Review: Alone in the Dark

So about a week and a half ago The Game received a review copy of Alone In the Dark, a somewhat new game from Atari and Eden Games released June 24^th. A PS3 port is to come later, possibly September. The demo is being released pretty soon if not already.

Alone in the Dark is an incredibly ambitious game. The developers took a number of risks which individually may not mean much, but combined together make the entire game a huge risk. Unfortunately, their gamble did not pay off. While I respect the intentions of the developers, the final product is a mess.

My initial impression of the game was quite good: the menus looked cool, they had good mood music, etc. It wasn’t long though that I noticed something odd: everything was eerily quiet. I turned up my stereo so I could hear everything properly and decided to switch back to regular TV just to see how loud it was. The difference was shocking. This sound discrepancy, while it seems minor, is the kind of oversight that mars this game continually. These problems don’t just go away though, they build up throughout the game. An example of this is the terrible attempt at ratcheting up pressure with music. The particular sound effect I’m referring to sounds like a throwaway sound from the movie Psycho. It’s so bad I’m really not sure how to describe it, just that it is so jarring and obnoxious that it takes you out of the experience to notice it. This forced me to ask the question: what is the most important thing for a game like this? My answer was immersion. This game, while coming close to achieving immersion several times, ultimately failed.

Game-stopping bugs are the quickest ways to break immersion. Terrible voice acting, bad writing, railroad design can all do it too. Sadly enough, Alone in the Dark has all of the above – but the bugs take this from annoying to criminal. Within twenty minutes of putting the disk into the system I encountered my first show-stopping bug. It was a silly one – I had to move a table, but when I clicked to move the table it decided to let my character walk through it. That’s not just a minor clipping bug (of which are many as well), it is a total break from the purpose of the game. Later on, after going through a ridiculous sequence where I beat down some zombies with a huge pipe, I decided to take the pipe with me through a grating. I dropped the pipe and to my surprise it disappeared. A moment later it fell down from the sky, bounced off my head back into the hole where it promptly disappeared again and fell down. You get the idea I’m sure. Other strange bugs also occur. I was actually thoroughly enjoying a car chase scene. The controls for the car seemed quite good, it was cinematic and gripping. Buildings were exploding around me, I pulled off some cool stunts. Then a terrible bug struck – I was crossing over a damage part of road, a chasm on my right. This was probably the easiest part of the entire chase scene. I hit a crack in the road and my car instantly turned ninety degrees and plunged into the chasm. This ended THAT play session.

The control scheme is also terrible. As Tonester put it when we were having an MST3K-style play session, steering the main character is “like driving a jet ski.” (This also happens to be my main complaint about GTA4, something which every single publication seemed to overlook.) As a result, the third person view is almost worthless. Fortunately, they give you the ability to switch to a first person view. However, whenever you perform any action that is deemed watch-worthy it shifts the view to third person and doesn’t deign to put it back to first, so suddenly your preference is ignored. Later in that same session I was trying to solve a puzzle where I had been stuck. I wandered about struggling to jump onto various things and generally being irritated. Eventually I told them I had tried using my universal key (AKA my pistol because it is useless except for opening doors) to open the door but it hadn’t worked. I decided to try shooting the door again and much to my surprise, the door opened. For the next five minutes I was told that I had missed the door. I don’t claim to be an expert FPS, but I can hit a goddamn door. These kind of bugs are littered throughout the game – littered enough to fill a landfill.

Apart from bugs, the game design is generally pretty bad. I will reiterate that Eden Games took some serious risks- but none of them paid off. Melee combat generally involves the player picking up something big and heavy. I appreciate this since nothing is more fun then beating zombies with pipes, axes, brooms, rakes, large pieces of wood, chairs, and a myriad of other such things. So whenever you go to melee the view shifts to third person and you control your weapon with the right thumbstick. In an attempt at interactivity you must rear your weapon back and then swing it. I could see this sort of thing working with the Wii controller but it just doesn’t work here. Monsters frequently duck and you can only swing in three directions. Left to right, right to left, or chopping downwards. I think you can see the problem here.

Next up is the inventory. I don’t know why, but they decided to make an incredibly bad design decision here. You have a limited inventory, which is fine. You have a bunch of different items you can combine to make new items, which is great as it adds a bit of crafting and creativity. The problem comes in the interactivity of the items. To access you items you have to hit the analog down button and navigate around your jacket (your inventory) which happens to have slots for all sorts of different sized bottles on one side, a lighter, handkerchiefs, and other things. First off, who the hell has that sort of jacket? Secondly, they are navigated in a circular manner which would be fine if they used a full circle but instead, the 360 degree range of the controller is mapped to about 180 degrees of inventory – not exactly intuitive. This problem is exacerbated even further by the fact that time passes while you are trying to combine items. Why would this be a problem? Because zombies don’t generally die from being beaten with large metal objects, they only fall down for a bit. While you are fumbling around with your jackass of an inventory, they can stand up and proceed to bite your face. So, once you’ve managed to dispose of the zombies you have been bitten, mauled, and probably burnt a bit. Time to patch yourself up. Okay, let me get out my medical spray and bandages. Enter more useless interactivity. You hit the button to bring up the healing interface. You look down at your battered bruised body and see a scratch. Spray medical spray, hit a button to look at my next arm, fix it, hit a button to look at my leg, fix it, etc. While the developers should be lauded for trying to create a fully interactive game they forgot about what was actually fun! If I wanted to play a surgery game I would play that emergency room game for the Wii. This is supposed to be survival/horror, not Mr. Wizard’s Jacket Laboratory of Fun.

So what would the last refuge of a game loaded with bugs and poor design choices be? The story of course. The writing and characters could tie all this together! I’ve heard a few times of a game being terrible but that the characters and story sucked the player in and made them forget about all the other problems. The discovery of a story and characters you could care about were what drove them on. While Alone in the Dark has an interesting premise, it’s very poorly written. The dialogue is wooden and delivery is flat. When seeing the main character (you) for the first time, you approach a mirror and sullenly ask “Who the hell am I?”. You stand there briefly pondering this most existential of matters and then punch the mirror. Maybe an understandable reaction from an amnesiac who is caught in the midst of some sinister plot involving the transformation of all of NYCs homeless into flesh eating zombies, but it is just jarring and out of place for him to wonder this at this stage in the game. It’s things like that which also occur with a maddening frequency. At another later point in the game you have just driven through an obstacle course of madness (one I refer to above in the bugs section) and managed to escape having crashed your car. One of your friends has blown his brains out all over the ground and you are beginning to get an inkling of this ridiculous plot. The damsel in distress decides that this it, she’s out of here, this is crazy! Oh, but you’re hurt, I’m going to stay and help you now. The scene doesn’t even skip a beat between the “I’m out of here” stage and “Oh, you’re hurt, I need to help you”. These attempts to create emotionally significant moments – connections between characters fail over and over again.

The game ultimately suffers from several major flaws. Bugs, shallow attempts at interactivity, and poor execution of what could have been an interesting story. I’ve actually gone out of my way to trim the list of problems I see with this game. The really sad thing is I wanted it to succeed – underneath it all there is this incredibly ambitious project which I wish I could reward with some vague recommendation for gamers, but I can’t. It fails to deliver on just about every level. I recognize Eden Games ideas here but this game needed more time in development or it needed to cut features, especially features that were unnecessary and just not fun.