Joshua Topolsky

God damn you back to Hell, Alone in the Dark. I wanted to like you, I ached to like you. Thoughts of liking you kept me awake at night, or woke me as if a fever dream had been visited upon me. With the constant delays of Resident Evil 5, a pitiable lack of zombies in GTA IV, the rock-block of Condemned and Condemned 2 put to darkest, deepest sleep, and that tiny, unsubstantial — yet nagging — bit of Dead Rising I can’t bring myself to finish, I thought this was the answer to my succulent, Satanic, reversed bible prayers.

But no. It actually sucks. It sucks badly. On the whole.

Originally I thought the failure of this title brought into focus the difficulties of putting together an effective game in today’s high-stakes, winner-takes-all, over-the-top, smoke-em-if-you-got-em climate of computer-based recreation — but now I just think Eden and Atari rushed this hunk of shit to market without really caring if it made me want to actively pursue getting Lyme disease, going without much-needed treatment, and eventually committing suicide due the infection’s psychological side-effects. Admittedly, I wasn’t expecting anything as good as Resident Evil 4 — but this fails on so many levels it’s shocking. Shocking, deeply upsetting, and then shocking again.

First off, the graphics are good, but not quite as good as you really want them to be, and there are annoying visual glitches that take you out of the moment (what few, pathetic moments exist). The game does a decent job lighting scenes and shading their elements, but characters look stiff, and some sequences provide such a rotten view or are rendered so spottily that it’s almost impossible to make out what’s going on (driving through the parking garage early on, for instance). Eden did triumph in the department of fire… though they pretty much triumphed only in the department of fire. Yes, things really do look like they’re burning, but that’s a small solace when your shoulder blade is constantly flickering and/or intersecting with a locker, a light source, and the hollow insides of your ruggedly handsome face.

Secondly, the sound is abysmal. Between the nagging, force-fed score (which I had to switch off) and terrible sound effect glitches (why are characters talking over THEIR OWN DIALOGUE?), it’s pretty hard to tolerate. I suppose it would be improved by a single voice actor that didn’t sound like they’d been plucked from a group of people that had recently decided it was either going to be voiceovers for French survival horror games or a human-dog handler in the porno Breast in Show 7.

Which regrettably brings me to the second worst feature of the game: the story. While other games of the genre are content to move you happily along with minimal plot, ham-fisted yet sometimes stirring player interactions, gratuitous T&A at inappropriate times, and unlikely scenarios followed by less likely resolutions, Alone in the Dark purports to have a story buried somewhere beneath the run-of-the-mill, meaningless, utterly, utterly shitty, cut-rate claptrap that it’s trying to pass off as a plotline. Adding insult to injury, no one told the developers that peppering the cut scenes with f-bombs and an unlikeable, scatologically-mouthed lead character doesn’t make it cooler.

But what it comes down to — what it always comes down to — is gameplay. And this is straight-up shit through and through. Maneuvering your character is a chore; you have the option of two view modes (behind the back and POV), yet you can only do certain things from each… and you never know what you can do until it’s too late. The combat system is clunky, clumsy, frustrating, and overly complicated. It’s not necessary to allow me to swing a weapon in different directions, and if the designers of the game had considered what made sense versus what they thought would be unique, the game would have been better for it. The same could be said for the fish-in-the-jacket item switching, which must have seemed like a novel approach on paper, but displays some glaring problems in execution. Driving would be okay — fun even — if the car wasn’t weighted like a disused tissue box, and the vehicle sequences weren’t put together like a lost level from Dragon’s Lair (what? UP then UP again!?). Oh, and everyone knows you can’t change a car’s position in mid-air.

At the end of the day, all-in-all, and to wrap things up, it turns out that if you’re making a survival horror game, you should be less focused on the fire effects and amount of level variation you can provide and more focused on the gameplay and thickening up a paper-thin plotline. No one makes a perfect game, but it seems like if the same effort that went into making objects burst delightfully into flame was put towards testing and gameplay refinement, this could have been wholly enjoyable trip rather than a frustrating pain in the ass.

Next up, I rant about socks that don’t have enough elasticity, and the lack of anal sex on broadcast television. Seriously, it’s barely ever shown.