Alone in the Dark

The most memorable idea in this version of Alone in the Dark is that it is built like a television series. Eden Games split the story into episodes, and the game lets you skip back and watch a recap, or jump ahead to a later scene when a section frustrates you. It is an odd bit of structure for a horror game, and it says a lot about what the developers were chasing: pacing, cliffhangers, a sense of a story being told on screen rather than a maze being solved.

The second idea is fire. Edward Carnby wanders a Central Park and a Manhattan that are splitting open, and flames are treated as a tool and a threat both. You can burn the dark creatures and the things that infest the environment, and fire spreads across surfaces in ways that sometimes impress. The inventory is equally unusual. Carnby opens his jacket and combines items on the spot, taping a bottle of spirits to a lighter, say, and the improvised weapons feel closer to the series' old roots than to a standard action shooter.

The execution is another matter. Driving sequences are clumsy, the camera can be unhelpful, and controls feel loose, especially on the PS2, which was by then a console the project had to be squeezed onto. The version is a weaker sibling of the versions on newer hardware, with less detail and rougher performance. The game was widely criticised on release, and the complaints were not unfair: it reaches further than it can hold.

What survives is the nerve of it. Very few horror games of the period tried to organise themselves around television pacing, or let you improvise gear from a handful of everyday objects. Played today, it is a patchy, sometimes irritating thing, but it is also unmistakably the work of people trying something. A competent game would have been easier to forget.