10 Amazing Ideas Wasted On Terrible Video Games

7. Realistic Fire Puzzles - Alone In The Dark

Even though it pretty much created the survival horror genre as we know it, the Alone in the Dark series has not enjoyed the same longevity as similar franchises like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. In fact, it pretty much peaked with the first game, although there was an attempt to resuscitate its lifeless corpse with a full reboot in 2008.

In many ways, though, the concepts it tried (and failed) to pull off a decade ago were eventually realised years later in better games. The episodic, DVD-like structure of the narrative would be adopted in everything from Call of Duty to Alan Wake, while its preoccupation with lifelike fire would be fully realised in games like Far Cry 2. It was that latter feature which was clearly the selling point of the reboot though, as a huge chunk of the gameplay was based around solving fire-based puzzles.

That alone was pretty jaw-dropping for the time, as lifelike fire that actually behaved like real fire was unprecedented. However, while that made for impressive pre-release trailers, when players got their hands on the end result, it became clear that most of the dev time had been put into perfecting the realism of flickering flames rather than, you know, creating a compelling game to put them in.