Top 1 Xbox 360 Site

Taking the fear to a new level, the next-gen Alone in the Dark features the macabre style of the series played with new gameplay mechanics and a broader-reaching, action-packed play style. Explore fully-interactive realtime worlds, interacting with physics and roaming the wide-open, fright-filled environments.

This next-gen Alone in the Dark is also built around a unique episodic game structure — the story is split into a number of distinct 30-40 minute episodes, doled out one at a time as you play. Each time the player launches a saved game, the episode will begin with a video summary of the previous episode to quickly re-immerse the player in the story and removing the need to remember where they were or what they were doing. Every episode will close with a nail-biting cliff-hanger ending to rattle players’ nerves, and if the player is leaving the game a video teaser of the next episode will play to leave them wanting more.

Genre: Adventure

Publisher: Atari

Developer: Eden Games

Online Play:

Local Play:

June 24, 2008 –
Quality survival horror games are woefully hard to come by on consoles these days, and it’s easy to understand why. As hardware gets more powerful and gamers’ expectations grow, building a big, beautiful world full of mind-bending puzzles, creepy creatures and compelling storylines is an increasingly Herculean task.

But it’s a job Atari’s Eden Games studio bravely took on with Alone in the Dark, an ambitious adventure game set in and around New York’s Central Park. Alone in the Dark (only nominally connected to its genre-spawning predecessors) follows the tale of a paranormal investigator who wakes up in a burning building, unable to remember who he is and how he came to be surrounded by menacing thugs.

He soon learns that he is Edward Carnby, a foul-mouthed tough guy who’s mixed up in some devilish doings. As he makes his way out of the crumbling skyscraper he meets up with the feisty Sara, and they flee into Central Park to uncover the mystery of Edward’s background and the secret behind a stone with mysterious properties.

Click here to watch the review

I love a good yarn, and I was hoping to find one in Alone in the Dark. Instead I was introduced to yet another amnesiac fighting demons and carrying around a spooky stone. It doesn’t help that our hero is challenged in the dialogue department, having been endowed by the game’s writers with a nasty blue streak. You can count on hearing the words f*** or s*** nearly every time our scarred-up hero opens his mouth, an attempt at gritty realism that comes off as adolescent and trite.

It’s a shame that there’s not more depth beneath the surface of Alone in the Dark, but it’s not just the tired storyline that makes it a disappointment. There are many genuinely inventive ideas at play in Central Park, but few of them work as well as they should and most are failures. As a result, the game feels loosely cobbled together, and the experience ends up being full of inconsistencies, aggravations and contradictions.

It’s been a point of pride with the developers of Alone in the Dark that they’ve implemented realistic fire effects in the game, and they have reason to boast. Flames lick the walls to stunning effect; objects catch fire and can be used against enemies; puzzles, especially near the end of the game, make use of fire’s destructive properties; and flames can help light your way in dark corridors. At times, the flames behave so realistically that you forget they’re an illusion. Now that’s a feat.

The problem is, fire is the only way to kill enemies (inexplicably named “Humanz”), which is interesting at first but quickly becomes tedious. Although, there are many different methods you can use to dispatch your enemies