Ben Croshaw reviews Alone in the Dark.Ben Croshaw reviews Alone in the Dark.Ben Croshaw reviews Alone in the Dark.
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Yahtzee: Ordinarily at this point I'd say that overambition has once again shot the kneecaps off a production as The Adventures of Edward Carnby, Serial Arsonist attempts to incorporate combat, driving, puzzles, plus Prince of Persia platforming, perplexingly. But I genuinely think that it could have pulled them all off. There was potential for true greatness here that just a little more polish could have brought out, if they hadn't booted it out the door before it could even brush its teeth. Combat would have been tolerable if the camera had been a team player. Driving would have worked if they'd tightened up the severely broken physics engine, which at one point caused my car to go flying into the skybox after driving too fast over a piece of paper. And I'm not even exaggerating when I say that the fire physics are the best in the entire history of gaming. Seriously! Lean to close to the screen and you're in danger of losing your eyebrows. It could have made a good game fantastic. As it stands, it just makes a bad game pretentious. As a series, Alone in the Dark has always been about subtle, claustrophobic horror, as is sort of implied by the name. Now it makes no sense, because you're not alone, and it's not even dark, because everything's on fire. I knew Atari were idiots when they let Uwe Boll make a godawful action movie out of the franchise, but I never thought that they were big enough idiots to use that film as inspiration. They've clearly been regarding Grand Theft Auto with envious eyes, hence the sandbox Central Park driving aspect, which the linear story renders needless until they make you go hunting around looking for the spots where Satan's infernal willies extrude from the ground and then set his pubes alight. The final straw came when I spent an hour driving laboriously around the park taking care of them all, and then after a brief puzzle sequence thirty more popped up and the game told me I had to take care of them, too. "No." I replied, "No, I do not. I reject your stupid, fucking, arbitrary, gameplay-lengthening World of Warcraft grind quests, and I'm sick of putting up with your bullshit! I know you provide the option to skip to the next chapter, but I'm not going to use it. I've had enough. If someone serves you a dead dog for lunch, you do not stick around for the pudding." I suppose I should have realized something was up when I saw that the chapter skipping feature was proudly touted on the back of the box. So not only did the developers think that not having to play the game was a point in its favor, but there were apparently so few other selling points worth mentioning that they put it in the marketing blurb. So to summarize Alone in the Dark in a pithy newspaper headline sort of way: "Glimpses of Brilliance Buried in Clipping Issues and Spunk."
- ConnectionsFeatures Alone in the Dark (2008)
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- Runtime5 minutes