Silent Hill: 0rigins

Also known as: Silent Hill: Origins
Platforms: PS2, PSP
Release Date: 2008-03-04
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
The Silent Hill mechanics reproduced with such exacting care that the result feels soulless.

This is a review of the PSP version of this game. I originally posted this on the blog because handheld games are not included in the Quest.

I finished Silent Hill 0rigins the other day. It’s a solid Silent Hill game, absolutely worthy of inclusion in the series. Though it’s technically a prequel to the original Silent Hill, it plays like an amalgam of every game in the series. The locations and progression through Silent Hill are very similar to the original game, many of the graphics effects (like the fog and shadowing system) are taken directly from Silent Hill 2, the monster designs are a mix of the second and third games, and there are even a few aspects of Silent Hill 4 thrown into the mix (voyeurism via holes in walls, chargeable melee combat, weapons that degrade with use). There’s an analog for Pyramid Head (though he can’t approach the awesomeness of the original triangle-topped antagonist from Silent Hill 2), extrapolation of the monster design themes defined by Silent Hill 2 and 3, and a (somewhat awkward) story line involving both the cult from Silent Hill 1 and 3, and an introspective protagonist working his way through manifestations of his own problems.

And, as a mixture of four awesome games (well, three awesome games and one mediocre one), it actually works pretty well. The game play in general will seem intensely familiar to anybody who has played a Silent Hill game before–everything from the rate at which maps are completed to the placement of health drinks in doorways and alleys throughout the town has been duplicated with meticulous care. It’s almost pointless trying to describe it; if you’ve played any of the first three games in this series, you know exactly, down to the very last detail, what to expect.

There are only a few minor points at which the game differs from its predecessors. Combat is similar to Silent Hill 3, except that charging hits (per the fourth game) has been added and there is a mechanic for new, one time use weapons (heavy things you can break over enemies’ heads). Some monsters are now able to grapple, and a key sequence mini-game is required to get them off without taking damage. Weapons also break after you use them for a while (an amazingly short while–three or four hits sometimes), so you have to keep picking up new bludgeons as you move around the world. But fundamentally, even the combat feels pretty much exactly the same as the previous iterations. It even suffers from some of the same problems as the earlier games: the bosses are all trivially easy as long as you save your guns, etc (at least there’s no giant moths in this version).

The other major change to note is the way that the character accesses the Otherworld; unlike previous games, Travis can switch from one world to the other at will as long as he has access to a mirror. This changes the role of the Otherworld somewhat–it becomes part of the larger traversal puzzle gameplay, rather than being a dramatic plot point. I have more to write about the Otherworld, but I’ll save it for a different post. Suffice to say that the implementation in Origins, while different, works well.

As the story line goes, it’s a little bland. The story in Silent Hill 4 was pretty bland as well, I thought, but the previous games, particularly Silent Hill 2, had excellent stories to tell. The problem with the story in Origins is that, like the game play, it’s just an mixture of things that have already happened in the previous games. While that sort of dedication to the precedent is welcomed for the game play, it makes the story fairly predictable, and drains it of some of its life. Also, while the level design does an excellent job of building tension, sometimes the payoff seems weak (particularly, the fight with the Pyramid Head knockoff was pretty anticlimactic). Also, the protagonist himself is a pretty thin character; though we learn about his life while playing the game, we learn almost nothing about his personality or feelings as an adult. I mentioned in my initial impressions that I felt like he didn’t comment on his situation enough, and now that I’ve finished the game, I think that being so stoic hurts the game’s ability to make him a convincing character.

But really, I have very little to complain about here. The graphics are good, the art style is spot-on for the series, the soundtrack is, as always, phenomenal. Being on the PSP does hurt the game a bit, as it’s harder to forget that you are playing a game and the stupid analog nub is a much suckier interface than a control stick, but these complaints are hardly the fault of the Origins developers. One thing that did suck is that about half way through the game I lost most of my sound effects permanently. This is probably due to the way that developers use the PSP memory during sleep mode (we had similar problems on a couple of the PSP games I worked on), but it was too bad because the sounds are pretty good.

Silent Hill Origins is an enjoyable amalgam of the previous Silent Hill games. While it’s hardly a game play revolution, it doesn’t need to be: the tried and true Silent Hill mechanics continue to work today as well as they did before. As a developer, I find it impressive that a third party developer has been able to reproduce Konami’s formula so throughly; this is not an easy task and the guys at Climax have done an excellent job.

Obscure 2

Platforms: PS2, Wii, PC
Release Date: 2008-03-25
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ☆☆☆☆
The worst aspects of a teenage slasher flick in game form: boring, trite, and occasionally offensive.

The original Obscure was a fun, if somewhat routine, horror game. Its saving grace was its two player mode, something that has still yet to be duplicated by any other console horror game to date. The first Obscure also had some interesting mechanics involving the use of light to combat enemies, and though the content itself was a bit generic, the game was pretty well put together.

Which is why I was somewhat surprised to find Obscure 2 to be a huge pile of elephant dung. It’s atrocious on almost every level, far worse than its predecessor, and it took significant effort to see the game through to the end.

Ok, let’s back up a second. Before I get into some of the reasons that Obscure 2 is a shitty game, let’s take a second and talk about the parts that I thought were ok. Actually, the technical execution of Obscure 2–the graphics, control scheme, etc–seems pretty ok. I like the half-cartoony art style and the in-game art is very nice. Combat is extremely routine but serviceable, and the soundtrack isn’t half bad (I particularly liked the Main Menu music). I played through the Wii version of Obscure 2 (it’s also available for PS2 and PC), and I thought that most of the Wii controls worked pretty well, including the gesture-based moves. There’s a section where you need to row a boat by moving the Wiimote and Nunchuck to manipulate the oars, and I liked that section in particular. There’s also a pretty nice dream sequence at the beginning of the game that is presented with a level of skill not evident in the rest of the title. It’s also kind of cool that the game splits its large cast up and follows different pairs of characters independently; that seems like a good way to keep the environments and play mechanics fresh without forcing the story to zigzag. And the Obscure series is still the only horror game series that allows two players at once, which is pretty cool.

OK, now that we’ve gotten that part out of the way, let’s get down to business. Obscure 2 has a bunch of problems, and while some of them are technical, most of them are design problems. On the technical side, the use of the Wii cursor to control the camera is, in my mind, a total failure. I spent good portions of the game with the camera spinning around in circles because the Wiimote wasn’t pointed exactly at the screen. Shooting was kind of a nightmare; you need to use three separate buttons to lock on and shoot (seriously? 3 buttons? come on, guys!), and it was such a pain that I usually just gave all the guns to the AI player (I couldn’t convince anybody to play this thing with me two-player). I beat the game but I never was able to decipher how the lock pick minigame was supposed to work; the pick seems to move on its own, and I couldn’t grok the mapping between 2D cursor coordinates and the aiming of the pick. I think I probably spent as much time trying to pick locks as I did playing the rest of the game; it’s not that there are that many locks to pick, it’s just that each one would take me ~40 frustrating minutes to complete. And those bastard game designers put a lock picking puzzle between a save and a boss–but now I’m getting ahead of myself again.

So there are a few technical issues, but nothing game-destroying. The real problems lay in game design direction that the game designers took. Gone are all the interesting mechanics from the first Obscure: no more taping flashlights to guns, no more high-beam strategy, no more breaking windows to give yourself the edge. On a couple of occasions you can select the members of your team, but for the most part the game forces specific characters upon you. And unlike the previous game, none of the characters can die during game play. Instead, Obscure 2 is a pretty linear romp through a series of unlikely locales which eventually loop back on themselves. One thing that persists from the previous game is the generic monster designs; the monsters themselves are no better than those in the previous game, which isn’t a good thing.

But the biggest problem with Obscure 2 by far is its story. The story is vile in many respects: it is contrived, poorly written, and at times offensive. I get what the game designers were going for, I really do; they were trying to hit that vibe captured by so many Grade B teenage slasher films, where the characters die off one by one until only the romantic couple (or final girl) remain. But they missed their mark; if Resident Evil is a B Horror movie, Obscure 2 is some grade significantly lower (I’m thinking ‘Z’). The plot involves monsters, suicide, rape, murder, and drug use, and yet manages to avoid making any of these themes significant. The events unfold as if within a dream, each scene having almost no relationship to prior events. The characters are the most bland and generic people ever; they differ only in visual appearance, and are each the embodiment of some thin stereotype. The cast includes Smart Asian Girl, Skater Guy, Blonde Jock Guy, Big Breasts Girl, Goth Girl, Stick-it-to-the-Man Slacker Guy, and a host of other cliched tropes.

And don’t get me started on the dialog. Though the voice acting swings between passible and really bad, the script itself is an atrocity. Every other line is some trite sexual innuendo, and even when the characters are saying “normal” things the delivery is so lacking in emotion that it just sounds robotic. Since you always play as a team, the designers tried to make the two team members have conversations with each other, a cool idea which is totally sabotaged by the vapid one-liners that the characters end up spewing at each other. Occasionally a character will say something helpful (like, “hey, we should go in the door over there,” which is useful when you’ve been trying to find any unlocked door for 15 minutes), but usually the lifeless personalities that serve as the protagonists in the game have nothing but lifeless things to say.

The worst part about the story in Obscure 2 is that it’s very awkward and uncomfortable (and not in a good way). There were several points in the story which I found myself mildly offended; though the themes that the game is trying to employ are not particularly remarkable or offensive, the way in which they are delivered seemed fairly inappropriate. I mean, having a monster rape a girl is bad enough, but did we really need to see her stomach all bloated with some monster child? And while I think that killing playable characters off is a really interesting approach to interactive storytelling (as evidenced by the crack execution in Siren), the death scenes in Obscure 2 are much more violent and vindictive than necessary. You know, watching a protagonist kill a cowering retarded man with a chain saw didn’t really make me go “hell yeah!”

Usually horror games fail because they can’t back up their content with competent game play (see Kuon, Rule of Rose, and Illbleed for some classic examples of this pattern), but Obscure 2 actually has the opposite problem. Despite fairly competent (if routine and fairly uninteresting) play mechanics and game technology, Obscure 2 collapses under the weight of its tasteless and contrived story. The story, characters, and dialog are so bad that they destroy any sense of horror that might have been found here, and for me that served to absolutely ruin the experience. It’s a shame, too, because the original Obscure, while somewhat flawed, had a lot of interesting ideas in it. Unfortunately the sequel is bland and mildly offensive. Avoid.

Silent Hill 5

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2008-09-30
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
A game that can’t make up its mind which of the previous Silent Hill games it would like to emulate more, and suffers as a result.

Silent Hill Homecoming is the latest in a series of not-very-Silent-Hill-like Silent Hill games. I guess that’s not very fair; a better way to put it is, it’s the most recent in the line of mediocre Silent Hill titles that succeeded the absolutely brilliant three titles that began the series. Here’s a quick recap: the original Silent Hill game on PS1 is complex, unusual, technically stunning, and creepy as hell. Somehow Silent Hill 2 on PS2 actually outdoes its predecessor by taking all of those traits and making the story deeply personal. Then Silent Hill 3 came along and cranked up dials on other axes, mainly by making the protagonist have some personality and by making the Otherworld even more sinister than it was before. Three amazing games in a row.

Then begins what I call the Silent Hill Malaise. Silent Hill 4: The Room wasn’t intended to be a Silent Hill game, and it shows; the pacing is weird and the game missteps when it comes to interesting characters and sinister otherworlds. It’s not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it just doesn’t compare well to its predecessors. And then we get Silent Hill: 0rigins, a game so functionally similar to the first Silent Hill that you might not even realize that it was built by an entirely different team. But the missteps here are even greater; the character is a predictable amalgam of previous Silent Hill stoic everymen, and plot is little more than a thin excuse to run around classic Silent Hill locales. There’s nothing broken about the game per se–it’s just not all that interesting. Not only that, there’s a four year gap between Silent Hill 4 and Silent Hill 0rigins; quite a lag considering the first three games came out in a span of three years. The Silent Hill series thus finds itself in an unfocused, unreliable state; its games not exactly terrible but not really up to the stellar standard defined by the early games in the series either. It is during this time that ill conceived spin-off titles, such as the Silent Hill Shooting Arcade game arrive on the scene.

Enter Silent Hill 5, eventually renamed Silent Hill Homecoming, the next (and hopefully last) of the series’ Malaise games. It’s not really fair to lump it into the Malaise group without even telling you about it yet, but I’m going to do it anyway. I will say that, of the Malaise games, Silent Hill 5 is by far the closest to the standard set by Silent Hills 1 – 3. The team has tried very hard to capture the essence of the series, and while they are not always entirely successful, the effort really shows. Leah Alexander hailed the game as effectively straddling the needs of the series’ signature motifs and the requirement to meet modern game design standards, and I think that’s probably a fair assessment. It’s just that, in its attempt to be “more modern,” Silent Hill Homecoming occasionally falls prey to the same sorts of problems that damaged The Room and 0rigins: use of Silent Hill tropes without continuity or understanding of what those tropes were originally designed to do. Still, this is the most Silent Hilly Silent Hill game we’ve seen in years.

Homecoming, like 0rigins before it, tries to combine Silent Hill 2 and 3 to create a dual-purpose story line. On the one hand we’ve got a crazy (and, to tell you the truth, fairly boring and unbelievable) cult that is to blame for all the problems, but on the other hand it’s really a personal story about one man’s personal problems manifesting themselves as physical monstrosities. I played the whole game through and collected multiple endings and I am still not sure if the game wants me to believe that Alex, the protagonist, is personally tied to the horrific events he encounters or if he just happens to be a passing witness to some horrific religious accident. This competing focus saps a lot of the life out of both potential plot lines, but it’s still done much better than in 0rigins. The problem with Homecoming is that it can’t decide if it wants to be an explicit, violence-filled and easily explained story, or a subtle, suggestion-filled metaphor-laden story. These dueling influences take the punch out of the story that is there.

I’ve been pretty negative in this review so far, so let me back up for a second. The thing that Silent Hill Homecoming does really well is all of the tiny little details that go into making a Silent Hill game. It’s got good graphics, decent level design, very well-done enemies, and a much-improved combat system. The music and sound is, as always, fantastic, and the puzzles, while few and far between, are not half bad. The look and feel of the Otherworld is a particularly stand-out feature; in addition to rusted metal and barbed wire, the Otherworld in Homecoming is like an industrial furnace, with heat and flames pouring out from every crack–it’s really well done. When it comes to implementation details, Homecoming has it pretty much together; it innovates in small, important areas and leaves the rest well enough alone. If it wasn’t for the quality of execution on those little things, the entire game would fall apart.

But I have two big beefs with the game that I think keep it from breaking out of the Malaise group.

The first, as I mentioned after seeing the very first footage of this game, is the camera. The camera in Silent Hill Homecoming is just your standard, run-of-the-mill user-controllable 3rd person camera, and that’s a damn shame. It’s probably the right camera to have for the game’s improved combat system, but it’s a huge step backwards when it comes to traversal and exploration. Every previous Silent Hill game has had hand-tuned cameras; cameras that were fixed to splines, or stuck in place, or otherwise heavily controlled by the designers. The reason to limit freedom of camera movement is simple: it lets the game designers actually compose shots–you know, use cinematography–to make the game scary. Homecoming throws all of that right out the window, and as a result, it’s not scary at all. Seriously. This one design decision pretty much guts the horror factor from this game for me. The surrounding environments end up feeling like movie sets rather than actual places, and while it’s always easy to see where you are going, there’s never any tension or foreshadowing created by the camera. I was really disappointed to see the complex and mature camera system found in previous Silent Hill games replaced with this generic follow cam.

The second beef is with Homecoming’s game progression. In game industry terms, “game progression” means the movement from one stage to the next, and in this context I am talking specifically about pacing within the regular Silent Hill fog-descent-otherworld-boss challenge cycle. The narrative beats for Homecoming seem totally off; I complained about the placement of items and saves while playing the game, and now that I’ve finished it, I can’t say it ever got much better. The transitions and timing of the otherworld is all inconsistent too; sometimes the Otherworld shows up as a way to slowly ratchet up the tension as the boss approaches (which is how it was classically used in the non-Malaise times), and sometimes it just randomly appears before a particular fight and then randomly disappears after it. The pacing is off. Heck, even the transitions themselves are inconsistent; once or twice we’re treated to the neat paper tearing effect that was used in the Silent Hill film, and other times it just some lame fade-to-black-wake-up-in-hell sequence. In previous Silent Hill games the transitions to the Otherworld were extremely important beats in the narrative; they signified a change from the relative safety of the fog world to the no-holds-barred pants-wetting Otherworld.

This feeling of inconsistent pacing is (aside from the camera), the thing that feels most untrue to the series. Lots of other details have changed–the radio is pretty much gone and the film grain has be relegated to a shadow of its former self–but it’s the pacing and placement of weapons, saves, characters, cutscenes, and the Otherworld that break the classic mold most dramatically.

I have a few other complaints. The combat system is nice but not quite expressive enough to pull off the increased complexity that it’s offering. I found it very easy to get stuck in a take-hit-react-take-hit combo loop that is unbreakable until you get knocked back into a wall, and dodging only seem to work against certain types of enemies. The enemy balance is off–the Schisms and Smogs are way too hard and the Siams are way too easy. And the knife really is about 100 times more powerful than anything else in the game; I only ever used the guns for bosses. The game is unnecessarily gory–another aspect of the dueling influences I mentioned above. But these complaints are pretty minor; none of them ruin the game or feel as off-kilter as the pacing and camera issues.

And occasionally, the whole game comes together and everything clicks right into place. There’s one section in particular, named Hell Descent by the save file system, that is an almost perfect example of classic Silent Hill game play. The player transitions from the fog world into the otherworld, which is a long, maze-like descent punctuated by a few puzzles, and finally fights a cool-looking boss at the end before being deposited back in the fog world. It’s a simple sequence, but man, it’s my favorite part of the entire game. It’s right up there with Silent Hill 2 and 3 in terms of execution and pacing. If only the entire game were like that I would have nothing to complain about.

I think that Homecoming marks the end of the Silent Hill Malaise. It doesn’t have the problems of the other Malaise games, but it shows that a “regular” 3rd person game framework overlaid with Silent Hill tropes is not sufficient to duplicate the absolute quality of earlier games. To move forward from here, the series will have to go back to its roots or (more likely), forego the most common tropes and strike new ground in a completely different direction (which seems to be what Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is trying to do). Silent Hill Homecoming is more like the classic Silent Hill games than anything we’ve seen in years, and it was clearly built with a lot of care, but it just can’t live up to the standard set by the first three games. It’s not bad, just mediocre. A good transition point to bigger and better things. A sign that Silent Hill is back on the track of interesting, scary games.

Condemned 2: Bloodshot

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3
Release Date: 2008-03-11
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
A sequel that hits all the right notes but can’t quite follow the tune.

Condemned 2 is sort of a hard game to write a review for. On the one hand, it’s clearly been designed to address the shortcomings of the original Condemned (mainly, repetitive game play and under-used forensic modes) while improving and enhancing the parts that worked. On the other hand, the game goes in so many different directions that it’s difficult to sum the whole experience up and describe what playing it is like.

Condemned 2 picks up some time after the end of the original Condemned. Our hero, Detective Ethan Thomas, has quit the force and become a body-building alcoholic with a three-day beard and a grudge. Thomas finds himself helping his old agency (much to his disgruntlement) when a mysterious caller leaves a message for him at the precinct. Very quickly he is once again delving into the bowels of the city, which seems to have gotten even worse than it was before. Unravelling the mystery that he is presented requires a lot of exploration, examination of evidence, deductive reasoning, and good old fashioned beat-downs. However, the more he learns about the problems plaguing the city, the more Thomas begins to realize that some larger event is taking place, and that he is somehow an integral component.

Condemned 2 starts out very strong. The combat system is similar to the original game but improved; melee combat in first person is hard to get right, but it feels pretty awesome in Condemned 2. Combat feels visceral and personal, and the introduction of special combos makes for some pretty bloody fights. The team at Monolith went all out in improving the investigation and detective bits of the game too; the CSI-elements are much more complicated and interesting, and the game rates you on how well you are able to piece together the evidence that you are provided. The story is effectively told through in-game cinematics and with radios and TVs that must be hand-tuned, which is a nice touch. There is generally a lot more to do in Condemned 2 than just punch things and hit them with pipes, and this increased level of interactivity is quite successful. The art is very nice; the characters in particular look fantastic. The protagonist, while looking completely different than before, is highly detailed and very well animated. The game also doesn’t rely on him appearing weak to produce its scares; in the very first scene we see him pummel a suspicious character almost to death. In general, the art is improved over the last game (which looked pretty damn good to begin with) across the board.

The levels themselves cycle between exploration levels, horror levels, and combat levels. The game doesn’t make this cycle explicit, of course, but after playing for a while you realize that each level has a particular focus. Condemned 2 is best when it’s in its horror and exploration modes–the modes that are most similar to the game play of the original Condemned. The designers are still very good at making truly claustrophobic and oppressive environments, and this time around they pull a few new tricks out of their hats. In particular, this game has absolutely mastered subtle changes in lighting and contrast in order to increase pressure on the player; the way colors slowly bleed out of the scene as the player descends into the depths of an office building or apartment complex is fantastic. The designers are also very good at leading your eye, so often events will seem to take place right in front of you as you casually look around. When it tries to be scary, Condemned 2 is a very scary game.

The problem is that it only tries to be scary every third or fourth level. The first several levels are focused on fear and quite successful, but then the game switches into combat mode and throws levels at you where you must simply pummel your way to the end. These levels are extremely non-scary, and while they are fun, I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the exploration levels. The last third or fourth of the game is entirely in this combat-heavy mode, which sort of made the end game a bummer for me. The original Condemned also had some problematic levels towards the end and I was hoping that they would do a better job this time around.

The cycling of level types isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but it is an example of a larger problem with Condemned 2: the game just can’t figure out what it wants to be. Sometimes it seems like it wants to be a horror game, other times it feels like Splinter Cell, and still other times it seems to draw directly from Half-Life 2. In one level you’re crawling through an oppressive basement looking for the bloody remains of some unfortunate murder victim, and the next you’re suddenly in some snowy wilderness running from a rabid bear and defusing bombs. Certain levels show up in the middle of the game (and more frequently towards the end) that seem to have absolutely no relationship to the rest of the story (like the theater level–what the heck was that?). The last couple levels of the game feel like they were taken out of some other FPS and transplanted into Condemned 2 wholesale; they don’t make any sense in the context of the rest of the game.

This sort of frenzied variation is visible in the story too. There are tons of elements introduced (a cult, a serial killer, a city on the verge of collapse, genetic manipulation, the protagonist’s problem with alcohol), but many of them seem like throw-away details or ideas that are introduced once and then forgotten about. For example, there’s really no specific antagonist for most of the game; there’s a serial killer that you’re following, but sometimes you get sidetracked and go off looking for other things. And the end boss is pretty lame and anticlimactic; it’s like they got to the end of the game without a specific bad guy so they just selected some minor character and promoted him up to “final boss” status. Too many of the story threads are left hanging by the end of the game, and major plot events seem to vanish into the ether. The characters themselves all seem to be pretty thin too; we learn a little bit about the protagonist, and his problem with alcoholism seems like a way to make him interesting and unique, but it ends up being really under-used.

But my biggest problem with the story is that it shows its hand to the player. Condemned 2 succumbs to the same trap that has ruined many horror films before it: it tries to explain everything rather than leaving the details of its plot up in the air. In the original Condemned, we’re never given a concrete explanation for some of the events that take place; in fact, by the end of the game we could probably make a plausible argument that the supernatural stuff that Thomas encounters is all in his head. This idea that the protagonist may be going insane was a very powerful plot device. Though the sequel starts out with a trip down insanity lane, over time the details of the plot remove our questions about Thomas’ mental stability. After a while it’s clear that everything is not just in his head, and that there’s actually some crazy explanation for all the weird things he has witnessed. And when we get that explanation, it’s not nearly as interesting as we might have hoped; in fact, as far as horror stories go, it’s all pretty ho-hum run-of-the-mill stuff. In the original Condemned, we get the feeling that human malice itself is manifested as strange skeletal creatures with mental jaws; in the sequel, we learn that these creatures come from a much more mundane source and enjoy Combine-like architecture.

That said, there are some fantastic moments in Condemned 2. I particularly liked the levels that are a mix of exploration, combat, and detective work, such as the hotel level. There’s a great level that takes place within the police station itself, and it’s one of the best in the game. And without giving too many of the plot details away, there are certain levels early on that require Thomas to visit some really uncomfortable areas that have been drenched in some sort of black, oily tar. The forensic investigation elements are much more fun this time around, and they are used much more often than in the original Condemned. And the good parts about the combat (such as the focus on short-term challenges rather than long-term aggregate difficulty) have all survived and are still very high quality.

Condemned 2 is a pretty good game. The game mechanics are all quite solid, and the only thing that really keeps the title from eclipsing its predecessor in every category is the disorganized story and unfocused theme. And that alone isn’t really enough to ruin the game–I had quite a good time playing it through. I just feel like it could have been much better if the horror and exploration bits had been the primary focus.

Alone in the Dark 5

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3, Wii
Release Date: 2008-06-23
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★☆☆
Mixing procedural mechanics with traditional linear game play proves mediocre.

Alone in the Dark 5 is an interesting game because it tries so hard to be so many different things at once. It’s got elements of all sorts of other games, including Grand Theft Auto 3, Disaster Report, Siren, and of course, earlier Alone in the Dark games. And sometimes, the crazy mix of ideas clicks and everything works really well. Other times, the whole thing feels like a total mess. Whatever it is, Alone in the Dark 5 is a pretty unique game, and that alone makes it worthy of inspection.

Modern single player game design theory can be described with two opposing extremes. On one end of the spectrum procedural content and emergent game play; the idea is to create an interactive environment that is complex enough that the player can solve problems in all sorts of ways. This method requires a lot of systems to work well together, and is technically complex (systems like physics and collision detection usually become non-trivial), but its major advantage is that the player is free to solve problems as they see fit. The designer can set up a stage and throw some interactive elements into the mix and then let the player decide how best to approach the problem. The Grand Theft Auto series is the poster child for this kind of design.

On the other end of the spectrum is the canned challenge theory. In this case, the designer sets up specific scenarios with specific solutions, and all paths through the game are defined ahead of time. Instead of making a highly interactive environment this approach dictates that each sequence is a puzzle with exactly the elements that are needed to complete it. Canned challenge games are easier to polish because of this intrinsic determinism, and this approach has an advantage over the procedural approach in that it can very easily host a complex narrative (at the cost of player freedom and expressiveness). Games like Guitar Hero fall squarely on this side: when a note hits the strum bar line, you must play that same note with the controller in order to avoid losing points. Super Mario Bros. and most older games are similar: the move set is restricted but continued challenge comes from applying that move set to pre-determined level layouts. Resident Evil lives on this side of the fence as well.

Of course, most games are some blend of both categories. Procedural game play is very popular in Western games (thanks to GTA and a few others) while Japan seems to prefer story-heavy games that are mostly linear, pre-determined challenges. The Metal Gear Solid series is an excellent example of how the two types of design can be melded: though the progression from room to room is linear and pre-determined, each room may be approached a number of different ways, and the MGS world is populated by a fairly complicated set of rules. You can run in guns blazing, or try to find a way to sneak, or try to silently dispose of the enemies, or try to distract enemies with items, or find a hidden path around the challenge, etc.

The reason that I’ve spent so much of this review talking about two schools of game design thought is that I think Alone in the Dark 5 is best understood in the context of procedural vs linear game play. Alone in the Dark 5, like Metal Gear Solid, attempts to blend procedural and canned challenges together into a single piece. Unfortunately, the result is not nearly as cohesive as the MGS games; Alone swings wildly from one extreme to the other with very little gradation in-between. There is an attempt to make the world expressive: the game features fairly complicated rules regarding items that can be combined and set on fire. It’s possible to throw a bottle of explosive liquid and shoot it, or open it and make a trail of gas on the floor which can then be lit, or open it and throw it to make a trail, or take a rag and put it into the bottle to make a molotov cocktail, or attach tape to the bottle and stick it to things, etc. There’s also an open world area, a lot of physics, and even a GTA3-style car driving mode. But every other level or so takes the player out of the procedural world and into linear, deterministic indoor levels. In these sequences there are monsters to fight, puzzles to solve, and mazes to run, pretty much just like any other third-person survival horror game.

The problem, I think, is that the two modes of play are at odds with each other and the game itself ends up being sort of mediocre at both. The dynamic physics and collision systems that are necessary for the emergent gameplay modes end up hampering the linear levels; the simulation just isn’t precise enough to handle close-quarters movement and combat as well as games that are written specifically for that mode. On the other hand, the need to have a linear story and interleave canned levels deals a blow to the procedural side of the design: the open world is not very large or open, the car dynamics are much more limited than other open world driving games, and for all of the different ways the player can set things on fire, it turns out that shooting the can of gas is the most effective solution for almost every problem. I think that the main failing of Alone in the Dark is that it just isn’t quite competent enough to effectively host both types of game design in a single package, and the result is general mediocrity.

There are other, more minor problems that also hurt the game. I don’t like the way that enemies can only be disposed of with fire; it makes fighting a pain in the butt when there is no fire around. The body-dragging mechanic doesn’t seem to work at all because you must back up into the fire that you are trying to bring the body to; I can’t count the number of times I died while trying to burn an enemy. There are long sections in the middle of the game (like, several hours) in which there are no health items whatsoever. The story is pretty bad and the characters are never developed. Using melee weapons is really hard. It’s clear that the game got to play testing very late: the level design polish is pretty high at the beginning of the game but it degrades significantly around the middle. The last couple of challenges in the game took me twenty or thirty attempts each because of simple, easily fixable design polish issues. The game is really buggy; I encountered all sorts of physics and collision problems, and for some reason I was denied a bunch of PS3 trophies that I completed all of the requirements for. And, for all its monsters and references to Lucifer, Alone only has a couple of genuinely scary scenes.

But what saves Alone in the Dark from being a completely blah game is that every once and a while you can see a spark of brilliance in its design. The game is strongest in the open world modes. At a couple of (unfortunately short) points in the game, you find yourself in a huge section of Central Park with access to cars and items, and you must destroy “roots of evil” that have cropped up in the park. These sections are really fun: you get in a car and drive to your destination, then play a very short and contained combat level that usually involves entering an indoor area and lighting some big fires. There’s also an absolutely fantastic sequence near the beginning of the game in which you must drive through the streets of New York as a giant earth quake rips the landscape around you up; that sequence alone is so dramatic and fun that it adds significantly to the game’s final score.

And Alone in the Dark has a bunch of interesting design ideas: skippable level segments, plot summaries, a really neat item selection interface, localized damage healing that doesn’t fall into the Call of Cthulhu trap of being too complicated, etc. The game is playable in both third and first person (something I haven’t seen done well since The Suffering), and when the world elements click, there’s a lot of fun ways to solve problems.

So, my conclusion about Alone in the Dark is that it’s overly ambitious. There are a lot of interesting ideas here but the tech and level design are just not quite up to the level of quality necessary to pull it off. It’s not a bad horror game by any stretch of the imagination, but considering how much work must have gone into all of the innovative features of the game, it’s a bit disappointing that it’s not really that great of a horror game either.