Alone in the Dark

Deliciously witted game writers have been referring to Atari’s latest survival horror title as Alone in the Park. It’s fitting considering the game focuses on New York’s sprawling Central Park and the non- mugger and creepy insane religious-nonsense-spouting wackjob horrors contained therein. The game stars detective Edward Carnby, who was the protagonist in the very first Alone in the Dark. This is odd, of course, because this new Dark takes place in 2006, some 70-plus years after the events of the first game—and Carnby looks as if he hasn’t aged at all.

Dark centers on the mysteries of life and death, and players will get to learn the true secret behind the existence of Central Park. Its plot offers up the very plausible explanation that something hellish has loosed itself in New York and needs to be dispatched. Players can expect suitable amounts of blood and gore; at a pre-E3 game event, Atari reveled in showing not much of Dark’s actual gameplay, but many, many shots of corpses hanging upside-down and with their skins removed.

Developer Eden has been concentrating on breaking the game down into digestible chunks, which it likens to episodic content as seen in TV shows such as Prison Break and 24. In this way, players won’t ever find themselves going for long stretches desperately trying to find a save point. Each episode will be a mini-story of its own, fitting neatly within the larger whole, and containing a build-up to a climactic event before its eventual resolution.

Atari showed off Dark’s gameplay at May’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. One of the game’s most interesting facets was its lack of interface. Carnby can only carry what he can hold in his two hands and in his pockets and, instead of pulling an item from an inventory menu, he must physically search for an object in his possession. It’s certainly addition by subtraction, but the overall effect on play seems to be minimal. Games such as Resident Evil manage to keep their level of foreboding high while still utilizing interfaces to manage a player’s junk.

Carnby will have to hotwire cars, drive through Central Park, use both his wits and his guns to make it out of this adventure intact. In one of the game’s tutorial scenes, Carnby is chased through an abandoned apartment by something entirely unexpected (architectural flaws!) and finally hurtled out into the night air, clinging perilously to a stone gargoyle—it’s astounding how Atari and Eden have captured the true New York experience.

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