In an alternate reality, I would be sitting here today tapping up a review on how wonderful it is that Alone In The Dark has lived up to all of the hype and ended up giving us gaming folk something truly special. I would be sitting here free from the shoulder-aching tension and rage of dragging myself through nine stages of inconsistent action and misplaced ideas, or the brain ache that has occurred due to wrestling with a confusing, over-complicated control system. Then again, in an alternate reality I would also have a fridge full of beer and week-old curry on my desk and would probably be confident enough to come to work wearing a natty sombrero, so perhaps being lodged firmly in reality is for the best.

Not that this eases the disappointment that Eden Games’ latest take on the rather haggard Alone In The Dark series has left me. You see, I was really, really looking forward to this as some of you may have noticed, so having to sit here and take the thing apart is all the more unfortunate. By now I am sure we’ve all seen the promo videos displaying the game’s rather spiffy fire effects and physics-based puzzles and it’s a mild comfort that these at least prevent the game from being a total write-off, but at a time when Resident Evil and Silent Hill are consistently being rehashed into entertaining survival action titles, Alone In The Dark walks the walk but can’t talk the talk.

Mixing a bit of Tomb Raider ledge hopping with Resi 4 styled over-the-shoulder adventuring, the game kicks into life with you waking up on a bed knowing absolutely nothing of what is going on or who the heck you are. Luckily you quickly discover that your lead character – Edward Carnby – doesn’t actually know anything either. Carnby was, as the sharp-minded of you will have remembered, the lead character from the first Alone in The Dark game set back in around 1920 and hence seeing him in a modern day surrounding is a little odd, but thankfully the whole thing actually worms its way through the plot and makes sense eventually.

The initial level of the game, in which you have to guide Carnby away from his mysterious captors and out of a disintegrating building, lays down a number of markers for how the whole show works, and it’s actually really quite fun. The puzzles often rely on using your environment to solve situations or create new paths, so Carnby can drag desks around to use as steps to ledges, swing and jump from wires to scale walls and gaps or smash in a door with a blunt object to allow him to pass through.

Then there’s the much-vaunted fire that occasionally blocks your path. More than just being an obstacle to navigate, however, the fire quickly becomes an integral part of the game and allows you to set scattered objects alight so you can burn down blockades or deal with the rather brutal monsters you are up against. It slots together very nicely, and it’s something that is used throughout the game to provide solutions to a number of puzzles.

Whilst we’re dealing with the puzzling, it’d be remiss of me not to say that they are, for the most part, what Alone in The Dark does best, consistently challenging the player to survey his surroundings and use a good dollop of logic in order to solve them. Electric wire dangling in some water that you need to walk through? How’s about grabbing a piece of wood and hooking the thing over a nearby railing, allowing you to progress safely. Clambered into a bus teetering on the edge of a cliff that you must run to the front of and exit? No problem for Mr. Edward Carnby, folks – simply dragging bodies around the buses interior to balance it will allow you to beat a hasty retreat and not plunge of the cliff of eternal doom.

It’s during moments like these that the game will have you sitting there in front of your screen ready and willing to fall in love with the whole thing. On more than one occasion it’s cleverer than a particularly crafty weasel, and it gives you the satisfying feeling that, hey, you’re achieving something and that the bit of your brain you thought had died when you stopped watching The Krypton Factor still kinda works. Pretty early in the game you also discover that a decent chunk of it is going to involve a very Grand Theft Auto styled driving and questing portion, thus all the cards seem to be falling into place.

The driving, however, ends up becoming one of the more frustrating elements in the game, and nowhere is this more prevalent than the game’s second chapter in which you have to belt through a crumbling New York and toward safety. On paper this actually sounds rather exciting and it packs plenty of thrilling set pieces in such as roads falling apart, buildings toppling over in your way and buses exploding and flying inches over your car’s roof, but the reality is that each of these events happens so quickly that you are given very little time to react and avoid them, leading to numerous frustrating deaths. Allied to the car handling being more floaty than the inside of a Milky Way the whole chapter quickly degenerates into a frustrating trial-and-error experience that’ll have you gritting your teeth, and to make things worse you have to start the whole thing again if you falter as there’s no checkpointing along the way. Ugh.

Other quirks pop up in the way the game is controlled, by which I actually mean the way the game attempts to force you to control it. Carnby stores items in his trench coat and retrieving said tools is a matter of pressing a button to open up the coat, selecting them and then switching back out to use them. This sounds alright, but you quickly realise that if you wanted to use multiple instances of the same item – say, medical equipment – that you have to open the coat, select one, use it, open the coat, select another and then use it… you get the picture. All the while a marauding pack of monsters are mere feet away and can attack you as soon as you stop fiddling about.

Now, this may have been a conscientious decision on the part of the developers to invoke terror and panic in their audience by forcing them to go mental with the first aid gubbins and heal themselves quicker than an experimental Red Bull-infused St John’s Ambulance man and that would be fine, but for the love of frick don’t then go on to punish them by making the control method for doing it so clunky and awkward that they’ll end up tying themselves in finger knots in the process. If you’re going to force people to heal real time, make damned sure that the only thing the player has to blame when a monster interrupts him mid-spray and tears holes in his body is himself and his lack of skill. By having a control system that’s so weighed down by having to press a sequence of buttons to do the simplest of tasks, you’re basically forcing him into a corner and then punching him in the face to add insult to injury. Do we really need to press a D-pad button, then select a spray, then hold right trigger over a wound? Nah.

The net result of this is that you end up having to spend far too much time concentrating on the kinds of things that a good action adventure game throws in as small, simple exercises. Something as simple as equipping your gun is achieved by pressing the RB button once to get it out, the right trigger to set you up in first-person view and then the right trigger once again to actually shoot the thing. Whilst in third-person mode the left stick controls forward and backward movement whilst the right one is dedicated to allowing Carnby to swing chairs, poles and the like around to batter monsters and flimsy doors. This means you can’t actually aim your gun or even do something as simple as, say, look around behind you without having to press Y to switch to the first-person view, an annoyance that’s amplified by the latter viewpoint having even more lethargic turning circles.

Then there are the silly little niggles – the ones that aren’t completely game crippling, but all add up to detract from the experience. Within a few moments of the game you come across numerous graphical glitches and dodgy clipping, whilst the game’s checkpoints are unsympathetic and often lead to you having to repeat whole sequences or sets of puzzles if you should fall foul of the monsters or, more likely, the controls. Those wanting to play without sound or at reduced volume are stuffed too – for no apparently good reason the game doesn’t come loaded with any subtitles at all (something that I am informed the PS2 version rectifies, strangely). To be honest you’re not missing too much though; whilst the story is packed with action and at times suspense, the dialogue seems to follow the Quentin Tarantino theory that the more expletives that you pack in the more gritty and mature things will seem.

Perhaps the most curious inclusion in the package, however, is the DVD-like option to skip through levels should you want to. The sale speak regarding this is that it allows everyone to complete the game even if they get stuck and it fits in with the television presentation style (each time you load your game you are presented with a short resume of previous plot occurrences), but surely having the ability to completely bypass 90% of most of the levels at will is a feature that’ll only be used by those who hate the thing enough to not want to actually play it, in which case you could argue that they would probably have stopped playing in the first place. Perhaps giving a shorter skip span could have solved the issue slightly and not offered such an alarmingly easy route through, but all the same it’s really quite odd.

You get the impression that Alone in The Dark is very much a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth, with too many ideas and systems being chucked in and tangling themselves up. Upon finishing the game and having been through platforming, shooting and the open-environment objective questing that fills the majority of game from the middle point onward, it strikes you that it’s the most traditional and linear parts of the game that really shine, and that even then they are hampered by a clumsy control system. By cutting the fat off the bone and concentrating on the bits that they can obviously do very well we could have been left with a very enjoyable adventure game but, as with so many other titles, Alone in The Dark trips itself up trying to be too clever and as a result is nothing more than an immensely frustrating what-if.