“Alone in the Dark: Inferno” Review

Rating:

It’s that time of year again. Which should be my favorite time of the year, since all of the scary games should be coming out now… Since nothing really terrifying came out recently, (Ju-On doesn’t count, since it’s about as scary as a vampire nowadays) I decided to go with Alone in the Dark: Inferno. Was it up to par with the usual regular fright fests? Hell no.

The game starts off with a first person in game cinematic of you waking up to goons harassing what I assumed was a priest. You then learn that if you don’t blink every few seconds your character starts to go blind. (Isn’t the realism amazing, folks?) You eventually also discover you have amnesia with no clue who you are, and your goal is to survive long enough to find out. Soon enough the story becomes so confusing convoluted your brain begins to hemorrhage and you will pass out for awhile. Also the plot loosely has something to do with you fighting Satan and his minions, oh, and that your name is Edward Carnby. With two of the crappiest and most ludicrous endings I’ve ever seen, this game sank to new lows. But thankfully since you didn’t give a damn about the story, true fun can be had with the game play.

 Controlling Edward isn’t too hard to do simple tasks like jumping or even fight off baddies. And that’s a big point right there against it. I use the wording “isn’t too hard”, when controls should be flowing, easy and intuitive. The controls just are stilted, though the driving segments aren’t too bad. But the saving grace for the game is it’s ability to screw around immensely, thanks to it’s item creation system. You can take random items and form them together to make several different kinds of fire bombs, as if you were MacGyver disguised as a pyromaniac. What could have been something truly robust in complexity is limited by your jacket space (which I do like the concept) and the lack of items.(Though fire bullets make no sense, but are awesome so we won’t question it.) Overall the game play is entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons.

Fire is your best friend, unless you try to give it a hug. (Or get anywhere near it for that matter.) Since every single enemy dies usually by only fire, though some of the squishier tiny enemies can be punted then shot. If you’re in a puzzle and you don’t know what to do, more than likely you’ll have to burn something. This is the #2 feature you’ll become familiar with in this game. The #1 feature isn’t the amazing (yet shallow) inventory system that allows you create a limited amount of items, it’s the ability to rappel. Yep, rappelling is the game’s #1 bitch. So much so, I think the creators all have an intense rope fetish. The amount of time you spend rappelling in this game is equal to number of steps you take, because boy does this game love f*cking rappelling.

This game is considered a horror game, that’s supposed to I guess scare you or something. Though it’s literally a B-film posing as a game.  You’ve got the hero who’s spouts expletives more than actual dialogue. A damsel in distress, who of course gets kidnapped by the monsters. And you’ve got a bunch of random monsters that attempt at being scary and go poof into pixie dust as soon as they die. This game turned out to be fun, but can only be fun if the player enjoys a good bad movie. The only time this game scared me is when a charging hell demon chased after my train car, but soon that just turned out to be annoyance. Thankfully, the overall B-list quality of it all gave me quite the chuckle.

But to be fair, I’ll list all of the good qualities about this game. You know, all the stuff I actually enjoyed. 1. The dialogue at certain points. Which was so ridiculously bad that it made me tear up with laughter. 2. Killing myself and others in amusing and explosive ways. 3. Taking double-sided tape (that you find everywhere!!!) and sticking an enemy with tons of glow sticks. (Zombie rave party!) 4. The first half of the game and some of it’s more clever puzzles. Act 1 of the game is truly something epic at times, all bugs aside. Though it doesn’t save it at all, not even the smarter parts of the game.

This game really just blew chunks all over my premise of scary games. Thank God I had played Fatal Frame 3 ahead of time, so I did not give up the genre entirely. It’s so laughably bad, that you should at least rent the game. Beat it, and watch those ridiculous endings. You’ll get some laughs, I know I certainly did. Out of a 5, this game gets 3. Which is giving it waaaay too much credit. Though it did bring up a good point about dating. *Spoiler alert by the way.* If your not careful, your girlfriend might just turn out to be Satan. That is if you don’t become Satan yourself. *Spoiler alert over.*