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Sometimes, the worst games can have the best ideas.

Alone in the Dark, a 2008 reboot/sequel to the cult “classic” survival horror title, is a game that tries a little bit of everything, and in the end isn’t easy to pigeonhole. It’s part third person action/adventure, part first-person shooter, part open-world exploration with a clunky driving system, and all buggy as all get-out.

And yet, it will remain one of the most memorable games of all time for me. It’s bold in its willingness to break genre conventions, and there is genuine brilliance buried in the messy controls and half-baked story. I’m going to try my best to explain why any part of this game is worth the effort, and why I hope more games are willing to take the kind of risks this one does.

The plot is thus: Edward Carnby, recurring series protagonist and paranormal investigator, wakes up in modern NYC with no memory and surrounded by angry men with guns. They’re trying to perform some ritual, there’s something about a stone, and blahdy blahdy blah the whole city suddenly starts to tear itself apart. Strange fissures start coursing over the walls, appearing to hunt people – and chasing Carnby specifically as he makes his escape. An old man warns Carnby about some prophecy he’s supposed to fulfill or avoid fulfilling, and so on. Long story short, Carnby has to piece together his memory, find out what he’s been up to, learn how that ties into what’s going on, and find a way to stop whatever force has been unleashed on the city. It’s not really that memorable; the actors are fine, but the script ranges from passable to laughable.

Anyway, here’s a summary of what it really does wrong:

- Movement is cumbersome, consisting of a third person view mode for environment interaction and melee combat, and a first-person mode for shooting. Fixed camera angles and tank controls are nothing new, but the game has a real problem with moving the thing around when you need it to either stay still, or follow at your back. Worse is if you’re doing something in first-person, it tends to snap back to third at really inopportune moments.

- Combat is no joy either. Most monsters can only be dispatched with fire; shooting or bashing the humanoid monsters will simply stun them unless you incorporate fire into the action. Using fire bullets requires precision aiming to hit a creature’s weak point, while swinging a weapon is far too cumbersome. You actually have control over how you bring the weapon around, be it over your head, from the side, etc; it’s an interesting idea but of little use in battle.

- The shoehorned-in love interest is perhaps the worst sidekick this side of Superfly Johnson. She splits up late in the game to do something plot-related and it’s never really clear what for, but frankly I’m only sorry she doesn’t leave earlier.

- Inventory is less than intuitive, you run out of space too quickly, and it’s a hassle to fumble with in combat. It’s neat to open your jacket and see where each and every item is physically strapped in, but by the time you fumble with making a batch of fire bullets or equipped an improvised flamethrower, the thing you were trying to use it on will be breathing down your neck.

- Physics are wonky across the board, but it’s mostly noticeable when driving: cars crash and spin after collisions with objects they should be able to either roll over or knock aside, and will catch on things you may not even be able to see. Worse, humanoid monsters can jump on top of cars and attack you while you drive; they will not miss and can only be shaken off at high speeds or by bailing out.

- There’s some really long and stupid fetch quest that involves burning evil tree roots throughout the park; you don’t have to tag them all, but a certain number are required to proceed in the quest. This is sort of fun at first, as taking them out sometimes involves using the oh-so-fun inventory system, but after about five or six of them the novelty wears *quite* thin.

- There are only two endings: Bad End and Non-End. I’m not yet sure which is worse.

I could go on, as many reviewers have, and rightly so; I could go on for quite some time about the stupid evil floor thingy that can only be scared away by light, but is annoyingly quick and a one-hit kill. But buried in all that – buried in all that unfiltered suck – are some of the best ideas I’ve ever seen. No, I’m not joking, not even a little. Alone in the Dark is an idiot savant game. It is the blind hacker from Sneakers. It is crippled genius. Allow me to explain.

The game is, if nothing else, consistent. The inventory system and MacGyver-style item creation, combined with natural physical puzzles that can very often be taken at face value, give the game a surprising amount of fluidity. It’s not like typical adventure games, where you get an item that has one and only one use. If a wooden obstruction needs to be burned down, you know fire is the answer, but it’s up to you to figure out how to get it there. If a live wire needs to be fished out of water, it’s not as simple as Use Stick On Wire; it’s on you to equip the stick and actually spin it around to pull the wire out. If a door needs to be blasted open, your tool is either a large blunt weapon or explosives, so you’d better go find some.

I’ll give you an example. While I was tooling around looking for the above-mentioned roots, I tracked one down inside a sealed building. The only way in was a door I couldn’t open. It was too narrow to ram it down with my car, so I needed something else. I could have improvised a sticky bomb with a bottle of lighter fluid, double-sided tape, and a box of bullets, but that would leave me low on ammo for anything that was waiting inside. I puttered around, looting a couple nearby cars for supplies, but nothing I could use. Then it hit me. I parked one of the cars close to the door, punctured the gas tank with a knife, touched it off with a lighter and ran like hell. Boom, door’s open.

Puzzles are often organic, or at least they sidestep the usual ’spade key to spade door’ nonsense. An early puzzle involves climbing down a crumbling elevator, where a wire has come into contact with a grating you have to pass. It seems insurmountable until you realize you can push it out of your way with your own body – and thus, hook it around a ledge to break the connection. A keypad in the lobby doesn’t have the code anywhere nearby, and yet bloody fingerprints on the pad should give you an idea. Or you can just bust the thing open and run an electrical bypass, or blow the door down. A car in the parking lot is locked, but the key’s in the ignition; that window isn’t bulletproof, in case you’re curious. A guard’s hand is needed for a handprint scanner, but his body is buried under rubble and he can’t be dragged there. That sword on the wall isn’t just for decoration; figure it out.

The puzzles create very mundane, if surreal, counterparts to the supernatural horrors around you. A bus is precariously balanced on a bit of rubble, suspended far over a chasm, and the only way to keep it from plummeting is to drag bodies from one end the other. A car is skewered vertically on a cliffside, blocking your path, and it creates an excellently nerve-wracking moment as you have to climb into the car, crawl over to the driver’s side, and carefully climb out. Scaling the side of a building via a loose cable is all well and good, until the cable starts coming loose at the top. The game plays exactly like the blockbuster actioner it advertises itself as. When it clicks – when it’s you bailing out of a burning car and hoping it takes some nasty with it, when it’s you figuring out you can mantle onto that ledge to climb under that wall, when it’s you trying to improvise a fiery solution to that sentient fissure speeding towards you, when it’s all you – there’s just nothing like it.

Even the game’s less shining moments, such as a frustrating drive through 59th street as New York City literally crumbles all around you, are bolstered by a grand vision and some of most fitting music around. Skip to about the five minute mark of this video and you’ll see what I mean. You can see even there where they got it wrong; no checkpoints, wacky car physics, etc. but when you do finally get it all in one go, when you do get to soak in the mayhem going on around you, it can be really engaging.

It’s so close to unabashed greatness that I wasn’t even mad when all was said and done. I simply felt let down. Without good game balance, without a good interface, without a satisfying narrative, most people won’t – and indeed shouldn’t – give Alone in the Dark the time of day. The Playstation 3 port supposedly improves by great lengths the controls, camera, and car physics. Those being the three biggest strikes against the game, I will check it out for that platform if I ever get one. That said, they’d have to rebuild huge chunks of the game from the ground up to really get at the core of why it doesn’t work.

And yet, it challenged me, it asked me to think and improvise in ways that better games have never even tried. It threw me into a hellish situation and said “Here are the rules, now get ready and STAY ready.” As I said of another strange title, Alone in the Dark isn’t what I’d call a fun game, but it is important in its own little way. I’d never recommend it, but I’m glad I played it.

Also, this song is awesome, and perfectly suited for the boss fight for which it plays. I am totally getting the soundtrack ASAP <3