Alone in the Dark

A giant step forward in gaming but it's also inscrutable and clunky. Both the environment and the gameplay scared the crap out of me as a kid.

I could never remember to be scared or entertained by this game because I spent the entire time fighting the awkward controls.

There was novelty here, but the game wasn't very good.

A game with trendsetting style, if not much else. The blend of blocky 3D characters, nicely prerendered backgrounds, and dramatically skewed camera angles was to prove very influential over the next decade or more. In fact, it was so forward-thinking it would be a few years before other developers could even pull it off. The stiff tank controls, awkward animations, and thin gameplay and plot would sadly prove just as popular.