Sail The Boring Seas
HIGH This final fight is very different than the one in 1993.
LOW Wait, THAT’s the warehouse safe combination? Seriously?
WTF Pretty sure that’s Jeremy talking to the game’s developers right there.
It’s impossible to overstate Alone in the Dark‘s influence on Survival Horror — it invented that specific mixture of spooky adventure and punishing combat before Resident Evil made the genre’s name famous just a few years later. In fact, the two series are so inextricably linked that as I watched the opening cutscene’s camera fly over a gorgeous rendering of Louisiana swampland with a car racing down a rural road at sundown, I realized I could just have easily been seeing the opening of Resident Evil Biohazard. That said, Alone in the Dark is certainly the lesser of the two, so let’s focus on what it does right — at least for the moment.
A third-person horror adventure, today’s Alone in the Dark uses its 30-year-old predecessor as a jumping-off point (and little else) as the gameplay and storyline have both been completely revamped. Where the original locked players in a cursed manor and challenged them to make their escape, this new Alone in the Dark uses Derceto (the manor in question) as the initial setting before propelling players on a journey through time and space to the literal ends of the Earth. It’s a more ambitious work than the original by far, and at its best it offers a compellingly bonkers experience.
Focusing largely on the psychological implications of cosmic horror, AitD‘s Derceto Manor is now a rest home for the mentally unbalanced. Players will first go through the consciousness of Jeremy Hartwood, a man in need of rescue. Then they’ll step into the shoes of either his niece Emily or Edward Carnby (the detective she’s hired) depending on who they wish to control. Unfortunately, that decision between protagonists doesn’t have a huge impact on gameplay.
AitD has no sidequests or branching decisions, so the only major changes players will notice after selecting a character are that they each have a different starting weapon, they’ll have different conversations with Derceto’s residents, and each has one unique late-game mission. In the end, it boils down to which famous actor they’d like to control while walking around and fighting dark creatures.
Sadly, this isn’t a Resident Evil 2 situation where the player can play one path and then see what was going on in the other parts of the mansion later — it’s the same story no matter who the player chooses. While I can’t say two playthroughs were necessary to ‘get’ the story, both characters’ unique missions were among the best parts, so rolling credits twice didn’t feel like a waste of time.
AitD‘s art design is a high point — the mansion itself is exquisitely decorated, with peeling wallpaper and creeping mold constantly reminding the player that everything is on the verge of collapse. I think I would have accepted an adventure that stuck to this amazing location, but it’s to AitD‘s credit that each new area the player travels to, be it a cluttered library or a barren, snowbound hellscape, has just as much thought put into design as the main location. Each area was a pleasure to explore, and even prosaic places like a warehouse on a dock manage to impress.
While the cosmic horror story is intriguing and the environments are top-notch, the puzzle and combat design leave a lot to be desired.
The monsters players face are genuinely creepy — things like zombies that are more root and moss than person, or many-mouthed abominations that spit acid — but fighting them is a chore at best. Melee weapons break after a few swings, forcing the player to constantly be on the lookout for new axes and pipes. Bullets barely stagger foes, and enemies are universally too fast for the claustrophobic areas in which they’re fought. Developers, please — if you’re going to trap me in a tiny room with a bunch of monsters, at least make them slow and shambling so I can have a moment to ready my weapon before they start stun-locking me.
There is a ‘distraction’ mechanic that helps a little — the ‘open’ maps are littered with bricks and bottles that can be tossed to draw monsters to a specific location. While it’s a nice option to be able to sneak past some enemies, the majority still have to be fought, and the combat just doesn’t hold up.
The other place where Alone in the Dark fails is puzzle design. This is especially disappointing because the original, while not a deep game by any means, had its share of strange objectives that were difficult to figure out, but that satisfied when completed. In comparison, AITD offers generic padlocks and safes with combinations have to be decoded by searching for numbers in the environment. In fact, one answer was so basic that I wasted half an hour searching because I couldn’t believe that the solution I had already found could be that simple. There are a couple of interesting instances of redirecting lasers around a temple or searching for waystations in a blizzard, but for the most part players can look forward to rearranging pieces of broken pictures, an activity that — by my count — made up nearly half the of the puzzles in the campaign. (And calling those puzzles is being charitable.)
Despite all that, this new Alone in the Dark is certainly a worthy inheritor of the series’ legacy. While it doesn’t innovate a genre like the original, nor does it experiment with physics and open world design like 2008’s AitD: Inferno did, it’s clearly a labor of love by people with a reverence for the source material. Where it impresses most is its unwillingness to let fealty to the original narrative limit its aspirations. Yes, all of the classic beats are here for those who can recall them, but the way it takes that material and spins it into a captivating tale of an ancient evil with its tendrils sunk deep into the characters’ pasts is a sight to behold.
The combat may be janky and the puzzles are nothing special, but anyone looking for a truly satisfying horror story need look no further. If nothing else, it knows how to end in a great way, and that in itself is worth a lot.
Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Disclosures: This game is developed by Pieces and published by THQ Nordic. It is currently available on PC, PS5 and XBS/X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the XBX. Approximately 20 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed twice.
Parents: This game was rated M by the ESRB, and contains Blood and Gore, Language, Intense Violence. Yes to all of those warnings, but it’s worth mentioning that people actually drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes in the game. The healing mechanic is literally taking swigs of booze from a flask. How did the ESRB miss that?
Colorblind Modes: There are colorblind modes available.
Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue is subtitled, but incidental sounds like monster growls and footsteps are not, so expect to get ambushed frequently. Subtitles can be resized. The game is not fully accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.
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