Alone in the Dark

Rating Mature Genre horror Publisher Atari External Links Official Website

Alone in the Dark, the survival horror sleeper hit of ’08 that just never seemed to get up from its coma. Those among you old school PC jockeys might remember this blocky 1992 death trap. Allow me to paint you a polygon filled picture of the original title. You are in a room, something passes by the window. You walk around, and something kills you. Now take that scenario and replay it over and over again, making little to no progress in between deaths, add in a few puzzles and other grotesque critters that one shot you and you’ve pretty much summed up the odd mix of anger and depression that is the tone of Alone in the Dark. It was with that in mind that I happily yes happily dove into the new Alone in the Dark. Do or die situations, complex puzzles, and all the while the ground itself is trying to kill you. Fantastic, sure! Perhaps I wasn’t much of a challenge as a preteen, but now I am a well-rounded “accomplished” player, so bring it on Atari.

Minuets later I find myself, amnesiac protagonist, running around a burning building that is literally trying to eat me, dying left and right, up and down even. I was home again. But this time, something was different. Cheap tricks and unseen timers were working against me, but like the many children before me, I refused to believe that it was my failing that perhaps the slow and clunky controls were to blame. Unfortunately for this game’s sales, popular consensus and I both received gold stars that day. Now, I’m no control snob. I was days into “Fable in Space“, I mean Mass Effect, before I noticed a complete lack of this-does-that button tutorial. When I fire up an obviously adult oriented title and the first button prompt I see is “Press R3 to Blink”, my immediate thought as the first person view grew bleary was, ‘Please tell me I don’t have to alternate triggers to breathe too’.

Not to be dissuaded by strange if somewhat creative controls, I pressed on. Surely something will come along to make me forget all about blinking. After a score or two eye kegels later, dodging flames and wall monsters did little to make me stop hammering that damnable button. The rest of the game felt sadly like a poor stepchild of the original. Open-ended gameplay reduced to running from or to the scariest thing around, like a hamster in a tiny maze that’s on fire and crumbling behind him. Poor hamster, I feel your pain. Eventually combat reared its possessed humanoid head and proceeded to lead me further into the abyss that is controller retardation.

The gimmick is that your weapon attacks consist of swings with whatever object you have in hand. Swinging involves tilting the control stick, then arcing it a different direction. While the swings are accurate, the speed and flow feel disjointed and leave more than enough room for multiple enemy attacks. Once downed, an enemy will get back up seconds later unless struck with fire or a flaming weapon. This particular dance normally involved beating some demon to death, dropping your lead pipe, picking up a picture frame, setting it on fire with the nearby burning trashcan, and returning to beat and burn the body. Quite the workout in a room full of monsters that all want to eat you.

Another one of the inventive yet limiting elements of the game is the realistic carry on item screen. The amount of weapons, ammo, puzzle items, and med-kit equivalents are limited to the amount of free space the old main character has in his coat and pockets. The item select screen takes on a fairly flasher theme when you watch the hero open up both sides of his trench coat and look down at all his goods. This title is riddled with interesting and innovative puzzles, items, and all around mechanisms of gameplay, but the sad and enjoyment-crippling part is that each seems puny and outweighed by the failure pile of a control scheme. As a fairly staunch anti-cheater, this is a title I would have loved to play with invincibility. A short but intriguing story, new and innovative gameplay, developed characters, ancient relics and the Devil himself, all buried under a blanket pf overly complicated button combos and shoddy maneuverability in inevitably closed spaces.