Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (GBC) Review (no fat)

Game Description

Followers of the Alone in the Dark series get a promised handheld port with the New Nightmare. The graphical masterpiece known as the high color backgrounds highlight the strong points of this GBC adventure. With a great story backing it, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare promises to keep gamers’ palms sweaty for hours.

AD: The New Nightmare- Survival Horror

The game follows the story of Edward Carnby, who investigates the mysterious death of his best friend Charles Fiske. Of all the places to bite the dust Charles does so in the creatively named ‘Shadow Island’.

Charles got a little bit carried away with his lust for some artifacts, containing a mysterious power. And the normal horror stereotypes follow, as you have a barrage of random battles with monsters awaiting you on the island. The unusual twist in this episode would be the battling; Alone in the Dark would usually be more favorable to games like Acclaims ‘D’, and in some ways still is, but the battle sequences in AD provide a break from the usual Sherlock drudgery.

Movement is limited in this mode and it almost plays as stiff as the exploration parts. However, the battle sequences are not ground breaking either, but they do tend to play to the strategic side. Only a couple of weapons are available. Plus, with limited ammo things get hairy really quick. There is the usual forgiving auto aim for the handheld, but still overall the battling is somewhat sloppy for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

AD: The New Nightmare - Easy Gameplay

It doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to master the controls or how to play this type of game, which is why the manual that comes with it isn’t even thick enough to be a good coaster.

Newbies and vets alike will take to the simple controls, as simple as a 2 button layout with an 8 way directional pad can be. The normal puzzle solving mode, where players walk around and pretty much match key scattered items/clues to move on to the next area, is excruciatingly limited. What seems like freedom will instantly play like follow-the-leader to seasoned gamers.

Amongst the lush graphics gamers will still find it hard to look for certain items, and since the backdrops in the scenery are merely for show, players are switched to an Atari-like battle sequence that looks completely different than the normal game.

AD: The New Nightmare Graphics

AD takes advantage of the rarely used processing power of the whopping 8-bit GBC. The backgrounds are really incredible to look at with a lot of effort and detail going into it, and as limited as it makes the rest of the game, for the genre in particular the background was a necessity.

The rest of the game looks normal and extremely old school Gameboy-ish, which may disappoint others who were looking for more rounded out graphics.

AD: The New Nightmare Sound

Pretty non-existent, the few tracks that are on the loop, when needed, do their job. The sound effects are a bit muffled in some cases, although that may be due to wear and tear on the GBC.

AD: The New Nightmare - Summing up

Without the random battles, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is nothing more than hide and seek with the items. The puzzles are nothing huge, and a lot of the in-game material went to the beautiful background graphics.

As questionable as sacrificing visuals for gameplay on a system that can’t graphically push past dinosaurs like the Game Gear or Atari Lynx, AD does a good job in providing decent gameplay for this particular genre.

This is a game strictly for taste, and to be quite honest, should be at the bottom of any gamers list even if they are fans of the series. And with the replay value being a big fat 0, there is a good chance that the next installment will be heavily revamped…just as this title should have been in the first place.

Buyers beware, with a nice red flag on top.

AD: The New Nightmare Cost

AD: The New Nightmare retails for $4.25