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The year is 1724. Pirate One-Eyed Jack and his men have gained immortality by entering into a sinister pact with voodoo priestess Elizabeth Jarret - in return for their gift the men must sacrifice a child on Christmas Day every 100 years. Two hundred years later, the pact is due for renewal, and eight year-old Grace Saunders goes missing...

Private Investigator Edward Carnby has been contacted by his friend Striker, who has since disappeared investigating the kidnapping of Grace. Carnby follows in his trail, tracing the pirates to a bootleg liquor operation they are operating from their den at Hell's Kitchen, California. Once there, simple moonshining pales in comparison with the unspeakable horrors lurking under the house, and in the galley of the moored ship. Infogrames' Lovecraftian adventure trilogy made a huge impact when it appeared on PC between 1992 and 1995, the grisly adventures of Edward Carnby breaking new boundaries in graphics sophistication and goriness. The second instalment of the trilogy is the first Alone In The Dark game to appear on Saturn in Japan, Edward Carnby's longest, and most difficult, adventure having been minimally tweaked.

Bemusingly, however, he is still not alone, and rarely in the dark. Hmm...

You play most of the game looking down, or along, at yourself in the form of Edward Carnby. As you wander around the various locations, camera angles change to present a cinematic feel to the proceedings. Once you've escaped from the house, you'll inevitably find yourself kidnapped by the pirates.

At this point, you instead play as the little girl Grace. Unarmed and practically defenceless, you must find ingenious ways to use the diminutive girl's size to defeat the pirates and help free Edward.

The first Alone In The Dark game concentrated on Edward Carnby's efforts to escape a haunted house by making his way from the attic, down through various rooms and eventually swimming an underground canal in the cellar.

Needless to say, all manner of spooks and menaces stood in his way of the kicking and scratching private dick. Alone In The Dark 2 saw Carnby add a vicious head-butt to his repertoire of aggressive moves, the game also refining his rather awkward gait and kicking motion.

Alone In The Dark 3 was perhaps the most coolly received of the three, widely criticised for being too small and too easy. This bizarre Wild West adventure saw a very definite end to the Carnby saga - Infogrames apparently want to go back and refine the existing games before considering resurrecting the private eye for further instalments.

It's generally a good idea to pick up anything you discover on your travels, whether it's just lying around or discarded by one of your victims. Guns and ammunition have obvious uses - other objects may only take on significance later in the game.

Hip flasks contain useful sustenance which you can gulp down with an amusing noise and green books are worth reading (if your Japanese is up to scratch) to gain useful clues that test your powers of lateral thinking. You'll be some way into the game before your swag sack will become so crammed that you're forced to discard anything.

Acquired objects can be drunk, modified, read or, in the case of this photograph, used to establish an objective. The tomb seen in the picture is actually your way into the house.

Once located in the maze, it can be accessed by attaching the rope to the grappling hook and throwing it over a particular statue. Connecting clues and discovered objects in this way is essential to successful completion of the game.

Having had such fond memories of playing and completing the first two Alone In The Dark games on the PC many moons ago, it's difficult to express how disappointed I was playing Alone In The Dark 2 on Saturn.

Yes, I felt let down by the basic polygon graphics, the awkward controls and the unfairly stacked odds, but in all fairness the game is practically identical to the one that first impressed me on PC. And that's the problem. Presentation and expectation of games have changed so much since then, and Alone In The Dark 2 has stood still.

Aside from some extra detail on the characters' faces and clothes, and a tinny drum machine-style accompaniment to the soundtrack, this is unchanged from the PC version.

All the original's faults are present - bizarre camera angles obscure important action and the game frustrates in all the wrong places. This is compounded, however, by some noticeable slow down in CD accessing when new characters or locations are loaded up. The opportunity to enhance, or even update, a once-intriguing game has been missed.

Alone In The Dark has an impressively structured plot. Years after the original release on PC, it's still possible to see how ambitious a game design it is. But Alone In The Dark 2 suffers at the hand of Father Time, and also for some lamentable aspects of presentation.

The disc access is unacceptably intrusive when it freezes the action, and the character control is often bloody frustrating. Also, wait for the English language version.

Graphics 70%
P. The locations, such as the house and the pirate ship, look quite stylish.
N. The characters are woefully blocks and unconvincing.

Animation 50%
N. Shaky, basic and prone to glitching.

Music 60%
N. Configured to stretch floppy disk-sourced PC technology to the limit. Things have moved on since then. This game hasn't.

Effects 60%
N. Again, these sound very dated. The opportunity to enhcance the effects by using CD technology has not been taken.

Playability 54%
N. There is a once-great game underneath all this, but you won't want to spend too long looking for it.

Lastability 51%
N. Not worth persevering with - wait for something with the quality of PlayStation's Resident Evil.

Overall 52%
Times have moved on, and this once classic game is now simply clumsy and dated-looking.