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.

Land of the Dead

Also known as: Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green
Platforms: Xbox, PC
Release Date: 2005-10-26
Regions: USA

Resident Evil 5

Also known as: Biohazard 5
Platforms: PS3, Xbox360
Release Date: 2009-03-13
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Lack of scares can’t keep this action-oriented game from being loads of fun.

Resident Evil 5 is a great game. The art is beautiful, the control is dead-on, the challenges are well designed and the difficulty curve is just the right kind of x^2. There are some flaws–the story is bombastic and inane, the main character looks like he has hams for forearms, and the moment-to-moment game play barely resembles the games that made the series famous. But those are relatively minor flaws; over all, Resident Evil 5 is a well-made, fun, action-packed game.

It’s just not that great of a horror game.

Don’t get me wrong–RE5 tries hard to pull horror off given its action-packed game mechanics. All of the Resident Evil tropes are accounted for: zombie dogs, mysterious laboratories, people changing into giant tentacle monsters, and protagonists shooting said tentacle monsters with rocket launchers from escaping helicopters. Even many of the game play tropes have survived; the safe room / item box has transformed into a UI screen in-between levels, and the two character mode found briefly in almost every Resident Evil game (and the subject of Resident Evil 0) has been brought to the fore and online-ified. There are zombies, exploding heads, foreboding hallways, reports and diaries to read, et cetera–all of the details that you would expect from any Resident Evil game are present.

The problem is, these classic elements are all secondary traits to the game’s primary interest: action. The action-oriented game play doesn’t directly negate the horror elements of Resident Evil 5, but you can see that the development team’s focus was on making the explosions look cool rather than designing tension-inducing sequences. The spotlight is on the gun play, the enemy combat, and the (incredibly trite) epic battle between good and nonsensical evil. Which means that the horror elements, while present, feel like an afterthought.

I know that a lot of people have argued that Resident Evil 4 and 5 are not horror games because the emphasis on action robs them of their ability to scare. I don’t think that’s true; both games are capable of inducing tension, usually by throwing the player into a situation where they have limited resources and must overcome overwhelming odds by playing as perfectly as possible. That’s pretty much how the Resident Evil games have always worked–it’s just that the details have changed. “Playing perfectly” no longer means “find the fastest path between point A and point B while avoiding combat at all costs,” now it’s more like “defeat the following wave of 100 enemies given only the resources in your current possession.” But the effect is the same.

No, it’s not that horror and action are mutually exclusive elements, it’s that horror is a muscle that Resident Evil 5 simply chooses not to flex. There are a few moments in the game where the horror stuff takes over and those brief sections are a seat-of-your-pants experience. But the goal of the designers was not to make an action game with horror elements, not a horror game with action elements, and this decision shows.

Still, there are a few key design characteristics that help make the game play in Resident Evil 5 shine.

The decision to prevent movement while shooting has been decried up and down the halls of the internet as being “outdated,” but it absolutely makes Resident Evil 5 a fun game. The reason is that combat becomes much, much more intimate; the enemies are charging you and you can either run or fight, but not both at the same time. If you choose to run, you better be fast. If you choose to fight, the focus is on precision aiming and a misplaced shot could mean death. Either way the tension level induced by the combat is way, way higher than similar games in this genre, including Dead Space, Gears of War, and Dark Sector.

The inventory management has been dumbed down a lot since Resident Evil 4 (which is a shame), but the way that it fits into the death-respawn-retry cycle is genius. You get a chance to adjust your inventory and upgrade your weapons every time you start a level or restart at a checkpoint after death. This means that, while resource management is a problem in the very short term, it’s never an issue over the entire term of the game. One of the most difficult aspects of the original Resident Evil games is that you could play for hours and then suddenly run out of resources; if you didn’t have a save from far enough back in time the only solution was to start the game over and play more frugally. As Richard Rouse points out, Resident Evil 4 was designed to appeal to a much wider audience, and one of the things it did (in addition to making the control scheme and camera agree) was remove resource management as an axis for failure. Resident Evil 5 does it one better by keeping resource management gameplay as part of the equation (and rewarding people who, like me, are still in the habit of hoarding all ammo and health for some future boss), but making it a short-term, tactical problem. The player must decide what to bring into the next room, not what he’s going to need three hours from now. I commended Condemned for accomplishing the same thing by making combat very hard but sprinkling health packs all over the levels, but Resident Evil 5’s approach, while a bit more heavy handed, extends to all of the resource types in the game.

Trite as the story is, it’s well told. I commented about this while playing the game, and it’s worth mentioning here again. The game is chalk-full of details about the characters and backstory, and if the player is interested there’s a whole lot of exploring to do. Dead Space made a pretty good attempt at this too (though its story was also lame for different reasons), but I think Resident Evil 5 does it better. Both of these games are still learning how to integrate dialog, text, and other types of narrative bits into an action-centric game from titles like Bioshock, but the results are not bad.

It’s just that, when all is said and done, the game’s not too scary because it doesn’t care to be. Rather than be Alien or Aliens, it’s gone for Independence Day. And that’s fine–there’s room in the genre for big, bombastic horror games that could be more effective but choose to put their efforts elsewhere. I have to admit, however, that as tired as the old Resident Evil format was, I find myself missing many of its classic elements, especially when I see them being reused in this most recent iteration of the franchise.

Fatal Frame 3

Also known as: Rei 3
Platforms: PS2
Release Date: 2005-11-08
Regions: USA Japan Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Girls visiting sinister Japanese buildings at night continues to be a successful formula for this series, though to be fair Fatal Frame III does have some new tricks up its sleeve.

Fatal Frame III is subtitled “The Tormented.” I don’t understand why games have subtitles; it seems like the name of the franchise and the number of the series should be enough. In any case, “The Tormented” is a terrible subtitle for this game because it contains very little actual tormenting, either of the player or the player characters.

Like the previous two games in the series, Fatal Frame III is about girls stuck in scary old Japanese buildings fighting off ghosts with an antique camera. Tecmo’s classic brew of vulnerable protagonists and dilapidated Japanese mansions is as potent as ever, even though some of the content has been lifted wholesale from the previous titles. Temco has also tried to make some changes to the formula, with mixed results. But generally, Fatal Frame III is a competent horror game and an excellent addition to the series.

For this iteration, the Project Zero team has changed the context up a bit. Instead of a single character exploring an ancient Japanese home or village, several characters are playable in different, interlocking locales. The main protagonist, Rei, visits the sinister “Mansion of Sleep” every night in her dreams, but during the day you have the opportunity to move her around her regular home. She eventually begins to experience other people’s dreams, which is how the game allows the player to play as different people. During the day, Rei can develop film that she took in her dream, investigate the history of the spooky mansion, save the game, and review other information about the story that she has collected. At night, Rei travels to the Mansion of Sleep, and each night she is able to dig a little deeper into its maze-like depths. As other characters are introduced, new sections from the mansion are revealed and unlocked. If you’ve played the first two Fatal Frame games, you’ll recognize some of the sections as ares from those two games. In fact, the protagonist from the first game, Miku, is one of the playable characters.

The separation of the day world and the dream world is really well done, and it allows the developers to give the player a breather without including Resident Evil-style safe rooms. Later in the game, the horror of the dream world begins to infect the regular world, which is a startling and extremely effective way to scare the player.

The fear factor in this game is also very high during the mansion sections. The mansion is claustrophobic and oppressive, and seems far more unsettling than the previous games. The amazingly well-done music and visuals really help sell the experience, and when playing the game I marveled at the degree of queasiness it was able to produce in me. I haven’t felt like that since the underground prison section in Silent Hill 2.

The addition of multiple playable characters isn’t quite as smooth, but it’s still pretty cool. The problem is that there’s no real difference between most of the characters. One of the characters, Kei (the first playable male in the series), has the ability to hide from ghosts, and his camera works slightly differently than the others, but these changes do not improve the game. If anything, the inconsistent camera rules make combat with that character annoyingly difficult. The other problem with the multiple-character approach is that while all three characters add to the same score pool, each of their cameras must be upgraded independently. Since you have to spend score to upgrade a camera, it is pretty easy to max out one character while neglecting the others. There is also some weirdness when it comes to camera upgrades and items: some upgrades apply to all three characters, while others are character-specific.

Fatal Frame III is a lot longer than its predecessors. I finished in about 15 hours, which is pretty long considering that the previous games clocked in at under 10 hours. In fact, the title may be a little too long: once all of the mansion has been uncovered, the game sort of degrades into a shortest-path problem, with few story events or fights in between. Towards the end of the game the developers add in a sort of time limit, which makes traversal of the map more arduous and is generally annoying. I think it would have been a tighter experience if they cut the playtime down a little bit.

The game only has one major flaw. There are a couple of other minor flaws (the control scheme is beginning to feel a bit long in the tooth, I wished that there were more interesting camera upgrades, and there are a couple of enemies that you have to beat over and over again), but the only huge problem I had with the game was the boss fight. I ranted about this problem already, so I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say that the end boss is so poorly designed that I almost gave up on the game instead of finishing it.

The story in Fatal Frame III is ok. Like previous Tecmo stories, it’s a little less trite than other video game franchises but still fairly trite all the same. It doesn’t really matter: the visuals and characters sell the experience on their own, so the story isn’t all that important to the experience. As usual, the rest of the production is top notch: the visuals are astounding and the audio in particular stands out.

All in all, I liked Fatal Frame III better than most of the other critics. Though the game play is still a bit simplistic, and even though the end boss fight made me want to throw my controller through the screen of my TV, the game still ranks in the top tier of horror games. The concept remains unique and fun, and there’s really nothing about the presentation that can be complained about. And perhaps most importantly, Fatal Frame III is pretty damn scary. While not a masterpiece, I think that Tecmo has done quite well with the third installment of this series.

Condemned

Platforms: Xbox360, PC
Release Date: 2005-11-16
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★★
Condemned is in many ways a classic horror game dressed up as a first person next-gen launch title. A gem!

Condemned was one of the first titles released for Microsoft’s Xbox360 platform. As a launch title, I expected that it would be pretty poor. The demo I saw the of game at E3 in 2005 seemed to confirm my suspicions; Condemned looked like a first-person brawler in which you beat homeless people to death with a steel pipe–not exactly my idea of a good time. So even when I found the game for $20 new, the only reason I picked it up is that some of the readers of this site had given it glowing endorsements. I’m delighted to say that my initial impressions were completely wrong and my readers were absolutely right–Condemned is a great horror game, and it is very scary.

The main character in Condemned is FBI agent Ethan Thomas, a specialist in tracking down serial killers. With the city’s crime rate skyrocketing and drug use at an all-time high, there are a lot of serial killers out there for him to find, and each has his own twisted M.O. While investigating the scene of a murder by a killer called The Match Maker (so named because he leaves his victims posed with mannequins in macabre death scenes), Thomas is framed for the deaths of two police officers. He realizes that the only way to prove his innocence is to track down the real killer, which requires him to crawl through the underbelly of modern society, through one abandoned and dilapidated building after another, into areas of the city that even the police avoid. Along the way he is constantly assaulted by drug addicts and psychopaths, and eventually things that are even more sinister.

Despite its “next generation” trappings and first-person perspective, Condemned is at its core it is a dyed-in-the-wool survival horror game. The developers at Monolith have expertly lifted fundamental elements of the best horror games and transplanted them into this first person adventure. As I played through it I marveled at how many of the mechanics and ideas from Silent Hill and Resident Evil had survived the translation from third person to first; though the level structure, combat mechanics, and story line are very different from the third person horror state of the art, Condemned makes use of key elements of other horror games extremely well.

For example, one of the key elements of progression in Silent Hill 2 is descent. Condemned picks up on this theme are uses it effectively: the player is constantly delving deeper and deeper into the areas he visits, and each subsequent basement increases the level of tension another notch. As in Silent Hill 2, Condemned also asks the player to make one-way descents, by jumping though holes or otherwise moving downward along a path that will obviously not allow a return. The combat system is another axis for horror: like the Silent Hill games, almost all combat is with melee weapons and some weapons can degrade and break over time. Condemned’s combat is actually fairly unique (it uses a first-person attack and parry system, the kind you might expect in a sword fighting game), the context within which it operates is well trodden ground. In fact, a lot about Condemned reminds me of Silent Hill: the character has a flashlight, film grain is used to make the world seem more gritty, and the story keeps you on your toes about which events might be reality and which might be illusion.

That said, Condemned isn’t derivative at all, and it was designed with remarkable acumen. One element I really like about the design is that while combat itself is very hard, the game doesn’t allow that difficulty to compound across the entire level. Health kits are easy to find and plentiful, so if you can survive a particular encounter with a lunatic wielding a fire hatchet, you will probably be able to heal before the next attack. This means that combat itself is hectic, difficult, and highly stressful, but that the progression from one fight to the next doesn’t become exponentially difficult. It’s enough for you to be able to best a particular enemy or set of enemies; the game designers don’t mind refilling your health before the next fight, which keeps the frustration level low even though difficult sections. There are many such design decisions throughout Condemned, and they really improve the overall experience.

I’ve not yet discussed the most fundamental element of Condemned’s design: claustrophobia through level design. Fear in Condemned is not a function of the enemies populating the world but rather the world itself. The game takes place in a series of extremely dilapidated locales, and each is claustrophobic and oppressive. It’s constantly dark, often pitch-black, and as you stumble through the ruins of some old department store or out-of-service railway, the tight, flicking beam of your flashlight is just enough to keep you oriented. The level design and art in Condemned absolutely makes the game; very few games that I have played have been able to invoke this level of tension with setting alone (Silent Hill 2’s underground prison, however, is still the king of this particular contest).

Speaking of the level art, I should mention that the graphics and art in Condemned are very good. I was particularly impressed with the lighting used throughout the game–there are a few scenes where I had to stop and look around just to enjoy the competency with which the lighting was composed. There were things about the art style that I didn’t like (more on that in a moment), but the level art is fantastic. I don’t really believe that better graphics make better games, but Condemned is an example of a game that gets a lot of benefit from the convincingness of its visuals.

Not everything about Condemned is perfect, but I don’t have a lot to complain about. The game does get a little repetitive after the first eight or nine hours; the basic formula is good and the levels keep changing but sometimes there’s a little hint of monotony. The very last level takes place outdoors and consequently the game loses a lot of its power over the player. The CSI elements, where high-tech gadgets are used to find evidence and progress the story, are great but underused. The main character seems to be the worst-looking character in the game; he’s bulky and unconvincing when you see him in cut scenes. The story, while not exactly predictable, ended up being slightly more straight-forward than I would have liked; the details are underdeveloped and parts of the plot can only be accessed by completing achievements, which is kind of dumb. The game didn’t do a good enough job of teaching me how to play early on, and I played almost the entire game without realizing that I had access to certain moves. The game is so dark that I had to play it at night time (the best time anyway, but still) as any glare completely obscured the view. I have a couple of little gripes about the AI, and the way damage is communicated to the player, and stuff like that. But really, all of these complaints are minor; they don’t really damage the overall experience enough to warrant expounding on.

Condemned is a scary game, and while it looks and behaves a little differently than other games in the genre, it is a game that knows its roots. It’s also an excellent example of how mechanics from fundamentally different types of games can be repurposed to create something new and exciting; it is much more than the sum of its parts, even though not all of those parts are original.