Battlemouth

I recently had the opportunity to play through Atari’s newest version of Alone in the Dark. For all the progress the game made in respects to design and delivery it kept getting caught up in it’s ambitions. In spite of these stumbles Alone in the Dark still deserves praise for the seeds it has planted, hopefully other developers will pay attention and follow suit.

Alone in the Dark is a mix between Resident Evil and Condemned with emphasis on the puzzle solving. The setting is in Central Park, for some reason crazy things are going on there and you’re going to figure out what is making it all happen like it or not. You’ll be heavily reliant on fire to help you through out the game to solve puzzles, kill baddies, or burn things in your way that you wish to not have in your way.

What is really cool about Alone in the Dark is that its totally episodic, where you can play almost any of the episodes except for a few end game ones that are unlocked once you complete a percentage of the game. So if you only wanted to play for an hour you could just dive into one episode or for a longer haul just plow through a few episodes. When you revisit a save game you’ll get a little recap of what has been going on to refresh your memory, very similar to a “as seen last week” feature you’d see on a TV drama. It would’ve been cool to see a “coming up next week” feature after episodes to keep you hooked and hungry for the next section.

Puzzles involve you putting together all sorts of things to make fun treats like molotov cocktails to help you along your away. Unfortunately whenever a situation that would require you to make something arises it becomes super obvious what you need to use to make things, as they are right there laying around. Making us have to experiment and throw together things and see what happens would’ve been a lot more fun. Its no fun when games assume you’re too dumb to figure things out on your own.

As far as the graphic go the game looks great with immersive and dark environments. It being so dark is a big reason why you’ll be looking for fire often, the developers did a good job of actually putting fire where it would/should be. Baddies look like weird meaty deformed/burned version of things that used to be humans aka creepy.

The camera is a bit of a hassle initially and took some getting used to, I only used first person mode for shooting and wrestled 3rd person view the rest of the time. Alone in the Dark also has crazy invisible walls, I’d be chasing after a baddie to all of a sudden not be able to walk up a ramp for some reason. The vehicles can be kinda weird but fun at the same time, some of the more exciting moments were in a car with monsters clung to the sides trying to rip me apart.

Alone in the Dark is a very ambitious project that just didn’t have enough time to fully cook. Its still worth checking out, you’re just not going to be raving about it in the end. There will parts you’ll fondly remember and parts you would rather forget. In the end unfortunately we’ve got another game that could have been so much more, at least it was able to present itself with some dignity.