If Eden and Atari had given us absolutely no sense of what Alone In The
Dark (2008) was going to be, it would have been the greatest surprise
hit of 2008. These days developers are being hoist on their own petard
(aka: blow'd up) by their own desire to promote the work they're doing
for a return on the enormous budgets involved. It's practically as
though the ratio of hype-to-hands on enjoyment involves a penalty: the
"but you pwomised us!!!" mentality. It's a problem, but it's not up to
us consumers to solve it or be nice, it's the frakking marketing
department's problem to not sell us a bridge while only giving the
developers time to build a hammock.
What's wrong with Alone In The Dark? Let's break it down into the common complaints:
Swearing - non-issue. GTA4 and Big Lebowski are far "worse". I'm
swearing more than the characters do while immersing myself into this
world. It's freaky.
Clipping - yes, this is a lack of playtesting time. Getting stuck in
the geometry or behind a one-way barricade and having to reload your
game is not acceptable.
Control - if you bother to look at the 360 instruction manual, you'll
see that there are *4* pages devoted to controls. This is not a
GameCube game or a dual-joystick shooter. But complexity is not a bad
thing, and I feel the variety of things you can do is more interesting
and less frustrating than the limits seen in the original Resident
Evil. I'm really interested to see how it plays on the Wii.
I think most people expected Resident Evil 4 1/2, and that's not where
Eden's at. It took Capcom 10 years to get there. I think AITD is more
on par with RE3, and I really believe they have refreshed AITD and the
survival genre overall with solid modern innovations.
And now, what be rumblin' right (the innovations):
Fire - Hell yes. AITD does for fire what Bioshock did for water. The
only thing where the fire animations fall short is in the lighter
flame. Lighters don't look like that.
Combat - Fire Bullets FTW. I find it terribly ironic that hell beasts
would be only vulnerable to fire, but whatevs. Being a gun-toting
grenadier that also chops people's limbs off with medieval armaments is
something more games should crib.
Inventory - real time & physically limited inventories are aces in
my book. Carnby doesn't have Adventurer's Pants, he's a Unabomber.
The music's great. The graphics are jim dandy, though I wish Carnby
looked more like the guy on the box art (younger); but bad hair and
plastic skin isn't anything new in a video game. (Less hair budget,
more fire budget. Okay.)
Finally the cinematic element: the chapter navigation is genius. There
are many many reasons not to skip ahead, but presenting that option to
be accessible and varied is absolutely the right choice, especially in
this genre. This turns the notion of difficulty into challenge, and
lets the player decide what the best outcome and the best method to
achieve that is.
