Alone in the Park

I finished Alone in the Dark 5 this evening and posted a review. Hey, look at that, I posted something on this blog again! Holy crap, bet you didn’t see that coming, huh? I actually have two more articles about Thinking After Dark to post, and something about The Path still, but those are not ready to go yet and work has been even crazier than usual lately.

Long story short: I gave up on F.E.A.R. (only the third game so far that I’ve been unable to complete; Rule of Rose and Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within are the others) a few weeks back and decided to try Alone in the Dark 5. I still have some things to say about F.E.A.R., but out of order here are some thoughts on the latest in the Edward Carnby saga.

Alone in the Dark 5 is an ambitious title. I played the PS3 version because I heard that it was much improved over the unpolished and buggy Xbox360 version. Even so, there were a lot of problems. At the same time, there are certain sequences that totally blew my socks off. Overall I didn’t think it was a fantastic game, but there is certainly a lot of stuff we can learn by examining it. Check out the full review.

8 thoughts on “Alone in the Park

  1. what was it that made you stop playing F.E.A.R?

    difficulty? or you just got bored? I hope you just got bored cause F.E.A.R is an EASY game xD oh and which F.E.A.R was it?

  2. F.E.A.R. was a breeze until the auto-save system decided to overwrite my save game with a save that placed me with no health or ammo in a place where there is no health or ammo and no way to go back. Like Cold Fear and Rule of Rose, the game doesn’t have any way for you to progress if you are stuck in such a low-resource situation. You can play flawlessly until you get to the next health item, or you can start the chapter over (which means going back a couple of hours), or you can stop playing.

    The game was also horrifically boring, so after 20 or 30 attempts at this one spot, I just stopped playing.

  3. Oh god. I also tried to finish The Struggle Within… and it was a struggle alright. I think that has got to be one of the most broken games I’ve ever played.

  4. I love The Struggle Within because it IS broken. You need a damn walkthru just to finish it because the game has no logic. Although if you could figure it all out on your own, and get the good ending– you would be a master, and you should feel very, very proud.

    Good review of Alone in the Dark 5.

  5. I really enjoyed Alone In The Dark. It was crammed full of ideas and I was surprised how many of them it actually managed to pull off. There were definitely some jaw dropping moments along the way. It’s main problem is that it’s a tad inconsistent in it’s quality.

    I can relate in regards to F.E.A.R. After being told countless times about how scary it was, it was painfully underwhelming when I actually got around to it. The shooting is fairly run-of-the-mill and the horror sections were dull and completely devoid of tension (especially since you rarely if ever get attacked during those segments). It’s use of the scary little girl cliché was also rather groan worthy.

  6. why isnt anybody commenting about the blinking feature? didnt anybody find it annoying to be pressing the r3 button every 5 seconds just to see a demo? did they erased that feature on the ps3?

  7. No. While I did find that annoying, it is only used in one short segment right at the beginning of the game (though a pretty cool variation of it is used later). It’s not something that should drag your enjoyment of the game down.

  8. Unfortunate about FEAR, I beat the game myself, and the “tripping out” scenes and the ending were fantastic. Occasionally a few situations were interesting in between, but most of the running around/firefights got annoying.

    Really too bad, one of the best “final boss” situations out of most games I have played, but understandable.

    If you have the difficulty high, especially later on, the horror sections get scary, because you can take HUGE amounts of damage very quickly, they get more and more dangerous the farther you get, this applies even on easy, just less chance of instant death.

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