Cheat Index - Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare Playstation Preview

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare will be developed for nearly every platform next year, including our favorite little PSX console. Darkworks has been slaving away developing this big adventure, in the hopes that The New Nightmare will expand upon the original Alone in the Dark game, by creating new interactivity and some truly spooky looking environments.

The storyline sounds intriguing at this early stage, as you take the roll of paranormal investigator Edward Carnby. Carnby is on a mission to investigate the mysterious death of his friend Charles Fisk, who was a top-secret bureau agent. Fisk’s body was discovered off the coast of Maine, and now armed with nothing more than a flashlight, and a peashooter, Carnby sets off to Shadow Island to unleash the smackdown on an army of freaky creatures that lurk around every corner. Carnby uses his psychic talents to pierce through the veil of evil and solve the island’s mysterious origin, while decimating strange monsters along the way. You will be required to do battle with a total of 18 different creatures, some of which look like giant demonic spider monkeys. The control layout, game engine, and quality of the enemy AI are unclear at this stage in development, so it is difficult to predict how well this title will hold up as a 3D action adventure game. AITD will undoubtedly rely on the usual find this key, pull that switch routine to get past certain obstacles, but the H.P. Lovecraft inspired storytelling should keep things interesting.

In order to squeeze every last ounce of processing power from the old R3000 Playstation CPU, Darkworks has compiled over 1,200 pre-rendered backgrounds that were created from scratch. The backgrounds contain an unparalleled amount of detail, which include, dark underground caverns, haunted mansions, and ornate H.P. Lovecraft inspired Victorian Architecture. The screens that the PSX Network seen display an incredible attention to detail, with amazing background color, and depth that should set a new standard for pre-rendered graphics. There is one room in particular with stained glass windows where the CG artists at Darkworks reportedly painted each glass pane section manually, before compressing the data into bit-map form. For the first time ever, dynamic light sourcing will actually reflect off the bitmapped objects in the background renders, giving you the impression of a true 3D game engine.

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