Alone in the Dark (2008) Critic Reviews

Ambitious but inconsistent, frustrating but entertaining. Still an innovative adventure.

A third-person action-adventure with the beating black heart of a survival horror, Alone in the Dark is a game that needs to be experienced by everybody. Its novel approach of applying shocks into an episodic structure, eight hourly segments in all, is a masterstroke.

Alone in the Dark proves that with a little time and patience, a good game can be created from innovative ideas.

There's quite a lot to enjoy in this game. In most aspects, it stays true to the traditions of the genre, provided you can stomach the unnecessarily lengthy prologue and the aforementioned drawbacks (bad camera, lousy voiceovers, atrocious vehicle physics and so on).

As much as Alone In The Dark deserves to be criticised for its problems, it equally deserves to be lavished with praise for some outstanding ideas and set-pieces. A gracious failure, AITD should stand as a lesson for other developers to see what they should be striving for.

Edward’s trip to the park is no picnic, but suffer through the controls and some aggravation and you’ll be compensated with a lot of unique moments. The game needed more gestation to really iron out the interface issues, but it remains an adventure worth pursuing.

You want to love it, but it just keeps letting you down, and in the end that's the impression that sticks to the wall and stays there.

Sure, its plot is hugely contrived, it’s occasionally frustrating and really lacking in the kind of polish we expect from big-name games in this day and age. However, it’s also undoubtedly one of the most imaginative, ambitious and exciting titles to hit a console in the last few years.

Whilst not as executed quite to the level we'd hoped for, Alone in the Dark remains an original take on the survival horror genre, with its DVD-style structure and environmental interaction worthy of praise.

Difficult and overly complicated control system.

The breadth of Eden’s ambitions may have meant that there’s barely a feature that’s implemented more than satisfactorily, but there’s a generosity of vision here that few games can boast.

A mix of revolutionary ideas and clumsy execution, Alone in the Dark is like a giant with clay feet. The way it marries new concepts with an old fashion control scheme of the character, not to mention some technical flaws, leaves us with a game that is frequently frustrating and only sometimes brilliant.

The monsters hunt Edward and one idea hunts the other. This game is not perfect but you definitely won’t get bored with it!

The controls are downright terrible in some instances.

Atari's Alone in the Dark is so busy being experimental -- giving players the tools and rules to solve problems on their own -- that it neglects the alluring experientialism of earlier titles in the series, which set a tone and pace that sparked the survival-horror genre off years before "Resident Evil" hit the scene.

Alone in the Dark has enough innovations to warrant being experienced by most gamers, but is crippled by poor design at the most basic levels.

Alone in the Dark is a good game, which falls short of being great based on the severe lack of polish.

If you can endure some vexing technical flaws, Alone in the Dark can be a clever, satisfying adventure.

Alone in the Dark can be applauded for its innovation, but it cannot be saved from its dysfunction. Had Eden Games added polish, or dare I say it, play-tested the game, it could have been a welcome addition for survival horror fans.

Alone in the Dark clearly had the potential to be something nearer to a nine, or at the very least an eight, but it just didn’t turn out that way. It’s a curio though, and maybe worth picking up if it ever gets released at a more budget price.