A Prince in Rags.

Ok, how should I...
Imagine you have a mobile phone. It has really cool stuff in it –a big, high-resolution screen, a 5Mpix digital camera with auto-focus, a high quality MP3 player, GPS, a flashlight and a Swiss knife. It’s great to play around with and it’s fairly functional, but it has a few dead pixels in the screen matrix, clunky navigation, it sometimes turns itself off for no apparent reason and has a tendency to wake you up in a middle of the night with high-pitched noise and flashing lights. It also automatically sends text messages to you with the word “fuck” every seven and a half minutes disguising itself with your grandfather’s number.

That’s Alone in the Dark. The fifth one.
Let me start off by writing that the technical state of this game is a fucking disgrace. In this day and age a digital product should not be released on the market so unfinished under the punishment of whipping. This game should have been left in the greasy hands of the beta-testers for at least two or three more months.
Floating objects that rotate rapidly, monsters stuck in doors, cars getting catapulted 20 meters into air after hitting as curb… that’s something you’ll be exposed to throughout the entire game. Add to that clipping problems, texture flickering, lightning and shadowing discrepancies and bad collision detection. Don’t get me wrong, they all don’t happen at once and none, let me put it in capital letters, NONE of those issues will prevent you from progressing or finishing the game. Wait, there was this once time that I made the main protagonist jump out of a speeding car while I was passing another vehicle – Carnby hit the other car and when he got up he was buried knee-deep in the other car’s hood. There was nothing I could do but to replay from the last checkpoint. It sounds bad, but all those problems are nothing more that annoyances. The game is not falling apart as some reviewers would like you to think. It is certainly a shame that AitD was released is such state, but it’s not like you’re going to buy a stone and you’ll get back with sand.

Also, many people reviewing the game said that the controls are so bad that the game is completely unplayable. Hell, Ryan Geddes from IGN gave the game a 3.5 for being buggy and „uncontrollable”. I don’t know what Atari did to that guy. Did they kill his cat? Did they steal his shoes? I don’t know, but it must have been something really nasty. Maybe they hid his remote?
I state here and now, that anyone claiming that the controls in Alone in the Dark are too poorly done to make the game playable should stop playing video games right now and start growing cabbage; because that is something they will be much better at. I don’t think this game’s controls are much harder to muster than, let’s say, Metal Gear Solid 4’s.
This game control scheme is complex, because the game’s mechanics are complex. Just get over it. If you can’t handle it go back to Wii Sports, shut up and let people with a cerebellum play the game. I will admit that the controls are a bit loose, especially during the driving sections, but it’s nothing serious.

With all that said – Alone in the Dark is one of the best games I have played recently, or actually ever. Surprised? I bet.
Yes, the game has flaws, quite a bit actually, but they are “dwarfed” by all the incredibly ingenious ideas packed into the game.
First of all the fire – it looks good, spreads and burns everything that can be burned (well, almost). You’ll need to use fire to solve puzzles and kill enemies. Actually, most enemies (excluding pretty much only the small dog-rats) die only if burned. That means sometimes you’ll need to fetch something burning to kill all the enemies off, but you’ll have a lot of flammables through most of the game so it’s no problem.
Combine wood with spreading fire and HAVOC physics and you’ll have more fun that with a “Small Arsonist” kit. Imagine that there are wooden beams that block your passage. What do you do? You take a can of mosquito spray, a lighter and warm those beams up a bit. You’ll see how the fire engulfs the wood, the textures change from a nice wooden one to a black burned-wood one (it looks excellent by the way – you’ll see small embers glowing on the burned wood) and then the burned beam will break on the point where there is the highest stress. Do the same with five or six pieces of wood and you’ll just love to watch them crumble.
Of course it’s not a game for insecure firemen so there are a lot more to do than just play with flames. You’ll use the physics to your advantage many times during the game and you’ll do it in most creative ways. I don’t want to spoil too much, because it’s one of the best things in this game – experimenting. You also do a lot of the afore mentioned with your inventory items. The inventory, which is Carnby’s jacket only hold so many items. You can combine them in various ways and sometimes you’ll be surprised with the results. Hell, that goes beyond your inventory. It’s excellent. One minor flaw though – the interface governing your inventory is not very intuitive, but one you’ll get the hang of it you’ll mix items faster than Flash Gordon masturbates.
Next thing is the AI. It’s surprisingly well made - something not often seen in survival horrors. Well, apart from Resident Evil 4, but that wasn’t really a survival horror, now was it?
Take the dog-rats again. They are interested in three things – you, light and blood. Wanna avoid confrontation with a particularly big pack? Find a corpse, shoot it in the head to make it lose blood and you’ll see the ratz (that’s how they are called in the game – laaaame) push the corpse to spill the blood on the floor so they can lick it. Also, other enemies will not just rush towards you if they know you have something to burn them with.
Ok, enough, or this review will go on forever.

The story isn’t the most original out there, but it’s engaging enough for you to want know more. The characters are distinct and Carnby is a likable, foul-mouth bastard with a nihilistic approach to life. He also swears every second word which creates both cool and silly moments. Overly, the voice acting is in an old-school, B-movie, survival horror style. I like it, because it fits well with the genre, but I’m sure most of you will frown after hearing the first few lines of dialog and it only gets worse as the game progresses.

The game is divided into episodes, and I don’t mean Half-Life 2 episodes. I mean Lost, 24, Prison Break episodes. Those are divided into chapters and can be controlled like a DVD movie. If you find a section of the game too difficult or annoying you can just skip it.
After every episode you’ll see the ending credits and when you load the game from a save file you’ll get a “previously on Alone in the Dark” cut-scene. It really makes the game feel like an interactive TV Series and I hope other games will feature something similar.

When it comes to sound the effects are nothing special really – just the average stuff you can hear in a survival horror games. What I do like is the soundtrack. It’s not exactly something you can hear in a game or a movie. It’s something that you would more likely hear on a concerto, with a choir and an extensive array of instruments. It creates an excellent mood for the game, even though there are a few instances with a questionable choice of music. Those however are few and far between.

Last, but not least are the graphics. And here I have mixed feelings. There are some locales that look stunning. They have sharp texture work, many details, excellent lightning and design. And then there are some places that seem to be taken from the Playstation 2 version of the game and look like a dog urinated on your TV screen. They are blunt, have issues with the dynamic lights and the textures look like they were made from butter and jello. In most cases the bad ones are only some of the minor or bonus locations, but it still hurts. Oh, and the character models are ugly as hell. Maybe not as ugly as the ones in Two Worlds, but they could use some serious work.

Ok, a small summary perhaps.
From all the whining here you could probably think that this is not a good game, but it is. It’s full of excellent ideas that were implemented into the gameplay and none of them feel forced or broken. Alone in the Dark is a game very well though trough. Too bad it’s not as well made. Think of it as a test. If you can get through the complex controls, the various bugs and glitches you’ll like this game tremendously. If not, well, maybe you should change a hobby or stick to AAA games that are more polished than dog’s balls. If you do that however, know that you’ll be missing a lot and I will have the right to call you a Sunday gamer.

Purists beware, this game will eat you alive.

And to all who diss this game, but are not gamers enough to actually play it I will misquote Edward Carnby – “I don’t care about the controls, and fuck you anyway”.

Goodbye.



P.S.
From what I’ve heard the controls on PC are really bad. Really, really bad. So maybe you should stick to a console version. On the other hand the PC version seems to have less bugs, so maybe you should get that one anyway. Or maybe get both, let Atari make more money, maybe the will hire more beta testers. For Christ’s sake!