This is simultaneously one of the most innovative and worst executed games I have ever played. The pitch: amnesiac MacGyver versus inflammable zombies. The controls are complex and ungainly, with different configurations representing a staggering array of actions: driving vs. walking, carrying a fire extinguisher vs. a chair, aiming a gun and/or a flashlight while walking vs. climbing vs. dragging a corpse, etc. You’ll use analog sticks to hot wire a car (if you couldn’t find keys under the visor), to close your eyes and blink, to pull a power cable out of the water with a pipe. You’ll hold a lighter in one hand and mosquito spray in the other for a flamethrower, and put cloth into a bottle of gasoline covered in double-sided tape so your molotov cocktail doesn’t roll back when you throw it. Your gun isn’t even worth using unless you pour fuel into each clip to set the bullets on fire.

After I replayed the same escape-in-a-car scene so many times that I got an achievement for having driven 10 miles, I was almost ready to dismiss this as an abysmal failure and move on. Eventually, though, I started finding something rich beneath the unforgiving deaths and bollocksed interface. I actually want to know what happens next in the story, and finding creative solutions to problems (often with fire) is pretty gratifying. Lacking explosives to take down a door, for instance, I drove a car up to it, walked a short distance, and shot the gas tank. It takes awhile to get the hang of the variety of ways you can interact with this environment, but I’m not sure if it’s Alone in the Dark‘s fault for offering too many options, or every other game’s fault for not offering enough.