Alone in the Dark

We only saw two other enemies - a stronger 'zombie' thing, and a scuttling crab-like pest. Mixing and matching your inventory to best take out the nasties promises to be a constant and interesting challenge, since ammo is scarce and so you'll need to think creatively. Like hurling a bottle of flammable liquid toward a crowd before blasting it with a bullet and causing maximum havoc.

Combining your items like this isn't just a gimmick. There are only two pistols in the entire game, so your inventory is your arsenal, and your survival demands flexible and fluid thinking. Well, thinking within the game's limits.

You can't do everything you might come up with. But you can, for instance, fill a bottle with petrol, stick in a hanky and tape some spare ammo to it. And then maybe stick it to a car and drive it at your enemies, before detonating it with a well placed shot.

But, more intriguingly, the power of fire can provide defensive innovations as well as offensive ones. For instance, imagine you're being harried by half a dozen enemies (we saw plenty of zombie-types in our demo, but there's also a host of creepy-crawlies and other assorted monsters) and you run up a corridor to be faced with a locked door. Game over? It doesn't have to be.

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.