Restless and yet focused, dramatic and yet mundane, ambitious and yet bounded, Alone In The Dark is much like its demonic possessed creatures: both eloquent and ugly. Frustratingly, those moments in which subtly framed puzzles encourage experimentation are followed by irritation at the fussy and inconsistent controls.

It certainly starts off with a bang: the first 30 minutes of the game take Carnby from captivity and the threat of execution by a shadowy bunch of occultists to witnessing the whole of Manhattan torn apart with vast fissures, before making a precipitous descent through a disintegrating high-rise and a desperate escape through the streets by car. The sequence is notable not only for the way it so assuredly sustains the drama, but for the fact that it’s almost completely interactive, introducing many skills that Carnby will be using throughout the game: blinking, shooting, jumping, wielding and manipulating objects, fighting, putting out fires, climbing, rappelling and driving.

And it’s also a high that Eden never quite manages to recreate. More insidiously, though, it also introduces the pervading sense that, though Carnby’s a jack-of-all- trades, Eden has failed to make him master of any. The frequent platforming sections are hindered by his lack of connection with surfaces, a foot left floating over an uneven area here, a hand clipping through a ledge there.

Driving is similarly inexact, with floaty handling that can make traversing the tree-strewn and fissure-ridden Central Park, the game’s central location, frustrating (confusingly, Eden also created Test Drive Unlimited). So, too, is melee fighting. Sure, Carnby’s blows connect meatily, with the game’s agile and ferocious zombies crumpling under a blow from a lead pipe. But the control system is awfully clunky, with melee weapons and objects swung in arcs ascribed by the right stick, and Carnby and his extended arms tend to obscure targets, making timing strikes and dodges difficult. Gun aiming, which is conducted in firstperson, has no acceleration, making small adjustments hard to perform, though the reticule will automatically lock-on to certain targets, if not enemies themselves.

Just as Eden has thrown the book at Carnby’s abilities, it has also implemented three types of view: firstperson, thirdperson character-relative RE4-style controls and thirdperson camera-relative ones. It can lead to disorientating flicks between views that see Carnby walking straight back out of the room he’s just entered. Though the option to flick to firstperson initially seems generous, it’s actually invaluable for exploring the frequently constricted rooms and corridors. Eden has clearly worked hard to streamline all that Carnby can do on to the gamepad, but there are inconsistencies, and having one context-sensitive button, which switches on the torch, opens doors, picks up, activates switches, starts cars and much else besides, can lead to a frustrating lack of adaptability.

Where Alone In The Dark is much more successful is in its puzzles, which are naturalistically embedded in the scenarios and environments. Redistributing weight on a bus that’s delicately poised over a crevasse, hooking out a cable that’s electrifying a pool of water, creating sticky Molotov timebombs to blow up inaccessible obstacles: such sections subtly teach the capabilities of Carnby’s inventory and stand in contrast to a couple of forced ‘kill all the zombies and I’ll let you through’ demands from NPCs.

The variety of tools available to Carnby leads to a rewarding sense of muddling through with whatever’s to hand. Techniques for burning zombies – the only way to finish them off – abound. Some are better than others – flame bullets (created with flammable liquid) aren’t bad, but the aerosol and lighter flamethrower is easily the most efficient. Combining, which is performed in realtime, can be awkward: items must be selected in the right order for the game to register the combination. And despite the variety, some capabilities – piercing blood packs to attract enemies, blowing up a car by shooting its fuel tank and igniting the petrol trail – are rather underused as well as being fiddly to execute, meaning easier options such as bullets and the ingredients for sticky bombs proliferate. In fact, item management in general is a grim comedy. Carnby’s coat has limited space, leading to much shuffling back and forth to dump and pick up.

To top it all, despite the TV serial-style presentation, the story never really finds its feet. The game is driven instead by the pacing of its thunderously rendered set-pieces. The dialogue, meanwhile, is clumsy and dumb, Carnby’s dislikeably conflicted character communicated through spat profanity rather than deeper inflection.

And yet Alone In The Dark retains compulsive coherence despite all its missteps and contradictions. The breadth of Eden’s ambitions may have meant that there’s barely a feature that’s implemented more than satisfactorily, but there’s a generosity of vision here that few games can boast. In an ideal world, perhaps its sturdy core of pacing, puzzles and spectacle could have experienced another year of polishing.

Verdict: 7/10

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