Every once in a while, maybe every three years or so, a game is released which presents an irresistible amalgamation of so many flawlessly executed gameplay styles that it not only defies genre classification, it gives classification the finger and punches it squarely in the Gunthers. Such games are usually a joy to play in every regard, from aesthetics to the seamless manner in which the mechanics converge to fashion an addictive, immersive experience. Some of these games can even cure cancer, bathe your dog, and rotate the tires on your car while juggling a family of ferrets.
Then comes everything else. And then, after everything else and a layer of grimy indifference, there’s Omikron. After Omikron, slumped beneath sixty feet of decomposing offal and a lost cuddly little kitten, lies Alone in the Dark.
If you were looking forward to a good survival horror jaunt on the 360, you might as well aggressively court a case of amnesia by slamming your head against the stove so that you can have a fresh go ’round with Condemned: Criminal Origins. While Monolith’s three-year-old launch title isn’t really a survival horror game, it’s still as close as you can get to scratching that itch with your 360, because Eden Studios’ Alone in the Dark (AitD) isn’t really a survival horror game either. Taken on its own merit, playing AitD more closely resembles being stalked by a large bag of sentient poo while walking through a deserted parking garage as you whistle nervously over your shoulder, fumble with your keys, and offer a desperate, sotto voce litany of contrition to whichever unfortunate deity drew the short straw for handling Ambulatory Fecal Monstrosities that week.
That said, Alone in the Dark is not entirely without virtue. The fire looks good. So good, in fact, that Eden wanted to gratuitously exploit their flame-rendering prowess by making the fire the most sympathetic character in the game.
Everything else–from the writing and dialogue, to the voice acting, the controls, the puzzles, down to the tissue paper premise of this insultingly inane exercise in self-flagellation–is unworthy of your time and money. Personally, I’d have had more fun running the New York City Marathon with a bag full of rabid weasels and razor blades taped to my crotch, but that’s just me. I’m funny that way.
The fact that enemies — or “Humanz,” and no, I’m not making that shit up — can only be dispatched using fire simply adds to the rampant idiot factor here, as cracking someone in the head with an axe or, say, three rounds from a .45, isn’t sufficient to take him out, but brushing against him with a flaming chair will result in instant crispification. The fact that the women you meet early in the game are whiny, helpless dolts incapable of performing even the simplest acts of self-preservation only made me want to set ol’ Ed Carnby himself alight with his own smoldering stool simply to put him out of our misery. Using live electrical lines to scale a building only polishes up the dumb and puts it on prominent display in a well-lit velvet-lined case, but at that point I simply shrugged, and uttered a resigned, “sure, why not?”
Damn headcrabz.
This is a game that asked me to move a fire extinguisher up one floor in a ravaged building by setting the extinguisher on a lift-elevator contraption, then climbing a nice, wide ledge (wide enough to accommodate a large, metallic, fire extinguisher-shaped cylinder, for instance) up to the area that needed some extinguishing. From there I had to jump off yet another ledge and catch yet another sputtering electrical line, which in turn lifted the elevator and conveniently deposited the extinguisher on the proper level. After wrestling with severe clipping issues, I then climbed back up and retrieved the extinguisher and used it to douse some very attractive flames before passing through a door to the next titillating activity. At this point I’m wondering what would have been wrong with a little lift-drop-climb, lift-drop-climb action to deposit the fire extinguisher on the next floor, instead of making me jump around like a spastic lemur using the game’s shitty movement mechanics.
We’ve all met those special Mensa candidates who are so ass-scratchingly, finger-sniffingly stupid that they fail to appreciate even the depth of their own imbecility, but there’s something endearingly tolerable about a dumb fuck who’s just smart enough to realize he’s a dumb fuck and so doesn’t need to broadcast his idiocy to the world like an Emergency Alert System test run amok. Alone in the Dark is the first and worst kind of stupid; that is, stupid with a pretense to omniscience, an intolerable blend of ignorance and arrogance that makes me want to pummel an effigy of Jerry Falwell with large slabs o’ meat.
Listen, I can play games. Trust me on this. I’m there. I know where to go, what to do, how to figure things out. So when a game assumes that I am, in fact, as chin-bitingly stupid as it is, it’s my first indication that something is inexorably wrong on the order of “blimey, Cap’n Smith, I think we’ve hit sumpin’.” I neither want nor need to be led slack-jawed through every level while the designer has me jumping through hoop after intelligence-sapping hoop like a large performing feline of impending explosive demeanor; it’s the designer’s job to get me, the player, to not notice the hoops, but when they continuously club me over the head with them I’ll not be held accountable for whomever might get eaten.
A little subtlety goes a long way towards keeping me in the experience, but unfortunately for survival horror fans and anyone who likes their games slightly smarter than the average three-iron, Alone in the Dark is about as subtle as a home trepanation kit. Don’t buy it, don’t rent it, don’t even look at it on the shelf.
Tags: Alone in the Dark, Cancer, Condemned, Marathon, Monolith, Parking Garage, Sucks, Survival Horror, Trepanation
