Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark

The imagery is arresting. On top of a burning, creaking building that’s wounded beyond all hope by an unknown force, you run down crooked corridors, swing from electrical cables and inch along window ledges, hundreds of metres above New York's streets. At one point on your frantic descent part of the building gives way, dust and masonry hurtling all around as you fall through the air towards the ground below.

But while Alone in the Dark's first hour trades in 9/11 imagery, the forces behind New York's rapid disintegration are anything but ideological. Esoteric arteries appear in concrete walls, swallowing innocent bystanders and zombifying humans and animals into agents of an untold dark power. Suffering from amnesia, your character, Edward Carnby, is somehow responsible for all the destruction and it's your job to find out why and work towards setting things right.

For the first section of the game it appears as though Atari’s vision was outpaced their technical ability and development timescale. The game's visual lack of polish, awkward acting and stuttering cutscenes interrupt and harm the drama. The game switches between first and third person perspective in an in unwieldy way and the convoluted and over complex control scheme does everything it can to put players off.

The problem is that the game doesn't set out its stall early enough. To begin with, as you escape from the skyscraper it seems as if you're playing a kind of action first person shooter, firing bullets into devilish gremlin and scrambling across the rubble like a cross between Master Chief and Lara Croft. But the truth is much more interesting and only really becomes obvious further onto the game. Resource management and puzzles are the game's real forte, and working out how to progress to the next area using the tools and items at your disposal is a little like playing through a 3D, zombie Monkey Island adventure game.

Your inventory is kept in your jacket and you'll often need to combine items in order to create the tools and items you need to progress. For example, if there's a cracked wall blocking your path you might need to combine an old rag, a bottle of petrol and lighter to create a Molotov cocktail with which to clear the obstacle. The emphasis on puzzle solving becomes stronger as the game progresses and, while there's still a lot of physical combat and driving sprinkled through the adventure, it's the puzzles that keep you playing.

For players who get stuck on one of these problems the game offers a neat way out. Each of the game's chapters is divided into scenes and, of you get stuck in a scene you can simply choose to move on to the next one, like skipping to the next scene in a DVD (although you'll lose the chance to win a level completion achievement in doing so). Alone in the Dark is a game stuffed with good ideas. Very often its scope and vision outpaces itself and the game's left scrabbling to catch up, never quite delivering on its bold and impressive promise. But despite the rough edges there's a good game in here, packed with fresh ideas and compelling to the end even if it is pulled back from greatness by some untidy execution.

3 out of 5