A premiere here on the Promenade Blog: my first video post! And it’s a rant about the new Alone in the Dark by Eden Games. So if you can stand my voice and my thick accent when talking English then feel free to click the play button. If you prefer to read and click some links: No problemo, what is said can be read here as well. A weekend well spent…
Enjoy!

(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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Finally I had some time this weekend playing the new Alone in the Dark, with the same name as the original from 1992, which was done by Infogrames (now Atari) and taught me how three polygons scare the bejesus out of a nine-year old. Good times… But this new game left me with mixed feelings and an uncomfortable nausea.

one shouldn’t write a review of a game when he hasn’t even finished with the first chapter of a total of eight, but what the hell.

Installing game that’s just shy of occupying 8 gigs on your hard disk took so long that I had enough time to write my one page of this week’s report for the university. When I finally started it, everything looked very promising and the look was great, the atmosphere dense and the voice acting quite good.

The first odd thing was having a key to blink your digital eyes which was necessary because your view kept blurring. And it happened, just as in real life, that when something interesting was about to happen you were busy blinking your eyes, including half a second of refocusing again. Tedious!

The Product Features on Alone in the Dark at Amazon.com read: In-Game movement has been designed to allow players to do almost anything that is physically possible in the real world. A big *LOL* here because in the real world I don’t have any troubles going through a door, facing into the right direction. Don’t get fooled by this buzzline, I wish it was more like Half-Life² mated with F.E.A.R. and spawned this game with a spring-solver for ropes and cloth.

On the plus side the game tries to teach you its interface while you play it, which I always like better than a never ending table with keyboard commands or a useless tutorial-mission. On the down side the game doesn’t discern between first person and third person view when prompting messages like “to spray [Button 0]“. I was using “Button 0″, which turned out to be the left mouse button, over and over again but Edward, the avatar, only kept attacking an invisible enemy with the fire extinguisher before stepping into the fire. Yes, Ed advances a step when he’s swinging furniture. it wasn’t the first time that I fell off a ledge. So to extinguish a fire in Alone in the Dark with “Button 0″ means switching to first person mode and pressing the left mouse button.

That switch between first person and third person is an interesting idea but it acts more as a tool for showing you stuff to interact with by a third person camera on Edward and his surroundings. The camera and the controls react oddly in third person but it is nearly impossible to play only in first person, because the game switches back and forth, swivels the camera around until I feel really nauseous in front of my 24″ HD-screen. Anytime you want to know what you are doing, you switch to 1st person, only to get switched back to very cinematic and very uncontrollable 3rd person.

In once instance you have to fight your first “real” zombie which was so terrible that I quit the game angrily at that point at first: She attacks you while you walk around as if going for a walk, looking for something, anything, to whack her. Until you finally pick up a chair and start to strike back, your almost dead. But if you really succeed at punching the zombie to the ground she’ll get up again after a while! Like fuckin’ Silent Hill 4¹! I hate that! The only way to kill her for good, the game tells you, is to drag her numb corpse into some fire. But when you haven’t played that scene over and over again, you don’t know where there’s fire. She comes at you again and so on and so on.

As one reviewer on Amazon.com pointed out: This isn’t a run-and-gun-game, it’s more like a walk-walk-walk-and-then-search-in-a-panic-through-your-inventory-while-fire-is-all-around-you-and-monsters-are-coming-game.

Oh, and the inventory or the way to treat wounds: Atari says its an innovative new system, in practice it’s a bitch in the middle of a fight: Hitting I, selecting your weapon via mouse and then closing the inventory by hitting, get a grip, β, that’s an I with a brow (haha!). The only way of producing an Î is by hitting the circumflex ^ first and then the letter I — in the middle of a fight! Gah! Just as bad as letting go of a rope, hitting Alt Gr, the German right Alt key. And if you are wondering: Yes, it means letting go of the mouse for a second — that’s a sin in most modern games (no, text adventures aren’t modern games)!

The graphic is up to today’s standards, sometimes it looks really good, sometimes there’s just a little too much bump-mapping, but I can understand the artists: Once it finally works you want everybody to show how well it does. And occasionally there’s heavy clipping, collision misdetection or some other atmosphere killers.
The in-game cinematics are executed quite well, defocusing, different angles, nice cinematography, but the characters seem so unnatural despite all the efforts taken by the designers with bump-mapping and blend-shaping. They could at least have made their mouth-cavities darker! And don’t get me started on buggy cloth-solvers that kill the atmosphere at an instant.

I haven’t played far yet to tell enough about the story but I don’t like it, when all the time people you just met keep dying in various ways. So far in the story only one or two survived. Out of seven characters!

I would really love to love this game, but after all Half-Life² still is god to me and I haven’t played a game with such a good balance of an interesting story, fun gameplay, intuitive controls and pacing since four years. Maybe a patch will save it all. Or maybe I’ll become so brainwashed while trying to beat that sucker that I really enjoy it. That reminds me: I have to finish F.E.A.R. Fahrenheit and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too…

1. …which hast much better controls, though! [back]
2. I guess I have to say thanks to my German keyboard layout [back]