their upcoming survival horror sequel.
Now comes news with a horrific twist of its own, and it involves a feature in the game that I don’t recall ever seeing before now — the ability to “wimp out” and skip the hard parts. OXM got the interview with Polloni, detailing the game, and were kind enough to share it with us. Most of it smacks of familiarity, but this one detail took the cake:
“Another achievement is linked to whether or not the player skips. We want everybody to be able to finish our game, so one of the other new features we’ve added is the ability to skip sections using a DVD-style menu if you get stuck, but always at a cost, and achievements is one way to reward players who don’t skip.”
I really don’t know what to say about that. Making sure that your game’s difficulty level is balanced enough so that people have a reasonable chance of seeing the closing credits is great. Giving them the option to skip past the parts that prove too challenging? Not sure I like the sound of that one, at all. Since you can always choose to play through the game as usual, nothing is lost. Still, it ranks as one of the most unorthodox ways of using the Xbox 360’s achievements yet. How do you feel about this revelation? Is it a cool new feature, or complete waste of development time?
