I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 44 was Alone In the Dark. How do I even begin to describe this atrocity of game design? I guess I would say that Alone in the Dark is primarily a 3rd Person Shooter with an emphasis on horror. However, it also has elements of open-world games, driving, and puzzle solving.

Let’s get the one good part of this game out of the way at the start. There are many instances where you need to utilize fire and torches to solve puzzles. The fire never once glitched out or failed on me and it spread in just the way that fire should spread in video games… That’s it. That’s the only positive thing I have to say.

Now for the story… You play as Edward, the main character in all the Alone in the Dark games, as he just had an exorcism performed on him. After this, the building you are in starts getting attacked by demons and you need to escape. The first thing you do in this game is walk down a hallway and one of the stupidest mechanics in any video game ever is given to you. You need to press down the right stick every few seconds so that your character can blink… YOU NEED TO MANUALLY MAKE YOUR CHARACTER BLINK!!!!!!! What? Why is this a thing that they thought would hook you into their game? Why is this the first thing you do? You are handed over control of Edward and immediately prompted to get him to blink… ugh I hate this game so much.

Quick aside, who is the character on the box art of this game? He’s not Edward and not any other character I could find. Who is that and why is he there? This kind of mess-up is honestly comical.

Alright, back to the story. As you are escaping the building, you meet a woman named Sarah. She’s pretty much useless in this game and doesn’t provide any meaningful addition to the cast other than being a woman the main character can have as a love interest. You will also meet a priest, who I can’t be bothered to remember his name and the main villain of the plot: Crowley. A giant idiot who thinks its a good idea to release demons into the world.

After escaping the building, a fate worse than death is brought upon our Edward and, more importantly, you… This game’s driving mechanics. Out of all the awful things done in Alone in the Dark. The one that boggles my mind the most is how unbelievably bad they did driving. First of all, you can’t even just get into most cars and use them. You first need to do a minigame where you hotwire the car so that it starts up. Then, even though it's not shown in the game, Edward must be getting out of the car and applying a stick of butter to all four of the wheels so that the driving would be more slippery. Oh my god it's so slippery and controls so poorly that I can’t even describe it. Don’t actually ever play this game… but every developer should be forced to play this to understand how not to implement driving. Even after all that, I haven’t even talked about the worst part of the driving: obstacles. Here’s a rule of thumb for you. If it looks thicker than your cell phone then the car can not drive over it. I am deadly serious. The tiniest cracks will stop your car short. It doesn’t bounce the car… but stops it as if you just ran into a brick wall. The driving here is just so bad!

Once you escape, the rest of the game is in New York’s central park, where you need to find a key and get to a vault in order to stop the demons from invading the Earth. It’s bad. You won’t know what’s going on. Questions you have will not be answered. The final boss is more of a cutscene than an actual boss fight, and words cannot describe how monumentally stupid the ending is.

Okaaaay… lets talk about combat! Combat is generally by means of 3rd person failing around. Yep. That’s the combat system. You pick up something from the ground and start flailing the right stick. The weapon will generally go in the direction that you tapped… but the game does not control well and most of the time your character will just do some random thing. This would be annoying but harmless… but there are instances where you need to move obstacles via the combat flailing system a few times in the game and it is miserable.

When you are not flailing around melee weapons in combat, you will instead be utilizing 1st person shooting. I can already hear you questioning “Didn’t you say that melee was 3rd person? Why would shooting be in 1st person?” That’s a good question that I have been asking myself and, for the life of me, I can’t find an answer. You may now ask “So how do you transition from 3rd person to 1st person and back?” The answer is, terribly. When you have a gun equipped, the first time you press the shoot button will transfer you to 1st-person mode instead of actually shooting. You can then actually shoot and switching weapons sends you back to 3rd person mode. None of this sounds too bad… but imagine 5 demons running at you and you need to quickly switch between melee and shooting. You will fumble things around for a couple seconds, causing damage, before you actually manage to do the thing you wanted to.

I have heard that the PS3 version of this game fixes the many, many glitches and control failures of the Xbox 360 version… so you may not have experienced this if you played on that platform. I cannot confirm if the PS3 version is better… but I wanted to bring it up.

As you play the game, you will see a bunch of optional objectives throughout the map. These are all the same thing and see you fighting demons and then burning down roots. The roots have some lore implication of helping the demons spawn or something. The only thing is that these are not actually optional objectives. Before you are allowed to enter the penultimate chapter of the game you need to burn down 25 roots and before the final mission you need to burn down 70. This translates to you spending about 2 hours traveling around the map and burning roots right as the climax of the story is about to play out. This is needless padding. Why couldn’t I just go into the last mission? There is no reason that I should have had to waste so much time doing things that should have stayed as optional side objectives.

Have you ever seen the movie “The Room?” It’s an absolutely terrible movie that is so bad it starts to become comical and enjoyable again. That is where I ended up by the time I beat Alone in the Dark. By the second half, I found myself laughing at how awful the glitches were. My car stopping dead after running into a curb became of of the funniest things I had seen in weeks. This game is so awful that it starts becoming a parody of itself. I haven’t even written about the terrible boss fights and enemy AI, the black goop you need light to get past, the piss poor graphics, or the unbelievable second half of the story and this is still one of the longest reviews I have ever written. How did Eden Games manage to mess everything up so bad? Is this game worse than Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing or Dark Castle on the Sega Genesis? No, it’s probably not… but they aren’t 10 hour experiences. This has to be one of the worst games I have ever played and is definitely the worst game I have ever beaten. There is nothing here for you to enjoy and I would not recommend this game to anyone. (0/10)

I spent 9 hours, 10 minutes, and 36 seconds suffering through Alone in the Dark.

I have spent a total of 429 hours and 46 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next game: Mass Effect 3

Jeez. I need to stop picking up these crappy old survival horror games in the hopes of finding hidden gems. It so rarely happens. I'll tell you, it sure didn't happen with Alone in the Dark: Inferno. The Inferno edition of the game is the PS3 port of an Xbox 360 title which was deemed unplayable upon release. I'll need to look up what exactly was changed because the game still seems pretty damn unplayable to me. Of all of the games I've played the whole way through, this one might be the only one that is not technically beatable. Due to glitches that prevent you from progressing, the game is essentially broken. Seemingly aware of this fact, the developers included a feature that allows you to skip to any part of the game like a DVD scene select menu. What. The. Fuck.

So they knew that the game didn't work and just decided to ship it anyway? On the second time it was released? It literally makes no sense. And there are soooo many glitches. Almost every step of the way through this game, I was battling a game engine that worked against me completing what the game was asking me to do. Objectives were unclear and sometimes the necessary elements to complete them did not load correctly or whatever, leading to situations where you have absolutely no idea what to do and no means to do it. The game can be stupidly difficult in this way- it will send you to the last checkpoint because the game's poor design caused you to die. Get ready to complete the same sequences again and again until you do it the exact way the game wants you to.

What's really upsetting is that believe it or not, there was some real potential here for an awesome survival horror experience and some things work out quite nicely. You can't fault this game for lack of ambition- it tries to do so many things that it ends up feeling unfocused and sloppy, reaching a bit too far into other genres. You have your floaty driving sections, platforming with shoddy camera angles, and first-person immersion exercises that border on the absurd. The inventory system is the most obvious example of the game's bizarre fixation with first person viewpoint. Essentially a spin-off of the Resident-Evil-of-old style limited inventory slots, your weapons, tools and healing supplies are stored in your jacket pockets which you actually navigate through in first person. Crazy right? The combat is an amalgamation of combining materials to make bombs, clunky shooting, and even clunkier melee combat. Wait till you get a load of the melee in this game. It's bananas. While holding down a trigger, you must twirl the thumbstick in the direction you want to swing, taking into account the fact that you need a full swing radius to do any damage. Oh and you will have to solve puzzles in this way too. Good luck! There's quite a few puzzles in this game actually, almost none of which make any logical sense.

It's incredible how good one sequence will play just to be followed up by some momentum-killing design errors that bring the whole experience crashing to the ground. The presentation isn't awful per se, for a game its age, but when a game seems like it wasn't even tested for bugs before it ships, it's hard to appreciate the good qualities. And the story certainly doesn't earn the game any additional points. It's the sort of B-Movie fare you would expect, laughably bad for the most part yet enjoyable enough to keep you sticking with it until the end. With some more time in the cooker, this could have been a decent game, but as it stands, it's barely worth the 5 dollars it cost at Gamestop.