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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, Alone in the Dark (5) is an incoherent mess of a game which tries to do too many things at once, fails at all of them, has an utterly unusable control scheme, an incoherent plot, and despite a few vague hints of potential, really isn't worth anyone's time.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: It's possible to end up clipping your flashlight to your shoulder and picking up a large object if you attempt to shut it off, as the same button is used to toggle it and grab things. Every other gripe on people's lists is totally baseless. Giving the game the exact same title as the first game in the series is rather annoying too I suppose.
Why I Like It Anyway: You might have noticed from the above lists of potential issues with Alone in the Dark 5 that it seems like I didn't even play the same game as any given reviewer out there. It would be possible for this to be the case actually, as Alone in the Dark 5 is available on a fair number of platforms, half of which (PS2, Wii) received ports handled by a go-between that apparently took a frightening degree of artistic license. As it stands, the majority of these scathing reviews (and the following wad of glowing praise) are all based on the Xbox 360 incarnation of the game. The true cause of our massive discrepancy here is that those who have been savaging the game were expecting it to be something it is not.
In February's discussion of Wild ARMs a fair deal of time was spent explaining a phenomenon wherein the target audience for mainstream console RPGs has shifted from the original fans of the genre to a new, larger group of people who quite frankly hate most of the things the original audience looks for. It would seem we are dealing with a similar split in the Survival Horror genre now.
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The roots of this relatively young genre are deeply in the camp of graphic adventure games. The essential premise of most such games is that one is running around solving various puzzles to proceed, with the added pressure of monsters and other things that will kill you if you stand around thinking too much, and usually a scarcity of vital resources to ensure a certain degree of tension and strategic planning. Recently though, every flagship survival horror franchise has been cutting back on the puzzles (or removing them entirely) while focusing on more action. Meanwhile, the FPS genre has been taking more and more cues from the Survival Horror scene, adopting similar visual styles resource rationing, and general horror theme. While this has lead to to some really excellent games, it has also brought us to a point where a lot of people see "survival horror" and read it as "blowing away zombies in dark cramped tunnels with really visceral flashlight-lit gore." Such people are really not going to find what they want here, this is a game for the oldschool crowd (if you can even use the term for such a young genre).
To begin with, let's talk combat. Late in the game we have a couple of proper boss fights, as well as a couple of big sprawling fight scenes made mandatory by freaked out civilians not wanting to help you to their location until the coast is clear. In by these cases, when I say "a couple" I literally mean two. Aside from these four instances, and some introductory encounters with new sorts of enemies for the purpose of illustrating how they can be dealt with, and the arguable exception of some of the more interesting puzzles, there is never any actual need to fight anything (although it does, of course, make life much easier often enough). To put this into perspective, the game is divided into 8 episodes. The first of which does not contain any sort of combat at all (but still includes plenty of potential for death by other means).
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Then there's the way in which you end up having to fight when it does come up. Early in the game, you find a handgun which proceeds to become one of the most useful items in the game, but aside from the most pathetic creatures in the game (the ones which generally serve more as an annoyance, or hazard when climbing on ropes), it can't be directly used to kill anything. All sorts of actual proper monsters can only be killed with fire. Any sort of more traditional weaponry, a length of pipe for instance, can be used to smack monsters around, or even knock them unconscious for a minute or so (hopefully enough time to drop your weapon and drag them over to a nearby open flame). On the other hand, just about everything can be instantly killed with the swing of a makeshift torch, a quick puff from an aerosol can and lighter combo, dousing them in kerosene and lighting up the trail, the detonation of a makeshift explosive device, etc. etc. The catch of course being that they have a surprisingly well-developed sense of self-preservation, and will change their tactics accordingly.
To elaborate on this somewhat, the first time I played through that first large scale fight, I had a rather nasty time of it. If I were to throw a molotov cocktail, the monsters would scatter. A pistol full of gasoline soaked bullets had them shifting around constantly, making it nigh-impossible to target the small weak points required for that to actually be a valid tactic. Set a chair on fire to use as a makeshift torch? They'd back away and attempt to knock it from my hands. Eventually I had to resort to snatching up a sword (this sequence happening in a museum), using that to knock each one down in turn, then quickly pulling out some proper weaponry to burn them as they stood. Replaying through this sequence later, I had the presence of mind to bring along a large propane tank with an attached hose. Everyone ran right up while I was swinging it as a clumsy club, but as soon as I managed to light off the steady stream of gas and turn it into an impromptu flame thrower, they all stopped dead in their tracks, and started running away and even climbing right up the walls trying to get away. Quite the satisfying means of totally circumventing the first of the game's two straight-up fights that.
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Again though, combat is not at all the primary focus of the game. This is, at its core, an adventure game. The various items I've mentioned as possible means of lighting up monsters are also used to solve various puzzles. Particularly the gun. It's primarily a tool used to break things or create sparks far away from you (undoing the hooks supporting a power cable you need to reach for instance, or setting off a home-made bomb mid-throw). And I suppose this is a good place to segue into the inventory system here.
You spend the whole game wearing a jacket, it has a good 11 pockets inside (counting your belt), 4 of which eventually end up holding items you're more or less never going to put down for the rest of the game once you find them. The rest you can fill with various things you find lying around, giving us a nice tangible inventory, instead of the assumption we have our own personal pocket dimension. Unlike most such games, which have a large number of items with exactly one use, here we have a very small set of items. How small? Gun, flashlight, lighter, sharp things, ammo, double-sided tape, bandages, tissues, portable light sources like glow-sticks, blood transfusion packets, aerosol cans- particularly first aid sprays, glass and plastic bottles that can be filled with various fluids, but usually end up filled with flammable liquid). That's it. There's a few other things scattered around, but they're large bulky objects you can't take with you for very long (like the propane tank above), and general aren't directly connected to puzzles unless you consider using a fire extinguisher to put a fire out to be puzzle solving. Aside from one special key-type item, that's everything you're going to pick up over the course of the game, and generally speaking, all these things can be found strewn all over the game, allowing you to find replacements at more or less any time you may require them if you look around a bit. How does one design puzzles around such a limited inventory? You build a really nice physics engine (particularly with regards to how it handles flames and liquid), you implement some really clever design, and you let the player pull off some really clever things.
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For example. I have to get to somewhere real far away. I wander around until I find an abandoned car (they're surprisingly common). Maybe the door's locked. If so, I look around, find a tree branch or other large blunt object, smash the window open with it. I get in. I can climb all over, into the passenger seat, the back seats, I can turn on the ceiling light, rifle through the glove compartment (oh hey, here's a bottle of water and some tape). Are the keys in the ignition? No, of course not, door was locked on this one. So odds are they aren't stashed in the sun visor either but otherwise it's a possibility. No problem. I'll just have to pull open the fuse box and hotwire it (which I do by experimentally shorting out circuits with fun two-joystick controls). Off I go. OK, here's a big evil root halfway up a cliff I'm going to need to burn somehow. Hmm... I can't climb up there. Let's see, I'll just dump out this water, use a screwdriver to puncture the gas tank of my car, refill the bottle with gas, wrap some tape around it, stuff one of my bandages in there, light it up, and throw it up there. If I didn't have any tape or bandages in this scenario, the control scheme makes it remarkably easy for me to skip the wick and shoot it out of the air at any given point in the slow-mo arc from when I threw it. If there was a decent ramp, I could have gotten the car going, bailed out, and shot the gas tank. If there wasn't a clear line of sight, I could cut a hole in my bottle, tape it to the back of a small critter then light off the trail it leaves.
This leads to some shockingly clever and organic puzzles at times. The number of puzzles in the game which really jump out and say "I am a puzzle you must solve to proceed!" can be counted on one hand, and at that only one (involving an improvised pulley as something of an early game tutorial) feels particularly artificial. In fact, early in the game one could potentially become stuck for a moment at how realistic things can be. I personally recall being at a loss at one point as to how to get through a blocked off hallway, applying game logic to try and find an alternate route, or a grate to crawl through, possibly a trigger to open a door. The solution turned out to just be, set fire to the obstruction, wait for it to burn itself out, cross over the resulting pile of burnt wooden debris.
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Here's the really impressive thing though about Alone in the Dark (5) though. A shockingly high percentage of the game (let's go with 50-75% depending how you want to count the big open sprawl of semi-optional content near the end) is comprised of elaborate set-piece sequences, which don't involve any changes to the standard control scheme, pre-rendering, or any other sort of cheats. There is a particularly memorable scene where you finally escape from the extremely unstable building the first sizable hunk of the game takes place in by car. At this point, the entire city starts tearing apart, with huge cracks and waves of rubble rushing down the streets you're trying to drive down. In any other game, this sort of thing would be a cutscene, or a Quick Time Event sort of appeal, or at best, a timed driving sequence where all the destruction is strictly restricted to the parts of the area you can't actually enter. Here, this is all powered by the physics engine, and triggered off timers. If you stop to gawk, the special effects will indeed catch up with you and bang you up if not outright kill you. It's the sort of thing which is honestly much more impressive to see when you fail than when you succeed, and there are several such set pieces scattered throughout the game.
So. We have a thinking man's survival horror game here, borrowing some of the better elements from Half-Life 2, Grand Theft Auto, Prince of Persia (there's a surprising amount of wall-climbing and rope-swinging). Is it perfect? No. The controls, while quite nice once you're used to them have something of a learning curve to them, and the occasional minor bug might pop up (no more so than in any of the three games I'm comparing it to here though). If, as a whole, the game holds no appeal for you, as seems to be the case with many a reviewer, it's not the fault of bad game design, you've simply stumbled into the wrong genre. Oh, and here's an odd little extra feature. Essentially scene in the game which proves too frustrating can be skipped past. I ever felt the urge to use it, but I can think of quite a few other games that could benefit from such a system.
