In many ways, the first Alone in the Dark game pretty much set the standard for the modern-day survival horror franchise, even if Resident Evil usually ends up taking the credit for it. Sixteen years after the original ended up scaring the bejesus out of us when we were in our teens, Eden Games, who have been consistently wowing us with racing classics like V-Rally, Need For Speed: Porsche Unleashed and Test Drive Unlimited, has been passed the torch (pun very much intended) and the resulting experience in the new Alone In The Dark happens to be one wild ride through a bed of roses. And, unfortunately, a briar patch to boot.

Alone In The Dark unfolds in the city of New York as the main man, Edward Carnby, wakes up suffering from an amnesia haze in an apartment building overlooking Central Park, around which the entire game and its mysteries are based. Saved from an untimely demise by a series of otherworldly fissures or “living scars” that tear the city apart, Ed finds himself on the run from the transformed creatures to try and figure out why he’s suddenly having such a lousy day. Along the way, Ed teams up with Sarah Flores, an art dealer who seems to have traded in the usual dress code for leather jackets and Goth thigh-high boots, as they struggle to survive until sunrise in Gehenna, formerly known as NYC.

While the story, penned by Sleepers author Lorenzo Carcaterra, isn’t as tightly wound as, say, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams, it serves as a highly engaging transport for the game’s mechanic and all the conspiracy theories surrounding Central Park – enough to make players at least want to do a decent amount of digging online. What’s confusing, however, is whether this game is actually some sort of a sequel to the original, having transported Carnby straight from 1938 to 2008 after his adventures in the Derceto mansion – a fact borne out by the Central Park EMT’s comments and the not-so-lucid endings to the game. Thankfully, the method of telling the story takes a huge deal of stress and implausibility out of actually doing it, by resorting to a DVD-style system that allows players to skip to any of the eight episodes (split across multiple scenes) that make up the storyline, in addition to rewinding or fast forwarding the game to replay a section in another way or skip one that’s causing a receding hairline.

In addition, a “Previously On…” sequence that kicks in every time you load a saved game proves to be a godsend when you have nothing but a vague idea of what you were doing after spending a day or two away from the game, which is something you’ll catch yourself doing after some particularly annoying sections when you’re too vain (or too much of an achievement whore on the Xbox 360) to skip past it. Once out of those, however, there are enough memorable set pieces and cut scenes to make up for these defects, as evidenced by the now-ubiquitous clip of Carnby hanging onto a gargoyle for dear life hundreds of feet above Central Park, as the sun sets on a New York City seemingly devoid of life.

As with any survival horror game, atmosphere is key – a fact that doesn’t seem to be lost on Alone in the Dark. Mind you, we’re not talking about the actual scare factor here, of which there is little to deserve mention, but an overall sense of dread and displacement is something that you tend to notice throughout the game – helpless people get swallowed whole by fissures and the unforgiving environment and Central Park at night exudes such an overpowering sense of evil that I wouldn’t be caught dead there on a dark, rainy day, leave alone at night-time. Even an action as simple as blinking to clear the haze starts to intimidate the player as the game progresses. And to top it off, like most good survival horror games, there’s enough edge of the seat action to satisfy even the biggest adrenaline junkies, whether it’s driving through desolate roads as living scars render the cityscape asunder, tearing skyscrapers down as if they were made of papier-mâché or climbing a building with a rope attached to a burning helicopter on the roof that’s slowly going over the edge.

Conveying all this to the player in a believable package is the Twilight 2 engine, derived from the rendering engine that had racing fans falling head over heels in love with the island of Oahu in Test Drive Unlimited. (And just like Oahu, Central Park has been accurately recreated using satellite data and thousands of photos, a testament to the amount of detail Eden puts into their games.) Having received substantial upgrades, the remade engine delivers a host of new features including depth of field, motion blur, moisture effects and vastly improved lighting and shadowing systems including photorealistic and HDR rendering, crucial to such a title that plays with light and dark as easily as it does with good and evil. The PC version, obviously, wins out over the others, boasting of even more eye-candy than the Xbox 360 version, thanks to full support for DirectX 10 and 64-bit multicore CPUs, while the Wii version suffers at the other end of the spectrum, thanks to a horrifying botch-job by Hydravision.

Although we didn’t get the PS2 version for review, we can only begin to guess at the travesty it would have been after spending a frustrating amount of time with the Wii version. The graphics actually seem like something out of the Quake II generation, with extremely low-resolution character models and textures, severe clipping and collision detection issues and framerates designed to be only slightly better than a fast PowerPoint presentation. And the worst part is, someone at Hydravision seems to have taken the name of “Alone in the Dark” way too literally, having bled out all semblances of lighting and color, making the already ravaged visuals even worse, if such a thing were even possible.

If there is one thing that redeems the Wii version somewhat, it’s the control scheme, which makes it the most natural and most easy to handle among all the other versions, although that’s pretty much the equivalent of saying Uwe Boll is a better director than Soccer Mom on the bleachers with a Handycam. While the Wii version handles movement controls, inventory management and the combat pretty well, the driving and rope climbing sequences proved frustrating enough for me to scream at the game in rage, which obligingly translated my angry gestures by making Carnby spaz out as if hit with a grand mal seizure. This, in retrospect, seems to be moderately funny, considering Carnby was doing that suspended hundreds of feet over certain death, with a countdown timer doing what it did best, but it’s hard to laugh when you’re in a red haze and contemplating some form of violence that doesn’t involve destroying expensive hardware.

And then there’s the PC version – a control scheme so tortuous (and torturous) that there simply is no point getting all riled up. For some odd reason, we seem to have jumped 20 years into the past where one had to press the left or right key to turn the character in that direction and then press the forward or backward keys to walk. Combined with the fact that there’s no mouselook and you have to press and hold another key for running, another for turning quickly and more keys to open your inventory, select an item, throw it and press another key to enter first person mode and then shoot it in mid-air – and any sort of combat quickly turns into a death wish where Carnby ends up becoming a five-course meal to whatever it is that’s pursuing him.

Thankfully, since the game happens to be Games for Windows certified, plugging in an Xbox 360 controller automatically maps the controls to mimic the Xbox 360 version of the game. And while it still suffers from all the ignominies that plague the PC version, at least it allows players to progress through the game, which should only be a tad harder for someone already used to the restrictive, clunky schemes that are supposed to be the bread and butter of survival horror. If you can hold your own against a zombie horde in Resident Evil 4, Alone in the Dark with the Xbox 360 controller shouldn’t be all that difficult.

Level design, for the most part, is very appealing and even though the world around you appears to be open-ended and available for exploration, it really isn’t so. While you can, to the game’s credit, open any door by kicking at it, shooting the lock out or slamming a heavy object against it, there are invisible gating systems that make sure that your path stays linear and static enough so that you don’t get yourself trapped - which, unfortunately, I still managed, thanks to my itchy trigger finger. But what the game limits you to in exploration, it more than makes up for every which way possible, creating new landmarks for the genre as it goes along.

Fire, as in the original, proves to be the most crucial gameplay element and the only way to surely dispatch enemies is to burn them – whether it’s torching them with a two-by-four on fire, dragging them to the fire and chucking them in, spreading a trail of gasoline on the floor and setting it on fire as the enemies walk across or dousing your bullets in flammable liquid to create fire bullets. And that is just a fraction of what the open-ended combat allows you to do – every object in the game world is usable as a weapon, whether it’s a katana that allows you to slash an enemy to ribbons or a fire extinguisher that moonlights as an alternative to opening doors without keys. Heck, if you’re out of weapons, you can even throw rocks at and kick your way past the smaller creatures.

But nothing shines more brilliantly here than the devious puzzles that players will be forced to solve - with brilliant interplays of light and dark, most of the puzzles can give the earlier Silent Hill ones a run for their money, if not one-up them. Although the puzzles by themselves aren’t really tough, they serve well enough to make you scratch your head a few times trying to make sense of the answer that’s staring you right in the face. Which, combined with the tense platforming straight out of action-adventure games like Tomb Raider, complete with giant, swinging blades, do more than enough to ensure that you keep playing, at least for another hour. And unlike GTA IV, you actually have to hotwire the car yourself in a terse minigame, making sure you get it right the first time or risk blaring the car horn, which, in effect, is the same as a dinner gong to the creatures lurking nearby.

Unlike Gordon Freeman who can stash a billion and one weapons, ammo and other stuff into an HEV suit, poor Ed just has a simple leather jacket that can only hold a limited amount of helpful goodies, so most times making the right choice of items to carry can mean all the difference between life and death. Although there are some minor incongruities in the inventory management, most items in the world can be salvaged to create makeshift weapons - plastic bottles and gasoline siphoned from stranded vehicles become Molotov Cocktails when a wick is inserted into them; mosquito sprays and Zippo lighters becomes handy flamethrowers and double-sided sticky tape and glow sticks become a light source in the darkness.

And since reality (or an approximation thereof) is the prevailing mantra, players will have to make sure Carnby gets his regular dose of healing sprays and medicated bandages when hurt, or run the risk of bleeding out and dying. And for those used to twitch shooters, you can’t just walk over or use a fortuitously placed spray or bandage – you will actually have to tend to your wounds, spray the medication and bandage yourself up, sometimes right in the thick of a boss fight. Fortunately, the enemies aren’t too intelligent, usually preferring to just bum-rush the player instead of actually doing something clever, a fact more pronounced on the Wii version where they just loiter around, waiting for you to put them out of their misery.

Unfortunately for the player, Lady Luck (through the annoying controls) also favors the other side sometimes, thanks to the questionable collision-detection mechanism and the sometimes-dodgy Havok 4.5 physics engine which can send your car tumbling right into the welcoming arms of a fissure if you so much as hit a pebble on a ramp.

All said and done, Alone in the Dark turns out to be a mixed bag of goodies, kind of like finding razor blades along with candy on Halloween night. The real star of the game turns out to be the orchestral soundtrack, composed by Olivier Deriviere, who, along with The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices, has delivered an experience few can match, combining Japanese-ish lyrics, choirs that warble and weave feverishly, startling pitch changes and taiko drumbeats in a blissful orgasm of music. That is, for the PC and the Xbox 360 versions – the Wii version’s audio has all the appeal of venereal disease, stuttering and cutting out at every possible opportunity.

Sadly, even this cannot redeem Alone in the Dark from its firmly entrenched position set bang in the middle of mediocrity. There are lots of things the game ends up getting right and is in some ways, years ahead of its time – introducing new mechanics and milestones to the genre that will be yardsticks for all future games. Eden Games, for all their genius, were simply looking left at the intersection when the truck came barreling from the right – too focused on the clever bits to make sure whether the basic ones were working as they were supposed to. As for Hydravision and the seriously broken, unfinished Wii version – the lesser said the better, especially since the PC version also earns a couple of brickbats from us, thanks to the excessively paranoid SecuROM copy protection. Needless to say, if you’re going to install this on the PC, better make sure everything’s backed up and there’s a System Restore checkpoint in place. In the end, Alone in the Dark becomes yet another Estella of our Great Expectations – always placed on terms of familiarity, never on terms of favor.

FINAL SCORES

* Reviews carried out on final-retail PC, Xbox 360 and Wii versions. The PlayStation 3 is scheduled to launch November 2008.

Distributor: Milestone Interactive
Price: PC - INR 999 / Xbox 360 - INR 2499 / Wii - INR 2499
Formats: PC-DVD (Games for Windows) / Xbox 360 (NTSC/U/C) / Wii (NTSC)
Availability: Out Now

PC System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows XP SP2 (32- and 64-bit), Windows Vista (32- and 64-bit)
Processor: Intel Pentium D 805 2.6 GHz or Athlon X2 3800+ (Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2 GHz or higher recommended)
Memory: 1 GB under Windows XP, 2 GB under Windows Vista (2 GB recommended)
Hard Disk Space: 8.5 GB free space
DVD-ROM Drive: 4x speed or faster
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX PCI Express or ATI Radeon X1650 XT PCI Express or better or ATI Radeon X1950 AGP or better (NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS or ATI Radeon HD3850 or better recommended) with 256 MB (512 MB recommended) Must be DirectX 9.0c / Shader Model 3.0 compliant
Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c (included) or higher
Internet Connection:
An Internet connection is needed to:
• Install Alone In The Dark
• Launch Alone In The Dark for the first time
• Revoke the license when uninstalling Alone In The Dark

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By N2H

• Nikhil 'bullismasher' Singh Says:
  July 31st, 2008 at 12:53 am

  Agree with you on the crappy control scheme on the PC. I played the entire game using mouse+keyboard, and I must say that it was one of the most harrowing experience of my life! It was by far the most horrific part of the game.

  It’s really sad to see a game with so much potential go down the path of mediocrity. Wish they hadn’t messed up the control scheme =( .

  As shallow as it was, I really loved the free-roaming bit though.

• Arachnid Says:
  August 3rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm

  Oh my God! I’ve lost the will to live after playing this fucking game! The controls suck even on the 360. The driving missions are worse than performing seppuku on yourself and Carnby looks more of a bum instead of a hero! Oh GOD i hate this game. The developers were seriously on mushrooms. That were peed on by skunks. That were raped by mountain goats.

  And the fucking headcrab clones are just so lame. Bleh…