Xbox 360 Critic Reviews

Ambitious but inconsistent, frustrating but entertaining. Still an innovative adventure. [Aug 2008, p.62]

A third-person action-adventure with the beating black heart of a survival horror, Alone in the Dark is a game that needs to be experienced by everybody. Its novel approach of applying shocks into an episodic structure, eight hourly segments in all, is a masterstroke.

Alone in the Dark proves that with a little time and patience, a good game can be created from innovative ideas.

There's quite a lot to enjoy in this game. In most aspects, it stays true to the traditions of the genre, provided you can stomach the unnecessarily lengthy prologue and the aforementioned drawbacks (bad camera, lousy voiceovers, atrocious vehicle physics and so on).

As much as Alone In The Dark deserves to be criticised for its problems, it equally deserves to be lavished with praise for some outstanding ideas and set-pieces. A gracious failure, AITD should stand as a lesson for other developers to see what they should be striving for.

Edward’s trip to the park is no picnic, but suffer through the controls and some aggravation and you’ll be compensated with a lot of unique moments. The game needed more gestation to really iron out the interface issues, but it remains an adventure worth pursuing.

You want to love it, but it just keeps letting you down, and in the end that's the impression that sticks to the wall and stays there.

Sure, its plot is hugely contrived, it’s occasionally frustrating and really lacking in the kind of polish we expect from big-name games in this day and age. However, it’s also undoubtedly one of the most imaginative, ambitious and exciting titles to hit a console in the last few years.

Difficult and overly complicated control system.

Whilst not as executed quite to the level we'd hoped for, Alone in the Dark remains an original take on the survival horror genre, with its DVD-style structure and environmental interaction worthy of praise.