Resurrecting a flagging or dead franchise is a risky endeavor. Sometimes it works and the series becomes relevant again, like with Resident Evil 4. Other times it is the nail in the coffin, like last year’s Tony Hawk’s Horse Beating Simulator. Re-envisioning Alone in the Dark should not have been that hard; there were almost no expectations of quality. I know that the first Alone in the Dark predates Resident Evil 1 and that it pretty much invented survival horror, but it has been almost seven years since The New Nightmare. It doesn’t help that the last time anyone even heard the name Alone on the Dark, it was as an Uwe Boll movie. All this game had to be was average, just to remind people that the series exists without offending them. Instead, it keeps none of its promises, lives up to none of its decidedly limited potential, and is likely the last time anyone will ever hear of the series.

Like its titular and unseen antagonist, Alone in the Dark is the virtual father of lies. There are good ideas here; fresh, new ideas that in a better game would have been noted for their potential and stolen later. For example, inventory space is at a premium; there is no magic backpack to hold every item in the game all at once. Storage is limited to what can fit in the players jacket, but this is where it loses all credibility: the jacket can hold four wine bottles, a gun, a flashlight, several boxes of ammo, a lighter, bandages, batteries and a quest item that cannot be dropped. It was a good idea, but implemented in a way that was frankly silly - the portable hole backpack was replaced by a clown car coat.

Even Alone in the Dark’s best idea serves only to focus the player on the game’s other glaring problems. I understand that not everyone has several hours a night to spend on a game. I admit that not everyone is either patient or stubborn enough to force through a game just to see how it ends, and Alone in the Dark tries to remedy this. Most chapters and sections can simply be skipped via the DVD like pause menu. A few of the last sections are not available right away, but can be unlocked relatively quickly. It sounds like a good idea - a concession to the casual gamer - but in reality it is nothing more then a stopgap solution to the game being at best unevenly paced and at worst just unplayable in places. If every level was worth playing, or at the very least relevant to the story in some way, there would be no reason to skip it. Giving me the option to jump to the end of a $60 game because I don’t have the time to play it (or because I can’t get past something) does not replace making the whole $60 game worth playing. I find it insulting that instead of fixing problems, the game simply gives me the option to skip them. If I skipped every problem, I would have been done in a half an hour.

Apart from these new and wasted ideas, there is very little good to talk about. Of course the game controls poorly, it’s survival horror on the level of Resident Evil and Silent Hill, games that controlled just as poorly two hardware generations ago and have since made a successful effort to improve themselves. At least they had the common sense not to force the player into a car for extended periods of time. Alone in the Dark features scripted chase sequences that border on Stuntman difficulty without including any sort of checkpoints. Each is an exercise of trial and error, except sometimes the error is not even the player’s fault. Example: the first chase ends in a building that has no apparent exits. The first time I got there, I followed along with what I thought made sense and crashed my taxi through a widow, only to clip through the building and fall into nothing. After twenty minutes of trying new things I realized that my first idea was right, but that the rest of the level hadn’t loaded before I plummeted to my death. I had to break the window, then hit the breaks and wait for the game to catch up. This was not good sign.

I am at a loss as to what happened with Alone in the Dark. It takes new ideas and breaks them, manages to get even the most established clichés wrong, and is buggy and unfinished to boot. There is nothing to salvage here. Even the end, a face to face confrontation with Satan himself, is boring. How do you make an encounter with the prince of darkness boring and uneventful? Alone in the Dark should not have been released; not even more development time, the supposed panacea for bad games, would have saved it. It would have been a better idea to take what good ideas it had and give them to more talented people while scrapping the rest. All this game did was make an Uwe Boll movie look good by comparison, and I didn’t think that was even a possibility.

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