It's a rare thing to be able to talk about a game and say that there is nothing quite like it, without it being some kind of hyperbolic statement, and few words are as abused and misused in the world of gaming as "unique". Not so for Project EDEN, Core Design's escape plan from EIDOS' Tomb Raider mines, before being dragged back in kicking and screaming for Angel of Darkness, which sank the studio.

All you need to know about Project EDEN is that it's a 3D action adventure version of Blizzard's The Lost Vikings and Sierra's Gobliiins, set in a dystopian future with a generous helping of John Carpenter body horror.

For those unfamiliar with the games mentioned above, think of a puzzle adventure in which you control multiple characters, each with their particular skills, which must be used in the right context and in synergy with each other in order to progress.

That Project EDEN is something special becomes immediately evident from the CG intro, which establishes the game's universe without need of a single word, through the clever use of a child's teddy bear, which is accidentally dropped from a terrace in a white utopian future city and slowly plummets down and down into increasingly dark and degraded layers of past urban developments and the humanity who lives there in the dark, until it lands at the very bottom, where it's picked up by the hand of what is implied to be a horribly disfigured mutant. It's brilliant averbal storytelling that gives you all the context you need without any kind of exposition dump. From there we follow our team of four police operatives in their descent into the underworld in search of two missing engineers, which quickly spirals into something much more sinister.

The levels are essentially massive puzzle boxes in the vein of Core's own Tomb Raider, except far more complex, since you have to use four people to solve them instead of one. You might have to send your robot through toxic gas to open a door so your engineer can repair a fuse box so the hacker can maneuver a platform around to ferry the team leader across a chasm to open a door and let everyone through, or you might have to drive a remote controlled car into maintenance ducts to fix a broken circuit so a bridge can be extended. It's very in-depth, so much so it can get confusing at times.

It's not all puzzle solving, as there is quite a lot of action too: cultists and mutants threaten the team at every turn. To fight them off, the game gradually unlocks about a dozen weapons, each with its own alternate fire: rapid or charge laser pistols, rockets launchers, proximity bombs, deployable auto turrets, even a stasis field to slow down time. There is a lot of variety in the way you can face the abominations you will meet in the lower strata of the city. It may not be the smoothest combat ever, but if you know Core Design, you already know the shooting was never their forte, and it doesn't significantly harm the experience. Furthermore, dying is only a temporary setback in Project EDEN, as the developers saw fit to remove the frustration factor by allowing the player to respawn each dead operative at set regeneration points, rather than going back to a checkpoint. A wise decision, since the puzzle-solving aspect is the main course of the game, and too much emphasis on action would have gotten in the way.

If you're looking for a lengthy and deep action puzzle experience that doesn't hold your hand at all and provides a huge sense of accomplishment when things click together to find the solution, this overlooked gem is exactly the game for you. I can't recommend it enough.

Deep dives into console libraries are fun precisely because you can find games like these that nobody ever talks about but deserve a fair look. Add Run Like Hell to the pile of titles I wish I could call hidden gems and that I could love a lot more than I do. In many ways this is Dead Space many years before Dead Space, and somewhat answers the question of what would happen if The Thing had infected the starship Enterprise.

In the far future, former war hero turned mining prospector Nick Conner sees his space station invaded by an unknown species of murderous aliens and has to struggle to survive, along with a handful of crew members.

Reading developer posts about it reveals Run Like Hell had a five years development hell cycle during which they changed all of the creative staff multiple times and saw management impose a complete rework of the game from what started as a survival horror "Resident Evil in space" sort of deal into a pure action game that had to be built from the ground-up in ten months. Sadly, this shows, and we can only imagine whatthe game might have been had it been allowed to follow the original vision.

And what a vision it was: you can tell the people at Digital Mayhem (MDK2, Giants: Citizen Kabuto) set out to make a fully featured sci-fi movie in videogame form, starting from a cast that I can only defy a pun to describe as stellar. the protagonist is played by Lance Henricksen from Aliens and the supporting cast includes names such as Clancy Brown and Michael Ironside from Starship Troopers, Kate Mulgrew from Star Trek Voyager, Brad Dourif from Dune and Alien Resurrection and Tom Wilson from back to the Future and the Wing Commander games. Doubtless a cast that would have sold many sci-fi horror films in the late 90s to early 2000s and not only that, because, unlike other gaming productions which cast established Hollywood talent who phoned in unconvincing performances, everyone here tries their absolute best to sell a script which was way above average for a turn of the century videogame, back when fleshed out stories and dialogue werre still considered accessory if not superfluous.

How disconcerting is it, then, that none of these actors' names appear in any capacity on the front or back cover of the game? What sort of production company spends several millions on an expensive movie nstar cast and makes sure nobody can tell from the box? The answer is Interplay, and that explains more things other than the simple commercial failure of this game.

The writing is nothing too crazy by today's standards, especially considering the naif use of Shakespeare quotes as chapter titles and occasional musings, but for 2002 this was not the bare minimum by a long shot: characters behave logically and show a believable range of emotions, helped along by a number of plot devices like the war hero being forced to interact with a member of the alien species he has fought against years before, forming an uneasy alliance with a satisfying arc. It's good stuff, and moreso given the lengthy development cycle of the game, which would place its conception and perhaps its writing somewhere in the mid-90s. The music is also excellent: setting aside the licensed tracks by rock bands Three Days Grace and Breaking Benjamin, which were a sign of the times, the original orchestral soundscape is chillingly effective in generating a sense of dread and urgency.

So we have great production values, a big name cast and a story that works; what is wrong with this game? Quite simply, the gameplay has been vandalized by corporate interference, as mentioned before, which transformed what might have been a quality REsident Evil clone into a rushed and botched action game that's simply no fun at all to play. It is evident that the developers were only given enough time to cobble together something that worked well enough and playtest it enough to ship it, without any opportunity to polish the fun factor into it. The result is a frustrating and stressful 10 hour ride in which you are constantly beset by damage sponge enemies spawning in behind you, which are fought with barely effectual weapons that require an ungodly amount of button mashing to dish out anything resembling a decent damage output. The dodge move, essential to defeating the bosses, is emblematic of the rush conversion job from Resident Evil-like to action, as it is a barely functional hobbling animation whose input you have to keep tapping in order to cover any passable distance.

Any and all survival elements were stripped out of the game, with workhorse weapons having infinite ammunition and the game showering you with health recovery items. Boss fights are abominable and the checkpoint system is frustratingly limiting, occasionally forcing the replay of lengthy sections with unskippable cutscenes.

It's a mess, and it's such a crying shame, because what good is there is really good. It doesn't quite live up to its potential in the narratove department, since you will be expecting a shocking body horror revelation that never comes, but it's still plenty satisfying to experience the story of Nick Conner and his crew.

My advice is to play this game with cheats, which allow to bypass the frustration factor and to enjoy the storywithout too much hassle. Do this and you will experience one of the most interesting, and sadly completely forgotten despite being undoubtedly influential, sci-fi horror games of the early 2000s.

Ever since Penumbra and especially its successor Amnesia hit the PC gaming scene in the latter half of the 2000s, the first person "hold lantern, hide from monsters and pull drawers, occasionally run away" psychological horror genre has become so saturated that you can reverse image search a screenshot of any given one of them and watch as the search engine gets confused trying the impossible task to tell them apart. Even Resident Evil copied the formula to an extent with 7 and 8, and just how much good that did to the franchise is up for debate.

The Beast Inside deviates very little from the recipe, aside from the fact it offers a dual protagonist: Adam, a CIA codebreaker in the late 1970s and Nicolas, a troubled man living a hundred years in the past. The story it tells is intriguing enough, even if the twist is far from impossible to figure out. There is some above average writing on offer, though the incessant swearing of the present day protagonist comes off as jarring and juvenile and the voice acting unfortunately does little to properly convey what the writer did right. This is voice work done on a kickstarter budget, and it shows, despite not being by any means inadmissible, it's nothing more than functional, with characters in dire situations reacting in neutral tones that betray a poorly annotated script that didn't properly direct the actors in the recording booth.

A tip for anyone who seeks to embark on a project like this: if you write the emotion the character is feeling next to each line of dialogue in your script you'll be able to get so much more out of your voice actors. You'll definitely avoid ending up with a scene where someone rips a beating heart out of someone's chest and offers it to the protagonist, who reacts sounding like they just lost the TV remote under a couch cushion.

Of the two gameplay segments, the 19th century one is your standard no frills Amnesia clone, while the other spices things up a little with a decent number of Frogwares-style puzzles that wouldn't feel out of place in one of their Sherlock Holmes game, if not for being anachronistic. A couple standout examples involve following instructions to operate a 1940s enigma machine and investigating a room looking for hidden pieces of a code. it's good stuff, and the rest of the game leaves you wanting more of that and less of what remains, which are disconcertingly poor action adventure sequences that drag the production down. You have a horrid though mercifully brief sequence in which you are given a revolver and a comically excessive amount of ammunition and made to stumble though thick fog, bumping into map boundaries as you try to follow lamps to a destination (which is a dreadful boss fight), after which the gun is taken away from you for good.

You also have far too many trial and error Outlast-inspired escape sequences where you die immediately when caught; you have exploration sections with nothing but jumpscares trying to startle you and failing most of the time, partly because they are so trite and telegraphed you can count down to each one and be right more often than not, and also because they self-sabotage by having the player constaly scavenging for matches and lantern oil, meaning you'll often be looking at a chest of drawers when a scare is happening off screen. There's the obligatory "don't step in the water" segment that Amnesia clones copied to no end, there are climbing and platforming segments that don't quite work and stealth bits with enemy patterns that are either too simple or too frustratingly random to be satisfying.

The Beast Inside wears its influence on its sleeve, actually both sleeves and both pants too: as such it is a drop in the ocean in a genre that is so tired it needs to be put to bed for good. It's not a terrible game, but far better ones exist, and what little it does to differentiate itself isn't enough to recommend it to anyone other than the most hardcore of Anmesia fanatics, assuming such people even exist.