Review: Alone in the Dark: Inferno

Jeez. I need to stop picking up these crappy old survival horror games in the hopes of finding hidden gems. It so rarely happens. I'll tell you, it sure didn't happen with Alone in the Dark: Inferno. The Inferno edition of the game is the PS3 remake of an Xbox 360 title which was deemed unplayable upon release. I'll need to look up what exactly was changed because the game still seems pretty damn unplayable to me. Of all of the games I've played the whole way through, this one might be the only one that is not technically beatable. Due to glitches that prevent you from progressing, the game is essentially broken. Seemingly aware of this fact, the developers included a feature that allows you to skip to any park of the game like a DVD scene select menu. What. The. Fuck.
So they knew that the game didn't work and just decided to ship it anyway? On the second time it was released? It literally makes no sense. And there are soooo many glitches. Almost every step of the way through this game, I was battling a game engine that worked against me completing what the game was asking me to do. Objectives were unclear and sometimes the necessary elements to complete them did not load correctly or whatever, leading to situations where you have absolutely no idea what to do and no means to do it. The game can be stupidly difficult in this way- it will send you to the last checkpoint because of the game's poor design caused you to die. Get ready to complete the same sequences again and again until you do it the exact way the game wants you to.
What's really upsetting is that believe it or not, there was some real potential here for an awesome survival horror experience and some things work out quite nicely. You can't fault this game for lack of ambition- it tries to do so many things that it ends up feeling unfocused and sloppy, reaching a bit to far into other genres. You have your floaty driving sections, platforming with and camera angles, first person immersion exercises that border on the absurd. The inventory system is the most obvious example of the game's bizarre fixation with first person viewpoint. Essentially a spin off of the Resident-Evil-of-old style limited inventory slots, your weapons, tools and healing supplies are stored in your jacket pockets which you actually navigate through in first person. Crazy right? The combat is an amalgamation of combining materials to make bombs, clunky shooting, and even clunkier melee combat. Wait till you get a load of the melee in this game. It's bananas. While holding down a trigger, you must twirl the thumbstick in the direction you want to swing, taking into account the fact that you need a full swing radius to do any damage. Oh and you will have to solve puzzles in this way too. Good luck! There's quite a few puzzles in this game actually, almost none of which make any logical sense.
It's incredible how good one sequence will play just to be followed up by some momentum killing design errors that bring the whole experience crashing to the ground. The presentation isn't awful per se, for a game it's age (one of the first next gene titles), but when a game seems like it wasn't even tested for bugs before it ships, its hard to appreciate the good qualities. And the story certainly doesn't earn the game any addition points. It's the sort of B-Movie fare you would expect, laughably bad for the most part yet enjoyable enough to keep you sticking with until the end. With some more time in the cooker, this could have been a decent game, but as it stands, it's barely worth the 5(5!) dollars it cost at Gamestop.  4/10