Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare

I’ve heard it over and over – “Oh I just can’t watch scary movies otherwise I will have nightmares.” Now I don’t know about some of you, but a scary movie isn’t enough to keep me tossing and turning all night. I can’t help but separate myself and see the lights, the make-up, fake blood, and the scary monster which is just the work of a few mechanisms and a whole lot of Hollywood alchemy.

Games, however, whether I’m playing an RPG in the fantasy realms, an action title in urban settings, or even an adventure title in an old museum, I’ve always been prone to reliving my video adventures in the dream realms. Sometimes I am in the game with some of the other characters, sometimes I only have the abilities, of the players in the game – but I inevitably fall into a pattern of really getting into my favorite games. So imagine the fun when I get my hands on a really good survival horror title? Maybe that was what they were going for when they named Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

Welcome to Shadow Island, Edward Carnby/Aline Cedrac (take your pick, you can play who you like). After a violent crash landing over the evil infested isle, you are going to start your journey alone (hmmm, I guess that was rather obvious from the title) with only a flashlight and a couple items to your name.

If you are Edward - Seems that Edward’s friend, Mr. Fiske has had his fingers in the wrong cookie jar and he wound up dead. What was in the cookie jar you ask? Oh just 3 ancient tablets that unlock an incredible power that could potentially be used for less than noble purposes. So at the behest of a mysterious Fred Johnson and your own will to avenge the death of your friend, you have decided to pick up where Fiske left off and solve these mysteries yourself. When you start out you have a gun and the calm demeanor of someone who’s been here before.

If you’re Aline, you are driven by your scholarly work, and maybe more? During the beginning cut scene you are clued in that Aline has information that she has ties to the events on Shadow Island – but after the crash, while she’s stranded on the top of the manor, you learn very quickly just how unprepared she was for this trip – both physically (lack of a weapon) and mentally.

Either way, there are forces at work pulling strings behind the scenes trying to harness the power of the tablets for themselves -  and who pulled the strings to get our heroes to be in this predicament.

This game is tough – but from my general experience, this is what survival horror games are all about. There wouldn’t be much horror if you had limitless weapons, and what would be the point of classifying it as survival-horror if you could just waltz through the whole game and suck up the monsters as if you were a tank sent in to demolish doll houses? To make it worse, if you are Aline, you don’t even start out with a weapon – only a flashlight. You’ll learn in the beginning of the game that the light helps keep the little beasties at bay, but not enough to keep them from taking a nibble on you the minute your slowly moving light doesn’t keep up with their movements.

There’s your usual lack of ammo to make this typically challenging, but what’s worse is these monsters don’t stay gone – they respawn – making you use more ammo on a room you just cleared. This can make some parts of the game infernally irritating to some as sometimes you will have to retrace your steps to solve a puzzle or find a key (or the door it fits in). And guess what else? When you run out of your limited ammo, you don’t even have a physical attack to defend yourself . So that means run until you luck out and find something good or until you run out of life due to the pack of monsters nipping at your heels.

So what kinds of fun toys do you find lying around Shadow Island. A wide variety of metaphysical weapons will become available to you as you progress. As expected, the first couple weapons are really slow and not so accurate (e.g. double barrel shotgun) and your main drive in the beginning is just going to get far enough to get a weapon that isn’t so unreliable. The good news (?) for people not as straight action oriented is that if you decide to play as Aline you will have a moderately more puzzle oriented and less action oriented game.

Monsters don’t particularly have to be too smart to be a tough factor in this game since all they have to do is cause you to deplete your ammo through elements of surprise or evasive maneuvers (this includes your evading your flashlight). After that, you’re just a buffet they might have to do a little running to capture. I didn’t notice the AI to be particularly out of the ordinary in either positive or the negative. As I mentioned earlier, the worst part of the monsters is they keep coming back the second you leave the room.

Now, on to the eye candy. The PSX is alive and well with the production of The New Nightmare: It’s quite the visual treat and care was taken to really give PSX owners a show for their money. The backgrounds and cut scenes show that the capabilities of the PSX were well utilized. The monsters are nothing exceptionally out of the ordinary but they get the point across. Even for all the “dark” there is plenty to see and it never gets hard to look at throughout the title.

Overall, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is a good addition to a PSX gamer’s collection, and a great addition to fans of the genre. It has good visuals, audio, and solid gameplay. It attains a high creepiness factor and keeps even the most avid survival-horror fan on their toes with its challenging game play. Looking for something to keep you up at night? Try this New Nightmare.

Game Play (8): The game play of The New Nightmare is pretty standard to what you’d expect if you’ve played a game like this before. Run around, manage ammo, unlock doors, and don’t get yourself dead. The plot is fairly well adhered to throughout the game and there aren’t any loading times or unavoidable cut scenes to slow your progress. The controls are fairly basic and 3/4 of the struggle in the beginning is to adjust to your character’s speed and your orientation control.

Graphics (9): The graphics for the PSX version of this game are amongst the finest I have seen. The developers have really gone the extra mile to craft a high-quality and great looking “scary” game.

Sound (8):  The “spook-factor” effects – such as lightning and demon noises are crisp. Another pleasant surprise was the score for The New Nightmare. Instead of being a slopped together attempt that sounds like something out of your local traveling Halloween haunted house, the tracks suitably creepy. The voiceovers and sound effects are standard, not too harsh or too bland.

Difficulty (8): If you’ve played survival horror before and you enjoy it – you’re not even going to notice anything difficult about playing this game – you’re already going to know how to play. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the genre, you will be introduced to the fine art of mutilating monsters on an extremely limited ammo budget, a speed challenged weapon (at least in the first few hours), and of course the endless seek-and-find for keys to open locked doors.

Concept (7): While the newest installation to the survival horror genre does an excellent job in taking advantage of the PSX system, I didn’t find any truly unique or startling aspects which distinguished The New Nightmare from other survival horror games. Resident Evil comparisons? I don’t buy into those. The only comparison between these two is they share genres, just as two racing games share the same genre. If you like the genre – you’ll enjoy The New Nightmare.

Overall (8.25): The founder of survival horror returns in The New Nightmare with a PSX incarnation that does the system and the genre justice. It does everything it’s supposed to do: It has a suitably suspenseful and spooky atmosphere, an appropriate plot that is developed throughout the game, and just the kind of reality based ammo availability and weapon issues we’d all run into if we just happened to be trapped in a house without fully loaded arsenals lining the walls.