Eden Studios, I ask this question with the utmost respect and concern for your future: what went wrong? It was just over two years ago that I was lucky enough to visit Eden’s offices, to see the game being made – to see the passion in its makers’ eyes and bear witness to the truly breathtaking promise of being able to physically interact with the game world.
When I spoke to the game’s lead designer, Hervé Sliwa, he revealed to me how the idea for the game came from his own chilling experience walking through Central Park at night. At the time, I was impressed with how the game promised to herald a return of the adventure game. Indeed, the prospect of an awesome, ground-breaking title has kept me on edge waiting for this game for the last two years.
WTF?
Fast forward to the present and I sit here staring
|
at the game’s credits wondering what the hell happened to the Alone in the Dark I was expecting. Not only is the entire experience devoid of any real scares, Eden managed to screw up some fairly fundamental
design elements.
I don’t have too much of a problem with the enemies in the game. The humanz, as they’re called, are tough as nails and can only be killed
|
by fire. Couple this stipulation with an extremely limited inventory system and you get a game that forces a kind of artificial dread on you, rather than abject fear.
The problem with the humanz, and all the demonic enemies for that matter, is that they respawn whenever you wonder off and come back, but the tools to destroy them do not. Further compounding the frustration is the fact
|
that Edward Carnby, the hundred year old protagonist with a bad case of incongruent potty mouth, is so bloody thick that he hasn’t worked out how to stuff things into his jacket properly. Confused? Well, Eden decided that in order to be really hip and cool they’d use a ‘revolutionary’ new inventory system – the realistic storage of items in Carnby’s jacket. Too bad this kind of realism totally sucks in computer games.
|
