G1 Gaming News
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Alone in the Dark
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.