The early exploits of Edward Carnby pioneered the 3D survival-horror genre. However, the PC-born series, after its conception back in 1992, has since turned into a game that has retained none of its past glory. What was once revolutionary, is now a brainstorming session that spiralled out of control and never once touched on the subject of how the ideas could be applied consistently.

So where do the issues lie? Well, gameplay and progression involve physical battles between you and a maddening camera as you lead an amnesic Carnby around a series of rooms that are dressed up in darkness to look like open vistas. The structure of the game tends to involve rubbing your character around the walls (well, three inches away from them) dipping in and out of fi rst-person mode to manually glean the whereabouts of a single trigger icon that will grant you exit. And because of this linear structure, frequently dying due to a cocktail of trial-and-error progression and shoddy camera work, then being sent back to replay a series of events, void of any real organic gameplay, gets tiring very quickly.

Later on the game does open up. The puzzles get a little more inventive and fi nally, after an hour or so, you encounter your fi rst enemies; one predictable, the other goofy: zombies and bats respectively. The bats are annoying and almost impossible to hit; the zombies move slovenly and fail to instill any tension or real threat. In fact, it’s pretty easy to avoid them, but you won’t. Why? Because by the time they enter the picture, you’ll be so desperate for anything resembling action to come and sweep you off your feet you’ll actively seek their attention – which isn’t a great trait for a survival-horror game; a genre essentially built around the idea of running away from danger not pursuing it.

Sadly, when the game isn’t ordering you around, further cracks begin to show. There’s a clear lack of coherency throughout. Areas are cordoned off by invisible obstructions, objects can be picked up and used to smash through (selective) doors/walls or can sometimes be combined with other items to make additional weapons or help expose escape routes (waving a wooden chair over fl ames will cause it to ignite and you can then use it as a torch). But can someone at Atari tell us why Carnby can’t perform the easiest of actions, like being able to carry a fi re axe up a ladder, and why certain objects only seem to work in certain instances? The combat is equally as jarring. To attack you use the right analogue nub to wave your weapon, which feels intuitive, but the idea gets ruined when you see a fi re extinguisher travel through a zombie three times before he even bothers to notice. Look, overall AITD has some nice ideas and it does look great, but annoyingly its potential is continually squandered by robot mechanics and tedious progression.

Stuart Hunt