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Sunday 10 April 2011

Alone In The Dark

The most pointless confusing counterintuitive game I have ever had the misfortune to play. Fair enough that I am not the most competent of gaming individuals, it's not like I go out and buy and clock a new game every week but... godamn.

I got ...just passed the title screen. That is how 'good' this game is. My god.

Okay, you start with the opening cutscene, sure whatever, except oh no, you have to BLINK. Blink your way through a cutscene. If you don't blink, everything goes white and you can't see. Which defeats the whole purpose of the cutscene thing. If you can't watch it then... well.

Some talking about something and someone gets hit, I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention because I kept on having to BLINK. But, eventually you get to walk and blink at the same time. Whoooo, multitasking! Sadly, I also lacked the intuitive manner in which I could turn and walk and blink. Just walk sideways and grind your face against the wall until getting hit by the guard to swing you around, and oh hey, have to climb some stairs, and blink.

He ends up dying, and I spent, I swear to god, fifteen minutes blinking and trying to figure out where I was supposed to go. Yay, a mirror! Punch the mirror and we can now be a camera. Awesome.

...this is the general theme of the sodding game. You climb a rope, okay, my version is for the Playstation 2, so it was X to jump and grab the rope, but square to jump while holding -onto- the rope because if you x jumped you let go of the rope, fell to your doom and died and had to go through the sodding thing all over again. Oiye.

I managed to get through putting out some fire, bashing in a door, and getting over a hole in the floor. Which, lo and behold, brought me to the TITLE SCREEN. I now know what game I am playing.

Jumping onto a rope and a ledge and dying umpteen million times, and I gave up. Literally. And it took me an HOUR to get there. ...I died a lot.

Now, if you want to -play- this game, I highly recommend you do so with an audience of other people who have learnt the joy of Alone In The Dark. Why? Because that makes it a fun game. It is just a game of fail, really. The audience spends more time reminiscing about how -they- failed attempting to do anything in the process.

This game seems to be a mash up of all horror genres with the least amount of sense possible. You start confused, and it just doesn't get any better. You start out with blinking and whitescreen, people getting eaten by shadows, fire, then progress to cracks in the floor that eat you and drag you around, and zombies. Where the HELL did the zombies come from? I mean -really-. The hungry floor is -somewhat- plausible, the shadows that ate people had to come from -something- right? But -zombies-. What the hell?! ...And everything is strangely immune to fire.

It is the best game to make fun of, because it is so counter-intuitive to play. That is the sole saving feature of the game. You can watch someone -else- play it and fail. And laugh.