Alone in the Dark is coming back later this year, and we recently got the chance to see how the game is shaping up. With a torch in one hand and a security blanket in the other, we crept over to Atari's London offices slightly regretting not being able to bring a sofa to hide behind.
When Alone in the Dark emerged in 1992, it brought the nascent survival horror genre into the limelight by combining the latest technology--it was one of the first games to feature true 3D characters--with intelligent puzzles, nonlinear gameplay, and a pervasive mythos that expands beyond the game itself. The 1992 classic spawned two sequels at the time (in 1994 and 1995) as well as a 2001 follow-up, but none of these had the commercial or critical success of the original. Atari is hoping that the 2008 iteration will buck this trend, as the game is going back to its roots of pushing technical boundaries, free-roaming problem solving, and tapping into the current paranoid zeitgeist.
Alone in the Dark has been built using a proprietary version of Half-Life's Havoc 4.5 engine by the studio behind the recent Test Drive Unlimited, with a script by Lorenzo Carcaterra. The veteran writer is best known for his novel Sleepers, which became a film starring Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt, and others--and is set in a version of New York that is falling apart around you.
The game opens in true survival horror fashion, with you waking up confused with no idea who you are or what's going on. Slowly the room comes into focus as you hear a conversation with references to various cultlike activities that are just coming to a head, but your vision soon blurs again--but this is corrected by simply closing your eyes. This mechanic continues for a small part of the first section as you slowly return to full consciousness, being dragged and ordered through an interior complex until you finally find a washbasin with a mirror, and start to get an idea of who you are and what's going on.
Alone in the Dark's attempts to break hardened video gaming cliches are obvious from the start. There are no inventory menus, ammo indicators, or health bars in either first- or third-person views--which you are free to switch between throughout. Your inventory is limited to what you can store in your rather capacious leather jacket, and it's accessed by looking down into it and seeing what you have stashed the various pockets and pouches sewn into the lining. Here you can not only see what items you have, but also work out how to combine them; if you've got a bottle of booze and a rag, you can make an instant Molotov cocktail, but add some tape and a box of ammo and you've got a much more powerful flying bomb.
Combining objects freely and creatively will likely be one of the game's highlights, as it isn't limited to just your inventory; you can use pretty much any object in the world that's not nailed down, from chairs and tables to fire extinguishers, rakes, and even cars. As you'd expect from the team behind Test Drive, all the cars are promised to be fully accessible. While they aren't all driveable, you can access glove boxes, boots, and even the contents of petrol tanks as well as being able to move from seat to seat and use all the doors, as you might expect from a real car. One segment we saw allowed you to steal a car, use a screwdriver to puncture the fuel tank, and then drive it until you choose to stop--at which point you can run away, light the handy trail of fuel left by the car, and sit back and watch the fireworks--at least until the fuel is exhausted. If you happen to have an empty bottle on you, you can even steal some of the free-flowing fuel to use later.
It's not just cars and petrol you can set on fire, either; everything in the game that looks like it should burn, will. This is particularly useful in darkened interior segments where light is at a premium and you are faced with photophobic enemies, and it becomes essential if you happen to have forgotten to pick up some new batteries for your flashlight. One neat example of this was being able to smash a wooden table using a fire extinguisher, pick up one of the table's legs--with a healthy section of tabletop still attached--and then set it on fire to act as an impromptu flaming torch. This not only served to scare off one of the game's more sinister enemies (who took the form of a shadow creeping across the floor), but also acts as a weapon if swung at speed, as well as a method for spreading fire into other areas easily. If you're feeling particularly creative, it is possible to kill the shambling zombies in this segment by first spraying them with fuel, then hitting them with your flaming table leg, resulting in a satisfying burst of flames over the area the fuel was sprayed, followed by the rest of the creature going up in smoke.
Once you pick up an object its movement is controlled via the analog sticks, so you can just as easily warily hold the torch out in front of you to light your way as you can rapidly swing it round. This control method is needed for the game's various challenges; one of the first we encountered required us to use a crowbar--one that had just been used to bludgeon a most unpleasant-looking creature to death--to slowly and carefully pick up a dangling electrical cable from a pool of water and drape it over a nearby barricade. Even at this early stage, the controls looked to be both intuitive and responsive.
The downside of having items that can be easily picked up in this manner is that enemies can knock them out of your hands. Take a heavy blow when swinging at an enemy and you're likely to lose grip with at least one of your hands; take another and you may see your weapon flying into the distance.
Problems you face don't just take the form of shadows, shambling zombies, and electrified pools of water, however. While most doors don't present a problem, as locks can be shot out and most heavy objects make effective battering rams, some security doors might. One we saw had a classic numerical keypad on for access, but three numbers were helpfully bloodied by the last person to get through. If working out the combination from those is too much for you, it's possible to just smash up the control pad and short-circuit the locking mechanism--once the wires are exposed the game goes into a first-person, close-up view of your hands holding some bared wires. The analog sticks are then used to select the various coloured wires and push them together as you search for the correct pair to short the device.
The game also features fast-paced action sequences. One we saw involved jumping into an instantly recognisable New York yellow taxi and driving it through the streets of New York as the buildings fall apart around you, segments of the road blow up, and other cars cartwheel over you as they get caught in explosions and hit by falling rubble. Another segment we saw involved rapelling up the wall of a chasm that's opened up, with your rope being attached to a freshly crashed helicopter. Rappelling up will involve swinging to dodge falling rubble, adjusting your position as the helicopter shifts position among the rubble above, and leaping clear before the structures holding it in place finally give way.
Driving through Central Park--the game's main location--provides its fair share of thrills too, as enemies will leap onto your car as you drive and attack you through the car's windows, given half the chance. (But if you slam into a tree you'll see them regret not paying more attention to just holding on.) The park has been faithfully re-created lake-for-lake and folly-for-folly, based on the most up-to-date satellite mapping, and it will be totally open for exploration in-game. Doing this thoroughly is likely to add five hours or so to the game's promised 10-hour running time, with plenty there to flesh out the story and reward the determined player, as well as objectives tied into the main storyline.
The atmosphere throughout the game will be enhanced by orchestral and choral music, all of which has been written and performed exclusively for the game. The vocals, provided by a professional Bulgarian choir, range from being haunting in creepy segments to flat-out terrifying as the game's tempo goes up and the score moves toward operatic madness.
Much has been made of the game's episodic format; Alone in the Dark is being promised to be a fairly TV-like experience as a whole. It is split up into eight episodes, all of which will have video recaps, so after not playing for a while, you will get a Lost-esque "Previously on Alone in the Dark" segment recapping the contents of the previous episode. If you're having trouble with certain segments it will be possible to just skip them, but at a price: You'll miss out on nonessential storyline elements, achievement points, and other bonus material. But it does mean that anyone who wants to will be able to get to the end of the game, without the need for endless replaying of particular segments you may not be enjoying.
Overall, Alone in the Dark is shaping up to be a solid survival action title that will not only provide a fair few rushes of adrenaline, but also yelps of fear and some chances for creative thinking, both in terms of destruction and problem solving. We are assured that the beta build is very, very nearly ready, and we expect to get some hands-on time with the game well before the game's release at the end of May.