Alone in the Dark

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 27th June 2008
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Graphics

Graphically, Alone in the Dark is a bit of a conundrum. For the most part it’s very pretty, but that beauty is ruined by frequent physics bugs – leather coats that bounce off walls like a rubber-coated baby thrown from a third-storey window. There are also some fundamental problems with how some of the characters look thanks to the wonky anti-aliasing.

Part of this is going to be because of the physics system (Havok), but the there are graphical problems too and there seems to be huge variations in the amount of detail. Characters like Edward and Theophile are hi-res and lush, while Sarah looks more like a melted chocolate bar with some lipstick on it.

Cutscenes where the characters are all together and not just falling off cliffs (there really is a huge amount of rappelling and climbing in this game) make this especially obvious.

Still, if you want to be sure just what sort of bang you are getting for your buck before you take the plunge then we’ve got a break down of the game’s graphical settings below, limited though they are.

Presets

It seems a bit lame to start with looking at the graphical presets, which come in High, Medium and Low flavours, given the usual level of depth we go into at bit-tech. The options in Alone in the Dark are actually hugely limited though and have little impact.

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Graphical presets on High (left), Medium (centre) and Low (right), click to enlarge

To be honest, the effects of the graphical options really aren’t all that massive, or that varied. There are options to tweak vegetation levels, effects, light clipping distance, shadows and HDR. That’s it.

Shadows don’t have that much of an effect and only really affect character shadows. The effect of HDR toggling is predictable too, but light clipping distance is something you can pick up on. That setting, which scales with the preset, changes where the light will clip through objects such as plants.

The result is that if you stand X number of steps away from a plant with light on it then it will appear dark. Take a step closer though and it lights up suddenly – it’s a kind of pop-up effect and the higher you set it the further away that pop-up will be. You can see the effect of this setting in the screenshots above.

Effects

There is one setting however which has a very definite effect on the game and that’s the Effect setting – or FX, as Atari has lamentably renamed it. Again, it comes in High, Medium and Low settings and we have screenshots below.

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Graphical Effects on High (left), Medium (centre) and Low (right), click to enlarge

This setting affects the use of all sorts of little effects and filters, but the most notable one is the mist which rolls across Central Park. True, you won’t be spending huge amounts of time actually roaming the park above-ground anyway, but the mists, smokes and fogs are still a fairly fundamental effect and can really add to immersion of the game – provided that you don’t mind having the distance obscure a little.

On the Medium and Low settings these effects start to die off a little, as does the density of some background smoke – though most other items and effects are left the same.

This lack of proper graphical options is perhaps the biggest technical problem with Alone in the Dark since what it essentially does is limit how far you can scale the game to suit your hardware – though the specs are pretty forgiving anyway. Be warned though that if you love fiddling with multiple settings then Alone in the Dark is going to leave you wanting.

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