How true to its real world counterpart is Alone in the Dark’s Central Park and why this location?

We mapped the park using GPS satellite data to a 50cm precision and our artists faithfully recreated every bump, bridge, and building, albeit bringing a distinctly Alone in the Dark look to everything. We took hundreds of photos and then our artists re-worked the images with an unsettling Alone ambience which our designers then used to create the in-game environments. For the buildings, we don’t actually have the rights to use the actual names of many of them in the game, however they are very faithful reproductions of what you’ll find actually in the park.

We’ve taken liberties with the interiors of many of the buildings, combining different interiors to arrive at something unique that served our game design purposes, for example the museum interior is part museum, part church. My favourite is our reproduction of Belvedere Castle which is a small but perfectly formed castle at the second highest point in the park which was designed by Calvert Vaux one of the original architects of the park. In the game it looks really dramatic and imposing against the backdrop of the shattered city and the night sky.

Does the entire game take place in Central Park?

The first two episodes are played out in one of the art deco buildings on the southerly edge of the park, then after a nail biting journey you’re literally thrown into the park where the rest of the game takes place.

It’s been several years since the last in the series and obviously fans are hoping to return to the best of Alone in the Dark. If I’m new to the series, will I be able to experience the story on its own?

We’ve approached this game as a rebirth of the series and not a sequel in any traditional sense, so as such you don’t need to know anything about any of the previous games to get the full experience out of it. That said, there’s some references in the game which fans of the first one will enjoy.

From the Real World Rules videos I’ve seen, there seems to be a huge amount of interaction in the game. Can you expand on how interactive the environment and surroundings are? What can you do with the air conditioning, cars etc?

Our aim was to make the environments completely interactive based on real world rules, that’s to say if you could do it in real life you can do it in the game. With objects, our rule was that if they don’t function like they should, they’re not in the game, so pretty much everything you see behaves as you’d expect it to. The idea here is to make the gameplay intuitive not based on what you know from playing other games, but from what you know of how things are in reality. We want to inspire creativity in the player so they try something out and get a kick out of discovering that it works.

The interactions you can do in a car include breaking windows to get in if you need to, checking the visor for a key, hotwiring it if there’s none, clearing out the glove box, turning on the radio to listen to emergency broadcasts, and moving from seat to seat and even to the back. This last ability might seem obviously useful but there are situations where it’s invaluable.

Does it play like a linear, corridor shooter or is it more open ended where you can have multiple routes to complete your objective?

We wanted to blow apart the preconception of this type of game as a corridor shooter, which is why if you try to play the whole game with just a gun, you’re not going to get very far, and why we literally blew apart the building you start the game in and present the player with Central Park, a wide open environment. The story itself follows a linear path, however almost every situation has multiple solutions and depending on your playing style different players can have significantly different experiences.

A simple example might be a door you need to open (incidentally, every door in the game can be opened) – you could either follow the blood stains on the digipad keys to open it with a combination, shoot the digipad and hotwire it, or simply find something heavy and smash the door in.

Where did the idea of the very unique inventory system (inside the coat) come from?

We wanted to create a game where the player is immersed in the action to the point where he never actually has to leave the game world, and that includes avoiding menu screens which take the player out of the action. Having the inventory in real time in the jacket also adds another dimension of pressure – you can’t just use the inventory like a pause button. The game does slow down, but you still have to act fast if something’s coming at you. That said, we also had to make sure that desperately trying to select and combine items while trying to survive a full on attack wasn’t frustrating for the player.

To make things faster we added two systems: a quick draw button which lets you take out and put away the last item you used and also lets you scroll quickly through different items in your inventory without having to go into your jacket, and a favourites system that lets you assign favourite combinations of items to a single button push.

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