This is probably the best mediocre game I can recall playing. While I enjoyed this game personally, it is going to be tough to recommend it to everyone especially at a steep price tag of $60. The game is plagued by technical issues, poor combat, and inconsistent collision. The high points are the story, which kept me intrigued the whole way through, and the puzzles, which range from relatively easy to brute force to requiring thinking outside of the box. There are a lot of options to tweak difficulty outside of combat so that the game gives you less hints, which I appreciate. This indirectly affects puzzle difficulty although the puzzles themselves are unchanged.

Technical issues: these almost prevented me from continuing to play the game. There are major issues with both traversal and shader cache stutters. There is no shader pre-compilation stage. Because of this, it is very hard to gauge how well the game is performing on your PC so you can tweak settings. Something is strange with the performance in general as well, which was made evident to me when I found that turning motion blur onto the highest setting actually helped the game to appear much smoother than with it off, and that was running at 60 FPS. Usually I find the opposite true for games. It's worth noting that the prologue demo didn't actually have the option to turn off the motion blur, so perhaps there is some underlying problem with the code change that the developers didn't expect. I also was annoyed that the game didn't hide the mouse at all times if you were using a controller. It would frequently reappear in the middle of the screen when certain game elements popped up even if I had already moved it away.

Combat: The best way for me to explain how bad the combat was is to say that I changed the game's difficulty down from Normal to Easy because I wanted to spend as little time possible with it. The hitboxes on enemies seem very inconsistent, as well as the geometry collision, then you add lengthy unactionable animations to that and you run into plenty of situations where you get stuck and just have to take damage after an enemy who you couldn't shoot locks you into a corner. So many times I felt like I was lucky that I didn't die, but there were a few times even on Easy difficulty that an enemy appeared from around a corner and locked me into a spot where I couldn't do anything. Throughout the game, I could never tell where enemy weak spots were. Sometimes it felt like it was the head, because I'd down them in one shot, but then other times it would take two or even three shots to the head to defeat them.

Story: I've never played the original Alone In The Dark, but I've heard that this is quite the wild departure from it. I did really enjoy the story though, and without spoiling anything it gets pretty wild. The setting is done perfectly and almost feels like historical fiction at times with how much effort was put into this aspect. I only played through Edward Carnby's story because I read that Emily Hartwood's is more or less exactly the same minus one sequence. You do need to play both stories in order to unlock all of the endings, but I was relatively satisfied with one ten-hour playthrough. It is worth noting that the other endings aren't actually bugged despite what some players might say, they are just a little bit hard to find. I scoured the entirety of Derceto at every point I could and yes, you do need to complete both stories, perhaps more than once depending on which one you started with.

Puzzles: This is an interesting aspect of the game, because while I did enjoy the puzzles and thought they were done very well, I couldn't help but compare them to the various puzzles in the Uncharted games. In that regard, they unfortunately aren't anywhere near as refined. You see, a lot of the puzzle "keys" can be found in Jeremy Hartwood's journal, and you need to use that to decipher them. It is reminiscent of Nathan Drake's journal in Uncharted that has some clues on how to solve puzzles. A lot of them fell a bit flat for me when I inevitably compared the two, but I still think they hold up pretty well on their own. They feel a little bit closer to an old adventure game while still leading the player into the solution instead of being so awkwardly obtuse. There were a couple of puzzles I ended up brute forcing because I believed it would probably take less time, these being relatively simple combination locks. The mansion itself is even a bit of a puzzle, with keys that unlock this way and that, and by the end of the game you've got the layout memorized pretty well.

The graphics look pretty. Downright gorgeous in some areas, but it's a shame you can't spend a lot of time enjoying them with the poor performance of the game. The sound was decent but didn't do anything too notable. The voice acting was really good, and there is a lot of it here even for random bits of newspapers and other such clues from characters not even appearing in the game.

Altogether, it's a good but heavily flawed game. If you can get it on console, the performance issues seem to be smoothed over so I have no doubt you'll enjoy it more. I probably would have bumped it up to a 6 or even a 7 if the performance issues were not present. It is very sad that PC players are getting the short end of the stick despite having drastically superior systems. The combat is hilariously bad, but it never gets to the point of getting in the way of what makes the game interesting, which is definitely the story. The puzzles are pretty well done too, with some more intricate ones being particular highlights.

I think this is one of those games that you'll already know you'll enjoy if you've seen some gameplay or know about the premise. I think it is a very niche title with a limited budget, and that should have been reflected in the asking price but it unfortunately wasn't. Something to note is that the game is DRM-free, so at least once you do purchase it you'll always have it and it's not doing anything weird on your system. Props to THQ for that one.

#aloneinthedark #gaming #review