Alone in the Dark

You want to like the supernaturaltinged Central Park thriller Alone in the Dark. You really, really do. It’s got all the makings of an intriguingly cinematic romp in the survival-horror hay. First, there’s a super-interesting item-combo system that gives you the choice: Do I use the doublesided sticky tape with a pack of bullets on a bottle of hooch to construct a grenade bomb? Or do I use the tape to smack a glow stick to a bottle of first-aid spray just for the hell of it? The choices are endlessly intoxicating — something that mashing together green and red herbs in Resident Evil always stopped short of accomplishing.

There’s also the lure of using the game’s mega-flammable environments to eliminate fire-finicky enemies, who’ll otherwise keep after you without a flame-y fatality move. Immolate ’em with a doused chair! Toss a self-constructed bomb at them, then light it up with either a Zippo or a well-timed bullet! The possibilities just ooze out of Alone in the Dark’s seemingly free-wheeling pores. Add to all this clever liberty cars that require a little hotwiring mini-game, and occasional puzzles that rely more on glorious real-world wit (and physics) than merely having the correct red/blue/green key, and you get the sense that the team behind Alone in the Dark was on the right track with its ambitions.

Yet our admiration for what the game tries to do (and sometimes succeeds at) doesn’t always match up with the complete package it presents. The most fundamental hurdle for any game is its control system, and Alone in the Dark’s rigid third-person camera and stiff character-handling cripple what could’ve been an amazingly fluid adventure. Swapping between third-person shooting and first-person shooting feels jarring and disorienting — even after playing the game for hours. With this many reanimated creeps hot for your spilled blood, these control hiccups pull you out of the experience faster than realizing the fact that every enemy in the game has a name that ends in a “Z” (humanz, ratz, vampirz). Really.

Sure, you may get used to the controls over time, but why should you have to? A learning curve is fine, but not at the expense of gameplay. Even the driving segments feel hard to control. This becomes crucial in the rare but important chase sequences, which are made all the more blood-boiling by the lack of frequent checkpoints.

Maybe we’re just bitter. There’s so much lovely intelligence lurking under Alone in the Dark’s hamstrung, occasionally glitchy surface (unforgivably, we found a few crash bugs in even the retail version!) that it’s hard to let this one go quietly into the night. We certainly appreciate its laudable ambitions, but we’re hard-pressed to recommend this uneven experience to anyone without the stamina to bite, scratch, and claw their way to uncovering its inventive charms.