XBOX-HQ.COM - Alone In The Dark

Eden revealed some promising technology at Leipzig, but where’s the game to use it? Since last year’s E3, Eden has remained unforthcoming about this gloomy remake of the 1992 classic – a game which gave birth to many of the identifiable features of the survival-horror genre.

We know that it has relocated to Central Park, New York, and that it will be episodic in its structure – broken up into one-hour segments of action, much like a TV show. Beyond this, little is known, however.

Given that the project has two years of development behind it, we were slightly nonplussed that all we were shown at Leipzig was a tech demo featuring a walkthrough of the kind of puzzles you might face during the actual game, should it ever decide to step out from the shadows. Fortunately, this modest demonstration was by itself pretty compelling, convincing us that the game has potential to deliver both atmosphere and innovation.

In the spirit of the original game, your character will find few weapons to hand – relying on a mixture of makeshift tools and his environment to defeat or avoid his enemies. The technology bolstering this is the ability to combine many items that you come across – the inventory system displaying from a firstperson perspective, looking down over the character’s chest as he opens his jacket, revealing the many pockets inside. Wrap a glowstick in tape and you can fling it onto a wall to light the area ahead of you. Fill a bottle with bullets and gasoline and you have a bomb, which you can then ignite from a safe distance by leaving a trail of fuel.

In fact, fire seemed to be a central theme of the demo, and one of the most effective ways to dispense with enemies. As with Far Cry 2, fire spreads realistically, consuming flammable substances and, indeed, flammable creatures – which includes you if you’re unlucky enough not to have a fire extinguisher to hand. From these simple abilities arise complex mechanics; the demonstration suggested multiple ways to resolve an encounter with some small, gruesome looking enemies – apparently some sort of demonically mutated vermin.

Our character at first shoots a corpse to distract the creatures, which choose to feast on the blood rather than attack the player. He then wraps a bottle of gasoline in tape and manages to throw it onto one of the creatures, to which it sticks, before igniting it with a bullet. The player then punctures a hole in a blood pack, and uses the trail to lure the remaining enemies into a gasoline-soaked fire trap.

In keeping with the attention to physics, handling items has been made intuitive and realistic. The player picks up a chair, and, with a slow rotation of the 360 controller’s right analogue stick, the character moves the item in a circle, sweeping out in front of him and then up over his head. With swift movements, items can be swung violently to serve as bludgeons – we witnessed a metal door being steadily deformed as it was beaten with a fire extinguisher, before finally breaking from its hinges. Later, a pipe was articulated through the air to coax an electrical wire out from a pool of water.

In an ideal world the full game will put these powerful, simple mechanics to good use in creating ingenious puzzles, which, being constructed on realistic principles, will make the game’s horror element all the more credible. However, with so much time on the project already expended, we can only hope that the handful of months between now and the scheduled release date shed some light on an actual game which does justice to its foundations.

News-Source: Next-Gen