The Nightmare Begins
Shadow Island, tourist attraction for hundreds of years and a great place to get a tan, is the locale for this survival horror. Carnby and an archaeologist, Aline Cedrac, are forced to bail out of their plane when it's attacked by a creature of the night. Carnby is dropped outside the manor, and Aline parachutes onto the roof. At this point, you have to make a choice: Play as Aline Cedrac or Edward Carnby.
Carnby starts the game with his two-barreled revolver (that still only has one cylinder), a flashlight and radio. The flashlight is extremely useful, as Shadow Island is obscured by eternal night. With a gun drawn, Carnby holds the flashlight next to his weapon. Alternatively, he can just wave the flashlight around for illumination. The radio is to keep in touch with Aline. Over the course of the game, Carnby and Aline share a few meetings and a lot of radio dialogue. Also, in some particular places, your character can radio the other for clues or hints.
Aline starts the game without a gun, and immediately runs into monsters that are afraid of light. Luckily, her flashlight works fine and will serve for this first part of the game. Just as Carnby, she has a radio for dialogue and clues. The two share the first part of the game inside the manor, which is to say that though they take separate routes and don't run into each other, they are in the same house. The adventures of the two are very different, however.
Setting the Stage
The atmosphere and mood of the game are pretty well done, though it does rely a lot on ambient sounds and the setting. The joke that states, "survival horror means monsters will come out of windows" applies here, though a few times I was startled when a bolt of lightning illuminated a monster behind me. The ambient sounds range from unsettling to campy, but the music score really makes you suffer, and not in the good way. It tries to set the mood, but often times the scores are repetitive or just plain painful to listen to. Luckily, the graphics more than make up for it. The backgrounds are hand-painted with 3D models added to stand out as "interactive." Light switches, chests and other various items will emit a glow (if you're lucky) and then you can interact with them or add the items to your inventory. The best feature of the New Nightmare is the modeling. The animators and modelers did a fantastic job on the characters, monsters and weapons.
The Real Nightmare
Unfortunately, things quickly take a turn for the worse. The interface is geared for console play, which puts anyone without a game pad at a disadvantage when playing. The style of holding one button to aim and another to shoot is extremely frustrating at times, especially in the thick of a fight where the two need to be pressed a lot. Reloading could not be more of a pain. The only saving graces are that the weapon will automatically reload if it is emptied and you try to fire again (assuming you have ammunition), and the game pauses when you go to the inventory screen to reload. There is no dynamic reload key, if you want to have a full gun, you'll have to open up the inventory.
The interactivity of the game world is non-interactive far too often. The zone of interactivity on many things is so small you have to be in a particular frame of animation or have your feet in the tiniest area to activate or pick some things up. Sometimes things just flat-out refused to work, and then would work later completely by accident. This makes solving the puzzles extremely frustrating, since I never know if I just don't have the right objects or they don't want to work. Too many times I was stuck on puzzles for hours with no ready solution available. For example, I explored the entire manor with Aline looking for a mirror for some ghost, and never found a mirror anywhere. I then stumbled into a room with a full-length mirror and accidentally backed into it where I was sucked into another room where the ghost wanted me to give him the mirror. In the cutscene I somehow produced a mirror from my halter-top and smashed it on the floor, despite the fact that I never picked up any mirror.
The camera angles were also a real pain. I realize that the wacky camera angles are supposed to add atmosphere, but usually they obscured objects I was already having trouble seeing, and worse, obscured monsters that mauled me from the safety of the unseen areas. Speaking of monsters, I would often walk through a door to have monsters practically standing inside my character and be immediately mauled before I could get a shot off. In short, the frustration factor of Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is extremely high, and not because it is a difficult game but because of the many quirks and bugs. I cannot count how many times I walked through a stone wall like it wasn't there, and then had to use my flashlight to find a way out.
Saving Graces
The downs are not necessarily enough to count the game out. Despite its many bugs and flaws, the game is still fun to play when it works. The combat is rather uninspired, but it serves to add to the atmosphere. The amount of frustration you'll find in the game should be noted, however. If you like survival horror and puzzle games, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare will appeal to you. Just cut down on salty foods to deal with the rise in blood pressure.
A decent enough survival horror game if you can get past the flaws.
