I read a lot of shit people were throwing at this game. I was even more surprised after this game actually launched without issues on my modern machine. Is it garbage though?

Yeah, lol. Roll the credits. Short version - we have an interesting concept abandoned halfway by developers.

Well, first thing first. I don't have any issue whatsoever with how this game controls. I played through whole game in first person perspective and everything was fine.

But the dirt hides in all other aspects of the game. You have hundred of ways to kill an enemy but use maximum of three: spray flamethrower, shoot flame bullets or throw and shoot bottle with gasoline. Why? Because game bombards you with supplies. Not a single time you have to manage resources or drag unconscious enemy into the fire. Looks like developers created a complex system and didn't know how to balance it and just gave up.

Actually same goes for plot. You have no idea what is going on or why Carnby does what he does. Ending feels either absolutely pointless or as a prologue for next part which never came. Sprinkle some roots of evil spread out throughout the map and you have 2-3 hours of just driving from point to point throwing molotovs at growling meat plants just to continue the story. Again feels like devs thought of a general idea of what they wanted but gave up halfway chiseling it out. And yeah, I burned all of the roots. And I regret it.

Just for your information, you can cheese evil hungry man-eating water with zippo. Wish I knew it earlier than my last encounter with it.

And punch everyone who tells you "Nyeh, this shit game disrespects and disgraces all legacy left out by its predecessors!". Alone in the Dark 2 and 3 was as bad as it could be. There was no legacy to disgrace. Fucking ghost cowboys for fuck's sake. Come on.

This is a game I sincerely did not want to hate despite being a frustrating mess. Alone in the Dark 2008 is a game made of so many interesting and neat ideas but executed in the worst ways possible. It’s a smorgasbord of different gameplay designs that potentially could had been good, great even if there was a more cohesive direction, time and budget.

Just from the opening hours, it tries its best to be bombastic and cinematic, showing off multiple gameplay elements that showcases some advanced technologies that other games were still trying to figure out and integrate at the time. Physics puzzles and complex actions, alongside larger than life scenarios that predates more successful attempts a year later like Uncharted 2.

It’s genuinely neat to see how the various mechanics actually play an important role in progressing through the game, such as setting objects on fire and breaking down doors, where even just the straight up logic of shooting something and breaking it open works. I actually got stuck more times than not because I was thinking of it as a more conventional video game with more abstract logic, and not the straightforward idea of just letting physics and blunt force get me through a path. Even with its more fantastical leaning puzzles, there’s a clever idea behind it all. It’s a shame that all of it is wrapped around with some of the most tedious controls and unreliable inputs that make it a bigger effort than it should be. Various sections I had to repeat constantly or had to do something weirdly specific just so that the game registers it. It’s always a mixed feeling of getting very frustrated followed by a thought of how cool it would have been if it was actually done well.

The game’s combat suffers a similar way in that it does try to make you use the game’s environments and give you various tools to achieve your goal, but again, are all made to be more tedious than intended due to how broken and irresponsive the controls are. There’s even the neat idea of making things diegetic with your inventory being an actual physical jacket with all your items attached, but is ultimately frustrating as it all happens in real time and the game can’t decide between a fast-paced action game and a more methodical survival horror.

The open world portion is mostly unnecessary and probably is one of the major things that hurt the game more than it helps. There’s also the arbitrary padding of making you go through burning 50 out of a 100 ‘evil roots’ scattered across the map, which feels like a proto-version of the ubiquitous Ubisoft-styled towers we see often in most open world games today. But I admire how much it did try to tie in with the game’s core gameplay loop of survival horror and puzzle solving, such as having to use a big truck to make a ramp out of a broken road. Again, all of these things aren’t exactly executed well, but the ideas on paper are so neat that it really made me wish all of these were incorporated into a better game.

There are a couple of genuinely fantastic elements the game has. For one the soundtrack is great, elevating various scenes and making them feel better than they really are, and the protagonist Edward Carnby himself. I can’t tell if he’s meant to be self-aware and campy or unintentionally hilarious, but it’s all the better for it. It’s also just a shame that the story also ends in the wettest of farts, regardless of the two endings you choose.

Despite the frustrating experience, I do have to appreciate the game’s features such as having multiple chapters selects that takes you to various points in the game. I shouldn’t have to want or need to skip through frustrating sections, but the fact they’re there is at least also an unintentional convenience that makes the messy experience more tolerable.

Alone in the Dark isn't a good game, but it is an interesting one that has shown a lot of potential. It was weirdly ahead of its time, with some of its elements being better executed by games that came out relatively soon after. Beyond that, also a fair number of unique ideas that no other game have tried, for better or worse.

One final FACT to ponder, if you are curious enough into playing this yourself, make the experience a lot less miserable preferably if you got some friends to tag along for the ride.

I didn’t play this alone, and fuck you anyway!

(Review originally written in 2010)

Alone in the Dark is so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.

In the beginning there was a great series: Alone in the Dark was the game that inspired all the survival horror games that ever existed. Then, after years of slumber, someone decided to revive the franchise and produce a cinematic sequel, inspired by blockbuster disaster movies like cloverfield. The result is a spectacular and flashy romp, but the underlying game falls apart as soon as you take control of the character.

The camera is atrocious: you can't freely rotate it and sometimes it will refuse to tilt up and down, so you won't be able to study your surroundings. You can toggle a first person view, but it's so slow and clunky it's a pain to use. The character handles like a broken tank, in the attempt to copycat Resident Evil 4's control scheme, they created a mess, where you will often move in the opposite direction than expected. The combat is dreadful: there's more action in children playing tag than in the broken lock on fighting mechanic, where you have to pick up objects and awkwardly swing them to hit your enemies. It's slow, it's unsatisfying and you can't counter enemy attacks, so it's pointless.

The game also features half baked Prince of Persia climbing sections, but they are so poorly executed they require a huge amount of trial and error to traverse them.
Finally, the driving section, the rotten cherry on this huge crap cake: you have to speed through a crumbling New York, dodging traffic and falling buildings to reach central park, while chased by a big crack acting as a time limit. Unfortunately this section is so broken it's just unplayable: the road will break at random, causing your car to get stuck everywhere and to flip 50 feet in the air for no reason, also, mess up once and you have to start over.

That's all I could push myself to playing, I don't know if the game gets better later on and I don't care: the first hour was so painful I can't just wait for the store to open tomorrow to return this game.

It's so awful it puts its prequels to shame and so bad even the Uwe Boll movie can't compare.

EDIT: about one year after returning this game I have borrowed a copy of it and played it in its entirety, and my conclusion is the following: it was very ambitious but they had no idea of how to make it all work together. The result is still a disaster.

I was so excited for Alone in the Dark for such a long time that I never thought it would be an (almost) bad game. I don’t want to rag on this game since the developers did try really hard, so as a courtesy I’m going to start with the positives. The first thing you’ll notice are the visuals; they are amazing. The graphics have high res textures, amazing lighting effects, creepy fog, and it’s all very dark and surreal. You’ll be playing as John Carnby who is trying to find out the secrets of Central Park while trying to stop Lucifer from taking over the world through “The Path of Light”.

At the beginning of the game, everything is very cinematic and pretty fun. The game walks you through the “mixing system” where you look in your jacket and mix tons of things together at your will. If you want a Molotov cocktail stick a handkerchief in a glass or plastic bottle, light it with a lighter and BOOM! Hey, you want it to stick to solve a puzzle? Add some sticky tape and you’re good to go. Need to light your way through a dark tunnel but need it landed in one precise area without it bouncing? Add some tape to that, or you just take an explosive bottle and shoot it in mid-air…don’t worry John keeps track of the bottle in slow motion it’s just your job to time the shot.


There are also environmental weapons such as setting 4x4s on fire and lighting enemies up with them, use them to light your path, take fire extinguishers to put out the fire, or you can use them as battering rams to take down doors. While the combination system is really fun it does have its limits, but we’ll get to the downsides later. The next thing you’ll come across will be the combat and there are more downs than ups to this. The one good part is you can use anything at your disposal. While you can only kill the demons (they are pretty damn creepy) with fire there are multiple ways to do this. Have a health spray, or any type or aerosol? Use your lighter for a mini flamethrower.

Another great aspect of the game is everything is seen visually. There are no meters or bars anywhere, so your health is indicated by wounds on John’s body. Bleed too much and you get a timer to find some bandages fast. There are also car scenes, and Central Park is kind of a much Grand Theft Auto type map where you can get in and out of random cars to kill “evil roots” which are a huge pain in you know what to find, but more on that later. What’s really cool is that if there are no keys you can hotwire the car to start it by matching colored wires, so this gives the game a more of an “I gotta hurry and get the hell out of here” type feeling. While these are the main elements of the game there are just way too many downsides.


The physics in the game are busted so everything is either really floaty, really heavy, or just plain wonky looking. Nothing really moves around right in the game and this really sucks since a lot of the game is built around physics. When it comes to combat the game just wants to hate you. While there are very little supplies in the game, to begin with, it’s so hard to kill 8 demons when you only have one spray can. While you can only kill with fire is really dumb since you have a gun, but it won’t kill them unless you pour gasoline on the bullets. I found this really stupid and when you try to kill the evil roots near the end of the game you will go mad trying to use the little supplies you have for the root, yet trying to fend off the demons.

The controls are just really wonky and don’t really work. In the third person, you can only move with the left stick and you swing things around with the right, but the movement is just really limited. This really sucks when an enemy is behind you and you have to fiddle with the left stick to get John to turn around. The driving is also another pain since the physics really suck. You’ll be stuck on the slightest slope or little rock and your car will go flying. Demons can come to rip you or of your car…or rip the car off you and it’s really hard to shake them off. Thanks to the crappy physics you just slightly bump something they go flying off yet they can jump 400 feet.


The controls just feel stiff and sluggish and they aren’t very responsive sometimes, so this makes everything overall harder than it should be. At least the last positive is the voice acting is good, the story is great, and the DVD type skips feature really helps. I can’t recommend this game unless you feel like struggling through this annoying game. It’s worth playing for the visuals, story, and great gameplay ideas, but you’ll struggle more than a smile.

Story: ★★½

It was ambitious in every way bringing an OG in the genre to a new generation with mechanics aimed to make the player think and strategize in a true challenge in survival horror.

However, it falls beneath the cracks of a poorly optimized foundation littered in technical issues that create a less than enjoyable experience.

Truly disappointing.

This game is like, peak kusoge. There are so many systems in this game, so much ambition, and all of it is terrible. Made at the peak of the Havok Physics Engine revolution of the 360 generation, everything in this game flops around and waggles. A horror game that completely fails to be scary at any point, it is a genuinely hilarious romp to go through right up until the final Episode of the game, where the game demands you arbitrarily burn down 50 tree roots before you're allowed to do the final chapter.

"I Don't Have Your Stone, and Fuck You Anyway" - Edward Carnby