ALONE IN THE DARK Deserves Another Chance to Shine (series Retrospective)

^video review above^

When you hear the term “survival horror,” I bet your first thought is Resident Evil and understandably so.  Resident Evil’s resource management, atmosphere, puzzles, and cinematic camera angles are iconic but quite a few of these design choices were actually first introduced in 1992’s Alone in the Dark by French developer Infogrames, a full four years before Resident Evil debuted in 1996.  So today we’ll be uncovering just how formative an influence Alone in the Dark has been on the survival horror genre.

Legendary Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami revealed in a 2014 interview that Resident Evil was originally conceived as a first-person shooter but he was unsatisfied with how the game tested.  He soon found the spark of inspiration he needed after playing Alone in the Dark. This game featured arguably the first ever 3D player character model and featured puzzle solving and monster fighting as you tried to escape the haunted Derceto Manor.  The environments were represented by 2D backgrounds that you viewed from a fixed third-person camera angle and which changed based on where you were in the room.  Sound familiar?  Mikami notes that Resident Evil’s development then just became about adapting Resident Evil’s zombie ideas to Alone in the Dark’s formula.  Without this game’s influence, Resident Evil probably would have stayed yet another 3D first person shooter like DOOM or Wolfenstein.

So how did such an influential but unsung series like Alone in the Dark come to be and how has it evolved or failed to evolve to keep up with the times?  Well, that’s the question of the day and you’re in luck, because I have the answer, as we explore Alone in the Dark 1,2, and 3, the New Nightmare, the 2008 self-titled sequel, and even dabble in the heinous Alone in the Dark: Illumination as well as the two legendarily bad film adaptations!  Grab a light and head down with me into the darkness, because friends don’t let friends go alone!

GOING DARK

In order to understand Alone in the Dark’s legacy as the grandfather of the survival horror genre, we should briefly explore what came before and what made Alone stand out from the rest.  Horror games have existed in some form since at least 1972, beginning with Haunted House for the first in-home gaming console called the Magnavox Odyssey.  Haunted House was about a detective evading a ghost to solve a mystery and used clue cards and a manual to progress the narrative offscreen and represented the game state on the Haunted House screen overlay as needed.  Horror games of note were few and far between in the 70s and 80s.  You may remember one such game mentioned in my Catacomb series video, 1981’s 3D Monster Maze, which was technically the first survival horror experience, a game in which you had to evade a bloodthirsty dinosaur long enough to find the maze’s exit.  This game has much more in common with the recent fad of run and hide horror games like Amnesia the Dark Descent, Alien: Isolation, and the Outlast series. 

A Pacman like horror game also called Haunted House released in 1982 where you avoided ghosts and monsters to collect pieces of an urn, and on high difficulties, had to light matches to see where to go.   Not until 1988’s Splatterhouse, a gory, side-scrolling beat em up, did gaming truly capture the essence of a classic horror movie, albeit the campy B movie slasher kind.  The creepy JRPG Sweet Home by Capcom in 1989 was the major next horror adjacent game, and was actually the property that Resident Evil started out as a spiritual successor to but this game was really more of a tactical, top down affair than a terrifying one.  So when the first Alone in the Dark came along in 1992, it was something truly novel in concept and attention to 3D detail – 3Dtail?

Alone in the Dark’s designer Frederick Raynal had been making games since childhood, his imagination fed by his father’s computer repair shop which also rented out videos.  As his skills advanced and he began to work for a new company called Infogrames, Raynal became more interested in 3D rendering, and created a program in which he animated a headless 3d zombie.  Around the same time, Infogrames was brainstorming a new project called In the Dark, which required careful management of matches as you traversed dark environments.  Raynal thought his 3D technology would be a great fit for this game, but he had to convince the higher ups of his value to the team.  Due to technical limitations of the machines he was using, Raynal decided to demo his 3D models across static 2D backgrounds and enlisted the help of some graphic artists from the company, the most helpful being Yael Barroz (Ya-el Bah-roz), the woman whom would later become his wife and the mother of his children.  She gave him concept art for an attic and this perfectly fit the creepy gothic atmosphere that Raynal was going for, so he made it the game’s first area in the Derceto manor, the place that drove its most recent owner Jeremy Hartwood mad to the point of suicide.  This pitch caused Infogrames to greenlight the project and soon Raynal gathered three programmers to hash out the dangerous scenarios that the player would face as they attempt to escape the manor. 

Despite the detail of his 3D visuals, Raynal wanted a good deal of the game’s terror to be abstract and connotative, to ripple in the player’s imagination like the pernicious evil that haunted Jeremy Hartwood.  Funnily enough, though Raynal turned down an offer to make the game an official part of the Cthulhu mythos, he nevertheless peppered the game with countless books, journals, and notes referencing Lovecraftian mainstays like the Old Ones, Al Azif, and the Necronomicon.  The main character’s name of Edward Carnby is reportedly even a reference to John Carnby, who hired a translator for  the Necronomicon in Clark Ashton Smith’s 1931 story “The Return of the Sorcerer,” the first work to borrow from Lovecraft’s mythos.

The numerous in-game documents are entertainingly voice-acted, and whether hokey or believable, they all effectively sell the Derceto’s fall to ruin.  While I doubt that Alone was the first game to include audio diaries or voiced diaries, I found it surprisingly difficult to pin down which game started this trend, as the internet seemed content with terrible takes like Bioshock made it popular and Doom 3 did it badly. 

Anyway, adding further literary heritage to Alone, Carnby is a mustachioed private detective who resembles Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the modern day detective story; early alpha artwork even portrays Carnby as dark featured just like the famous author.  Funnily enough, this difference in style from the main game’s look was because Infogrames was pushing for promo screenshots but because the team hadn’t finalized Carnby’s head model yet, they had to hand draw his face on top of his 3d model and hope that worked.  These even show up in a slideshow if you leave the game’s main menu on idle for a little bit.  The game’s setting is also said to have been influenced by Poe’s story the Fall of the House of Usher, which once you enter the greater portion of the manor, you’ll start to feel like the house itself is out to get you, just like that story.

ALONE IN THE DARK 1

The Derceto manor itself is set in backwoods Lousiana in 1924. At the game’s outset, you’ll choose between two playable characters, Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood.  Carnby’s been hired by an interested party to inspect an antique piano for somewhat unclear reasons and he’s a classic Bogart style private dick whose voiceover makes him sound like, well a bit of a dick, something that Alone 3 and the infamous 2008 game picked up on.  Emily Hartwood is the niece of the manor’s owner Jeremy Hartwood and is convinced the antique piano holds some clue as to why her uncle committed suicide.  Gameplay is identical save for Emily’s slightly faster running speed, shorter reach, and different kicking style because she’s wearing a skirt.  To be honest, Emily’s motivation is a lot more interesting than Carnby’s but she doesn’t have what appear to be triangle eyeglasses and a sweet mustache, so Carnby was my obvious choice. 

So Carnby arrived by taxi at the manor’s gate, clearly being watched from a window high above, a motif used in the first four Alone in the Dark games.  Then Carnby’s handsome visage (it’s a French game, I have to say it this way) scales the stairs to the attic so that he can inspect said piano.  He’s given a limited amount of time to explore before a fucking murder chicken from hell bursts through the window.  Or not.  In a turn that would make immersive sims proud, you can actually sequence break the game a little bit by running over to the dresser, clicking Enter and then choosing the Push action to cover the window to the attic and prevent the murder chicken from breaking in.  How clever!  Context sensitive actions like this pop up infrequently but intuitively so if you’re stuck, just check your inventory action menu to see if there’s a new action you’ve not tried yet.  This level of interactivity this early in gaming’s formative decade is pretty impressive.

But woe unto you if you don’t have enough imagination or foresight to cover the window because otherwise you’ll have to box this chicken to death or shoot it with the rifle you found in the chest.  To achieve this though, you’ll have to grasp the controls quickly or die miserably.  There’s no mouselook so the left and right arrow keys control which direction Carnby is facing and forward and back keys move relative to the direction he’s facing, as opposed to most games where you move onscreen relative to the direction of the player.  To attack, you must hold down the spacebar and then hold and release the directional keys to swipe up and down or side to side.  If using a firearm, you’ll have to hold the up button and release to fire.  You’ll often take a lot of garbage damage just trying to get centered on an enemy so that the animation connects with them.  These are the original tank controls, of course, but I prefer “fly in the ointment” controls because of how much flailing you’ll do and how much of a bother they are to master.  It took me several play sessions to stop spinning like a top.  While doing so, you can take some comfort in knowing that Carnby’s rather comical jogging animation was actually the programmers teasing Reynal about his own running style which they modeled the animation after.

But, once you deal with this Kentucky fried crazy and the zombie whom you can cheese by covering his trapdoor with the chest, the attic is finally yours to explore.  You’ll grab a lantern, which will be a great help if you, y’know, happen to find yourself alone in the dark, and you’ll also uncover a blanket in the cupboard, the aforementioned rifle, a crazed confessional from Jeremy Hartwood in the piano, and in a twist none could foresee, a book in the bookcase.  There’s a lot to unpack in this first room.  It’s this game’s E1M1 in terms of being a comprehensive primer of how the game works: you can move furniture around to block enemies, you learn you’ll need to check every square inch for items, and you’re trained in both ranged and melee combat.  Once you’ve been educated, you’ll head downstairs and enter your first interconnected area, which are four rooms separated by….oh look, a collapsing floor! 

Another “oh you’re so funny” feature that Raynal and friends added was death traps.  The collapsing floor is the least diabolical as there are at least cracks in the floor signaling its fragility, but others, like apparitions that kill you if you get too close or books that kill you upon reading them, have a From Software level of disdain for the player’s digital lifespan.  Most   forgivingly, Alone 1 offers 6 save slots to save anywhere and anytime so you can try out various approaches to perplexing problems.  Unlike the search and destroy type rhythm that games like DOOM encourage, here you’re incentivized to trial and error your way through new hazards and see if you can spot the logic in them and come up with a solution. 

The mansion unfolds like a Metroidvania, requiring you to get to know the manor as a tactile place that respects your attention to its function and be able to intuitively surmise which items allow you passage through which obstacles.  You’re incentivized to collect everything you find because you’ll take all the help you can get as a vulnerable everyman, but inventory space is limited so you’ll have to be very picky about what to keep on you and remember where you dropped everything in case you need to come back for it.

What makes this triage tricky is that items don’t always signpost how useful they may become.  Health kits and keys are obvious enough, but what about the jug of water, the false book, the heavy statuette, or the aforementioned blanket?  Some are necessary to get past death traps so you can beat the game, but others merely give you some creative agency in how you problem solve, reminding me of how Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid could use cigar smoke to see otherwise invisible lasers. 

My favorite big-brain moment in Alone 1 actually involves a cigar too.  Turns out there’s a study with some nice items in the far corner but there’s a lit cigar smoking up the room.  Carnby can try his luck and attempt to explore quickly and leave before he starts coughing and losing health, or you can be a smart boi and douse the cigar with the jug of water to explore freely. 

Additionally, while note and books are often there for simple backstory, they can also double as useful hints for how to slay some of the toughest monsters, and you’ll have to read carefully to find all the pieces of the items you need.  Alone 1 just has some great immersive elements that make you feel either really smart or really lucky if you manage to figure them out on your own.  Even if you’re a basic bitch like me who often scurried to walkthroughs for the obtuse puzzles and who didn’t want to drop something and have to retrieve it, I could still appreciate the clever and realistic ways you can interact with the world.

So the game’s rhythm is exploration and puzzle solving punctuated by brief bouts of combat until you eventually journey underneath the manor into its cave systems.  These are a mostly linear affair and new horrors await, some corporeal, and others that test your patience like a “because it’s the 90s” maze that you must figure out with barely a halo of light from your lantern to see by.  Oh, and some awkward Carnby Kong platforming sequences, oh joy!  There’s also quite a bit of presumed imagination on the player’s part to figure out item placements in order to beat the game.  I won’t spoil them here but there are several I’d have never thought to try and that’s unfortunately one of the legacies of this game’s design that persisted even as late as Silent Hill 2, which is regarded as a classic.  Trash chute puzzle, anyone?

Some intuition will help you, but these were the days right before Myst sparked a renewed interest in point and click adventures, a lawless time when puzzles were brutally prescriptive and intentionally as hard to understand as possible probably either to extend gameplay time and increase the perceived value of the product, or just because gaming was much more achievement and high score based than about providing relaxing entertainment accommodations.  As much as Alone 1 is the first survival horror game, it’s also deeply indebted to the “break your brain” point and click adventure genre of the 80s and early 90s, with its 2D backgrounds and pixel hunting, like where exactly on this bookcase you need to insert an item to open a secret door.  So if you take the plunge and try this game for yourself, I’d advise you to be wary of the archaic controls and confusing puzzles. 

But if you’re not too good for walkthroughs or better yet if you enjoy the self-masochism of hours spent trying to figure out that one bugger of a puzzle, Alone 1 will treat you right with its gothic setup, tense atmosphere, and subtle storytelling.  The soundtrack especially contributes to this mood, its instrumentation a sonic tiptoe as cautious as your exploration must be. And when the music ceases, unearthly howls and loud crashes sound in the distance and you’ll only be able to guess if something’s coming for you.  This feature reminded me quite a lot of the howls you hear around the mansion in Cliver Barker’s Undying, a game which has other similarities we’ll explore later.

While the grindy puzzle solving and awkward combat aren’t always conducive to the drama, if taken on its own terms as a product of a time when high difficulty wasn’t a swear word but a desirable state of affairs, you’ll likely found this one quite compelling.  Worst case scenario, if you’re a newbie to these types of games and need a lot of help to get through, the game still works as a guided museum tour through horror gaming history’s formative moments. But enjoy the pacing and care that went into this game while you can, because the series drastically changed as early as its next installment Alone in the Dark 2, released in the year of our Doom 1993.

JACK IN THE DARK

Before we get into the second game proper, let’s touch on its small promotional prequel level called Jack in the Dark, which released early in the Alone 2’s development.  It stars Grace Saunders, a young girl who appears in the main game, and the gist of this levelis that she gets locked in a little toy shop of horrors near Christmas time, possessed toys come after you, and you must solve puzzles to thwart them and escape.  You’ll have to reference a book of backstories about these “special” toys to figure out how to get past them.  Some puzzles are clever and others quite unintuitive, which is par for the course. 

In one puzzle the titular Jack has to be fed sweets but he won’t react to the gumballs you get out of the machine, only to a random candy cane you get later on.  And then you must use a mirror on him, and not use it to distract the vain dolls you need to get past?  What is the logic behind any of this?  Couldn’t tell you, but oh did I mention there’s a passed out Santa inside a jail cell in the back of this store?  Yeah, it gets weird. Jack in the Dark is cutesy, inscrutable, and off kilter, and serves as a portent of stranger things to come in the main game. 

ALONE IN THE DARK 2  

With that ominous lead in, you might think Alone 2 would be chockfull of puzzles like Jack in the Dark, but the series’ core ethic had changed. 

Frederick Raynal had since moved on from the series he helped create due to creative differences with Infogrames, and the reins were handed over to one of his programmers, Franck De Girolami (FrONk de Jer-OH-law-MEE), who was given just over half a year to complete the game.  Not only was time a factor, but Wolfenstein 3D had exploded in popularity since the first Alone came out and the hype of the upcoming DOOM was poised to sweep gamers up into a frenzy all over again.  So while Alone 1’s writer Hubert Chardot also wrote this game, the tone and gameplay emphasis are decidedly more campy and action focused in response to these industry trends.   

Carnby himself, now disappointingly cleanshaven and built like a Hummer, is now known as a “supernatural private eye” after solving the Derceto case (cue Alone in the Dark “I’m a paranormal investigator” movie line).  His next case comes in the form of a desperate telegram from his mentor Ted Stryker, who’s discovered that Grace Saunders has been kidnapped by notorious bootlegger One-Eyed Jack and his gangsters.  Ted messages you for help now that he knows where she is but by the time his telegram reaches you, Ted himself has gone missing as well and as Carnby says, he doesn’t take kindly to people messing with children or his friends, so Carnby’s on the case.

Presentation wise, the game is a different beast than Alone 1.  The music is upbeat and incredibly catchy.  It’s very French, ranging from jazzy secret agent themes to an almost baroque cant.  Animations are cartoonishly bouncy, enemies say humorous one liners like “hi guy!” and you can even wear a Santa Claus outfit at one point for no discernible reason other than to reference Jack in the Dark.  The tone is far whackier and the gameplay has evolved to include high enemy counts and more guns.

There’s no weight limit to your inventory anymore and the action menu is streamlined down to Fight or Search, with contextual actions like Push, Throw or Jump becoming available only in specific instances.  You’re rarely alone, you’re never in the dark, and long gone are the overt references to Lovecraftian monsters and menace.  In its place, One-Eyed Jack and his Thompson wielding gangsters turn out be--no joke--zombie pirates in disguise.  This lends itself to some fun pageantry and set pieces by game’s end, but at this time, Alone was definitely less and less a suspenseful horror series.  (insert “savvy” from Pirates of Caribbean)

You need look no further for proof of this than the opening sequence.  Unlike Stryker, who infiltrated Hell’s Kitchen like freaking 007, Carnby decides subtlety is for the weak and blows the gates off the mansion with a bomb.  And that crash-in title sequence, oh, give me all the cheese!  The explosion predictably alerts the gangster zombie pirates and they pursue you across a confusing hedge maze for the better part of an hour, Thompson machine guns ablazing. 

What’s really rough about this section is the sheer number of enemies, how easily they stunlock you, and how finicky the shooting controls are.  The fixed camera angles cause depth perception problems, and make shots hard to line up, especially when the hitboxes on walls and doors are wider than what’s actually shown on screen and end up blocking shots you’d think you’d have clearance for.  You’ll have to resort early to the dominant strat in Alone 2: aggroing enemies, then running back behind a corner or doorway and gunning them down as come around.  The sprint function is still really inconsistent but at least it works more often than it did in Alone 1.  All told, this opening sequence is a brutal illustration of what a bad idea it was to chase the Wolfenstein action trend with a control scheme that barely functioned in the first place.

But once you’ve ground through the gangsters and traversed the hedge maze (because every 90s game seems to have at least one maze), you’ll travel through linear underground passageways leading up to One-Eyed Jack’s manor.  The puzzle quality here ebbs and flows, some rewarding and others strangely arbitrary and this really holds true for the rest of the game. 

I accidentally solved a weird one by accident when I was stuck trying to unlock a door.  I accidentally clicked on a newspaper in my inventory and it disappeared as if it had been used.  Confused, I clicked on the door again but this time with a pipe cleaner, which jostled a key out of the lock and onto the newspaper below, allowing me to slide it back to me and unlock the door.  That’s pretty cool but I probably wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years had there been anything else in my inventory to choose!

There was one puzzle I was tickled pink to solve by myself though which involved an unassuming paper bag I’d found and a guard sitting at the edge of a precipice.  I noted the barrel hanging overhead on a track and the push lever nearby and had a eureka moment.  I clicked on the bag, assuming Carnby would blow it up and be able to pop it, and the game agreed.  I used it to startle the guard, then pushed the lever, and the barrel swooped down to knock him off the led—ok, I startled the guard, pushed the lever, and the barrel knocked-ok, it took me like five tries to get the timing right because of how finicky the barrel’s hit detection is and how inconsistently the guard walks into the sweet spot, but finally I got him.  I liked this little gimmicky puzzle a lot.  It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out but made you trust the game was playing by some creative and intuitive rules.

Then I was told there was a hole in the clock nearby and eagerly clicked on the crank in my inventory, just knowing I’d get this right too. Nothing happened.  I found that the message actually popped up at the wrong part of the clock and I had to reorient myself into that Goldilocks position to try again.  Thanks, Infogrames, don’t let me get a big head or anything :/ 

Initially, Alone 2 gives you the impression it’s going to play a little more fair and reward you for playing along.  Unfortunately, this impression really only occurs because this section is so linear and you basically pick up everything you need and then immediately use it so context isn’t lost.  In that way, it felt decidedly modern but it quickly went into adventure game logic once you get into the mansion proper and you’re tasked with finding lots of small objects or blindly clicking on the farthest corner of rooms in hopes of pulling essential items out of their recesses.

Once you get up into the house, the game unfolds like a much brighter, faster paced version of the first game’s manor hike.  You go room to room and must often wade through lots of enemies to get to the puzzle or item aspects of each room.  You’ll acquire a Thompson machine gun, various handguns, swords, and my favorite, the battledore, which looks like a table tennis paddle and smacks like a nun in Catholic school.  The combat’s not very good, but at least it’s obvious what’s expected of you.  Puzzles, on the other hand, range from totally fine like a riddle about a white queen that clearly relates to the crown in your inventory to the truly bizarre ones like when you need to throw a cheerleader pom into a garden full of snakes so that a clown will chase it and get attacked. 

And then you’re supposed to know that the hole in this same garden is actual an opening to the chimney of a room you haven’t been to yet and couldn’t know that you’re being asked to throw a grenade down to kill one of many goons.  What’s also strange about this sequence is that the grenade doesn’t even clear out the whole room of guys, while a later sequence lets you shoot a cannon to blow up a whole sleeping quarters full of pirates.  Why wouldn’t the grenade do the same and what kind of chimney has a hole in it midway up and shooting smoke into a garden area?  The overly prescriptive nature of the game’s logic just never relents and makes it relatively futile to start looking for patterns.

This futility is most present in the Grace Saunders portions of the game.  At several points, Carnby gets captured and you’re given control of Grace just like during Jack in the Dark.  She’s just a little girl so you must be stealthy or use makeshift offensive options to defend yourself like a little MacGyver or Kevin in Home Alone.  These sections are conceptually interesting but fairly annoying to complete.  Grace’s slowness means you have to judge guard patrols down to the nanosecond to not get auto detected, and they can even catch you while performing scripted animations like walking up or down stairs to leave an area.

As for the puzzles, here’s one frustrating example:  I had in my inventory a fuse, a small cannon, a pepper shaker, some matches, and a vase I’d just picked up.  You’re supposed to throw a vase at the door to trick a guy on the other into coming in and then ambushing him, but it’s quite an ask to remember this guy’s even there unless you have elephantine powers of recall to remember which of the many tan doors he’s on the other side of, and that’s if you even caught a glimpse of him as you snuck through the ship in a previous section.  Anyway, as he comes through the door, you’re supposed to light the cannon and blast him (so anyways I started blasting).  But you can’t just light the fuse in your inventory and fire the cannon with it.  No, I had to put the pepper in the cannon and then light it with a match.  I’m sorry, what cannon runs off pepper except maybe a quasi-magical one like in Alice: Madness Returns? Don’t quirk me out like that, Infogrames!  The puzzles frequently resist comprehension and this all compounded to really start taking the wind out of my sails. 

As charming as its art style, voice acting, and music are, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was having to force myself to keep playing more than I did in Alone 1.  For every cool thing you’ll see like a note that mentions two characters named Booker and DeWitt that one has to assume influenced Ken Levine when he wrote Bioshock Infinite, to magical portals that let you travel across the house in an instant, to a pretty neat ending set piece I won’t spoil here, the game often distracts from its atmosphere with unforgiving combat its controls can’t handle and punishingly obtuse puzzles.  I truly wonder how many folks actually got to the end of this one without help back in the day.

Alone in the Dark only managed one game that felt like “true” survival horror before design concessions to the popularity of Wolfenstein and Doom came to bear on the franchise.  But there’s no denying there’s something authentic about Alone 2’s commitment to its self-aware tone and tough firefights.  The game might even be lauded as brave and what we should expect from sequels if it were released nowadays, what with franchises like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry going years without innovating much.

So this one’s got it warts but also its charms, and the soundtrack and art style are just simply far too good to be missed.  Plus this game lets you sword fight zombie gangster pirates, distract clowns with a pompom, wear a Santa Claus costume, and even turn on an electric organ that plays Danny Boy while you slay monsters and that’s not something you see every day.  I can’t say I always loved playing Alone 2 but I can say I enjoyed living in it, even as different as it was from the first game. 

ALONE IN THE DARK 3

Now Infogrames must’ve felt they were on a tear because they made an Alone entry for three straight years, the third being Alone in the Dark 3 in 1994.  The negative reaction to the increased combat focus of Alone 2 caused Infogrames to synthesize the first two game’s styles, resulting in fights feeling like a crescendo to long bouts of puzzling as opposed to the main attraction, a welcome change in my book.

The story is that a film crew has gone missing in a ghost town called Slaughter Gulch out in the Mojave Desert.  The outlaw Jed Stone is responsible and most importantly, Emily Hartwood, the other playable character in Alone 1, was among the missing film crew members.  Without giving too much away, Jed Stone’s also rumored to be the descendant of two characters we met in the first two games, which is a pretty cool way to tie all these games together.  The plot structure feels almost like a ripoff of Alone 2 with One-Eyed Jack and Grace but it’s really a very slight backdrop here.  Stone himself has almost no presence in the game until the very end so the weird west setting has to do the heavy lifting to keep player engaged and motivated.

Even though weird west stuff is my jam, I feared that Alone 3’s setting would be predictable and generic, very yeehaw, get along little doggie with all the tired cowboy references you always hear.  Sure, Carnby curses “hell and damnation!” when he dies and has the occasional trite quip, but generally the voice acting and writing is tolerably restrained.  Well, unless we’re talking about the natives’ voice actors, who sound like answering machines or aliens trying to assimilate into Earth culture by learning a new human language for the first time.  Before we get into the meat of the game, I have to say I’m a little disappointed by how repetitive and irritating the soundtrack can be.  There are a couple good grooves but mostly just these plinky little riffs that don’t have enough melody or variation to remain listenable over long periods of time.

Unfortunately, Alone 3 is also not a looker by today’s standards and the engine had really started to show its age in its third year of use, not to mention DOOM coming out a year before and looking far more impressive.  So many environments are monochrome stretches of dark blue or grey stone, gravel, or wood with little unique or attractive detail.  You might think that Infogrames would use this boring art style to maybe throw the player a bone and make important items stand out all the more from the subdued backgrounds, but unfortunately this game is the most egregiously vague of all 3 in that puzzle solutions range from “oh I guess that makes some sense in hindsight” to “what the hell am I looking at to even know what I might be able to do.” 

Even stranger, Infogrames changed the way you Search for items or activate them.  Sometimes the game will let you just run across an item to initiate the Take it or Leave it menu, but other times you must manually use the Search function.  This is especially annoying considering how Carnby takes wildly different amounts of time to complete the Search animation so you could be holding the action button down for as long as five seconds and just stop because you assumed the game is telling you you’re on the wrong track.

Additionally, interactive objects like this skull’s horn that opens a trapdoor require a pixel perfect activation to work.  So not only have they scaled back the user friendliness of the very act of searching or picking up items, but the exact sequencing and placement of where you must be to successfully solve puzzles can look like it’s not working and wrongly make you doubt your approach. 

Alone 3 also has a weird habit of providing hints for certain bosses so long before you fight them that it’s easy to forget them.  I’ll throw the game a bone as that era of gaming expected you to write stuff down but why can I hold everything else in inventory except those hints?  Hmm…there are also moments of real tomfoolery in the boss fights too where one guy could only be killed a gold bullet, and so I equipped the bullet into the Winchester rifle and instead of unloading the 10 regular bullets into my inventory, it permanently deleted them to make room for the gold bullet.  THANKSSSS.  Considering how hard the puzzles are to even understand what you might want to do much less what the game thinks you should do, this user-unfriendly design is just indefensible.  Later sections of the game get almost apologetically prolific with hints, but it’s too little too late.

One such hint comes in the creative lore specific sequences I mentioned earlier, something that I actually thought was pretty cool.  At one point, you’re killed and a shaman sends your spirit into a cougar, and you’re given a limited amount of time to retrieve a magical item and kill two werewolves to resurrect yourself.  The werewolves are invulnerable to everything except silver and you must dip your paw first into a tar barrel that’s completely obscured by the camera angles and then into a barrel of silver shavings that you’ve not seen for about 2-3 hrs of gametime and probably won’t remember even exists.  The game tries to give you some hints after the tar like “silver will kill werewolves” but I didn’t remember that barrel at all and this message didn’t even show up the first couple times I tried this sequence.  This section is a bit of stretch to figure out but I have to commend the animations and the whacky creativity on display here, especially how the werewolves die, reverting into zombies and then into cat spirits before disappearing.  I mean the whole game zombies have inexplicably turned into cats before evaporating but here they ratchet it up a notch.  I’m so confused!

Another neat little section has you ingesting a solution that shrinks you down to action figure size, much like Alice in Wonderland. I also wonder if this idea was influenced by Evil Dead II’s scene where Ash is attacked by little versions of himself.  Interestingly, the 1997 shooter Blood actually had its main character Caleb get attacked by little versions of himself, and their black hats and cowboy attire remind me a bit of Carnby’s look here.  Probably nothing, but certainly a possible influence. 

So did I enjoy Alone 3?  Well, surprisingly, as much shit as I threw Alone 2’s way, I still think it’s better than 3, making 3 the worst of the original trilogy.  Alone 1 controls like a brick shithouse but it has a period-authentic art style, a creepy soundscape, cool lore, and a cool ending.  Alone 2’s action is messy and its puzzles are pretty hit or miss but it has a likeably campy vibe, even it departs from the preferable atmosphere of Alone 1.  Alone 3 thankfully doesn’t push its controls to the limit very often and does some fun things with its undead cowboys and shaman magic but the puzzles feel pretty random and unsatisfying, the setting’s often not very compelling to look at, and the villain plays no role in how the story plays out until the last admittedly cool boss fight, meaning you’re just kind of wandering around without much motivation.

The series’ janky controls and aging 3D engine definitely felt like they’d reached their creative plateau here and Infogrames wisely hung up the series’ spurs after making them for three straight years.  The series wouldn’t resurrect like Carnby from his cougar spirit walking until many years later in 2001, and the gaming industry had capitalized on its absence, releasing Resident Evils 1-3 and Silent Hill in the meantime, which practically obliterated Alone in the Dark from survival horror’s lexicon, as those series iterated on its foundational design principles and improved them in many ways.  So next we’ll see if the fourth game in the series, the New Nightmare, had what it took to regain the dignity due a grandfather of the genre.

ALONE IN THE DARK: THE NEW NIGHTMARE

The New Nightmare was published by Infogrames but development was handled by first timers Darkworks, whose subsequent work I’ve incidentally played as well, namely 2005’s Cold Fear and 2012’s I Am Alive.  New Nightmare released on PS2 only in Europe but came to nearly every other platform in America save the brand new Xbox.  Funnily enough, the Dreamcast version was the base version (“Dreamcastguy here!).

Because this game is essentially a soft reboot, Carnby’s now a supernatural private eye living in 2001, not the 1920s, as his greasy hair proves.  The most important variable in New Nightmare’s development though was that Resident Evil had released 5 years prior in 1996 and had taken the world and the genre by storm.  Much like how Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider reboot series was inspired by Uncharted which was inspired by the original Tomb Raiders, so too does New Nightmare ape Resident Evil in a turnabout is fair play kind of way.  Which is not a bad thing, but is a thing to remember as we go.

A deliciously cheesy 2000s cutscene starts the game off.  Carnby’s best friend Charles Fiske was found dead on Shadow Island during his search for three tablets which are said to unlock ancient evil.  So Carnby sets out on Halloween night to avenge his friend and find out what happened; he’s joined by professor Aline Cedrac, who seeks to understand the tablets and who thinks Obed Morton, the patriarch of the island, might be her long lost father.  You’ll take a plane to Shadow Island together and like every entertainment property ever, the weather or someone attacking you takes the plane out, you crash land, and Carnby and Aline are separated save for their walkie-talkies (walkie-talkie line from Tommy Boy). 

Much like the first game which apparently inspired Resident Evil’s multiple playable characters, you can choose to play as Carnby or Aline and each has a unique campaign.  To aid in your selection, you’re given this vital information: Carnby’s characteristic is a “double barreled gun,” and Aline’s is “father unknown.”  So we got a guy who’s compensating for something and a girl with daddy issues?  Hmm, tough choice but I empathize more with Carnby’s, uh, “characteristic.”  Upon choosing your character, a narrator will grimly deliver the line “Alone in the Dark,” just like Resident Evil does.  Now even if you choose Carnby as I did, don’t despair, because by game’s end, you’ll get your fill of Aline’s ill-tempered and badly acted personality via frequent walkie talkie updates. 

The opening area heavily recalls Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion, from its abundance of stone statues and fountains and other classical architecture, and the main foyer of the manor.  Similar to Alone 1 and 2, you’re going room to room scouring each corner for items and notes to help you get to new areas and solve puzzles.  Carnby and Aline are 3D modeled in a high resolution while the backgrounds remain highly detailed 2D.  One interesting little detail is that the flashlight beam lights up the 2D backgrounds very convincingly as if they were 3D, a trick that entails them swapping out a lighter tile to replace the dark one as your flashlight passes over it.  Aline’s campaign is fairly puzzlecentric while Carnby gets more gunfights.  Player movement is leagues better than previous games, as there’s a dedicated sprint button and activate button.  You’ll still need to open your inventory to use keys or puzzle items, and you’ll want to reload your guns from here too, as the animation in real time just takes too way long.  You’re given four save slots but you can only save your game if you consume a charm of saving, which are drip fed to you until about midway through the game and then you should have plenty to plan out your saves from.

Your primary occupation is puzzle solving, and they’re all pretty decently brain teasing here with only a couple being a stretch.  Clues are cleverly implemented and come in a wide variety.  Some puzzles may require you to look through a telescope to find a secret message scrawled on a distant castle wall, while others want you to remember a birthday or pay attention to a specific date or someone’s initials to inform you of what code to enter elsewhere.  Unlike previous games, anything you read gets stored in your inventory for later reference, which is a great quality of life improvement and really makes you feel more like a detective.  Too bad they’re not voice acted like previous games but alas.  Clues also require a good bit of reading to refamiliarize yourself with their context but you can be fairly confident that the necessary info is in your notes or is waiting for you nearby.

What will become fairly trying is figuring out what keys go to which doors and in which order the mansion wants you to go to each area.  Each key notes which door it goes to like “grd f east” but if you look at your map, which is a welcome new feature to the series, the location of the right door often doesn’t match the key’s description. 

Another trying problem is how specifically you must be aligned with certain items in order for the activate button to work; pushing items is unintuitive, as you must push straight ahead and then hit activate, as opposed to trying to activate from a standstill and then pressing forward.  The game also inelegantly and misleadingly gates your progress so you can’t go anywhere too soon,  like this attic stairwell that lets you climb the staircase but won’t even tell you the door at the top is locked or inaccessible currently and only becomes interactable at a specific point in the story but without the game giving you any indication that this direction was the way to go.  Nice!

This may occur because the game is trying to account for two distinct campaigns going through the same areas, but this leads to real confusion on where to go next, and negatively impacts your resource management during combat.  Carnby’s now a full on gunslinger with no melee options.  Shooting uses an auto aim feature that mostly works but can wig out quite a lot if using the late-game weapons.  Starting weapons like the pistol and shotgun also chew through ammo quite quickly as they’re outfitted with extra barrels.  This can really suck if you’re unsure where to go, because if you wander around for too long, enemies will respawn, causing you to waste precious ammo just to get back to parity.  I actually had to scrap my first playthrough and replay the game’s first hour because I’d run too low on supplies and couldn’t make it through.  This bad beat occurrence isn’t guaranteed or necessarily likely if you’re aware of it and play around it, but the possibility of this happening again loomed large in the back of my mind as I played.

Before I get into what I really enjoyed about New Nightmare, there was one section that was emblematic of how the game can be a pain to figure out and control.  The library is a well-conceived area in theory, making you imagine the place as real and interact with it accordingly but it also kind falls apart because it doesn’t quite follow its implied ruleset.  The game’s notes tell you via diagram where 4 books are that you need to push in order to unlock a door.  But the space is huge and the camera changes angles so often it’s pretty hard to tell where you are relative to the diagram.  The game tries to help you by making the appropriate books glint but I played this section probably ten times and this clue glint never showed up the same way twice, sometimes appearing, sometimes not.  Then a boss interrupts the last part of the puzzle and fighting him ranges from confusing as to when he’s vulnerable to tedious as it takes almost all your ammo to kill him to impossible if he glitches into invulnerability.  As much as I’d wished this section had been incredibly satisfying instead of bewildering, fortunately this is usually the exception to how the game works, and it’s rarely totally unfair with how it treats the player, which is a step up from the bizarro design from previous games.

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In fact, while a little volatile, the New Nightmare was the first Alone game that I played for long stretches of time without having to constantly look stuff up.  I was losing myself in the world, and, dare I say it, HAVING FUN.  Puzzles were often intuitive and exciting to figure out for myself and the game’s combat was serviceably diverting, but the story and sense of place is what really kept me intrigued.  The voice acting is often goofy fun, and the plentiful documents lying around the manor are well-written and provide great anticipation for the next story beat.

Reading these tidbits, we learn that Shadow Island was once inhabited by the Native American Abkani tribe, who used magic to keep at bay the World of Darkness, a dimension of black magic and monsters.  The Abkani all but died out and years later the troubled Morton family built a mansion there in the island’s seclusion.  The family is influenced by business partner Judas Decerto (who shares his last name with the first game’s mansion) and they start practicing grotesque human experimentation in order to understand and contact the World of Darkness.  Professor Obed Morton, a clear reference to Lovecraftian cultist Obed Marsh, is a foremost expert on Abkani language and supposedly Aline’s father, hence her involvement.  The game’s story finds Obed and his brother Alan continuing the family’s twisted research and attempting to fully open a gateway to the World of Darkness.  Edward, Aline, and a suspiciously helpful Abkani witchdoctor named Edenshaw are all that stand between the Mortons and evil flooding the world. 

That’s really just the setup with some additional context and there’s more intrigue and set pieces that I won’t spoil here.  While the game’s scripting is effectively motivating, the strength of any interactive medium is a sense of place that convinces you that you’re there, and New Nightmare has this in spades.  The fully realized mansion is flush with secret rooms full of magical and technological wonders hidden away, you’ll brave foggy moors on the manor grounds, comb its catacombs, dare a laboratory full of macabre experiments fully in the dark…while mostly alone 😊, and the end-game goes full on H.R. Giger in a fantastic way.  Environments are pregnant with history and exotic detail, from Abkani hieroglyphs to gruesome corpses of monsters too horrible to imagine.  It’s all great, pulpy fun and the primary reason to play this game.  I would also recommend playing both campaigns as Aline’s sections has some really brainbusting puzzles and some of the most unique supernatural encounters while Carnby is a more likeable protagonist who gets to use more of the crazy weapons the Mortons crafted to kill the Creatures of Darkness.

In short, this is the best the series ever played.  Now let’s be honest, New Nightmare’s return to form was essentially achieved by copying the refinements that Resident Evil had made to Alone’s original formula.  The cynical type might assert that it was Resident Evil’s world and Alone in the Dark was just living in it, but I must insist that New Nightmare has enough of its own creativity in its puzzles and story beats to feel familiar but fresh to fans of either franchise, especially considering the complex ping-pong match of influence the two played that New Nightmare acted as the returned serve for.  Unfortunately, this brief moment of strength for Alone in the Dark would be short-lived, as the series would lie dormant for another seven years before being revived in the wildly uneven 2008 entry. 

ALONE IN THE DARK (2008)

Since 2003, Infogrames had been rebranded as Atari SA and they gave creative control of the 2008 Alone in the Dark game to their subsidiary called Eden Games, previously known for their work in racing games like Test Drive Unlimited.  Lead designer Herve Sliwa had actually worked at the company when it was called Infogrames for 6 years before and expressed his love for the original games in an IGN interview, coincidentally enough the same publication that would later give the 2008 game a 3.5 out of 10 so…OUCH (emotional damage meme).  I guess you might say the game has a little something for absolutely no one XD

Herve notes that the game’s inspiration came to him in his first trip to the US where he walked through Central Park at night.  He noticed the unsettling contrast between the darkness of the park and the lights that girded its walkways, almost like two worlds sitting parallel to one another.  Herve thought this would make an excellent setting for the Alone in the Dark game and brainstormed a pitch to Atari for a new game in the series.  So this game wasn’t a cynical reboot to keep the trademark alive by a big corporate honcho, this was a legit fan of the series with a history in its creator’s company trying to make a passion project and it shows.  Unfortunately, it’s also a game whose passion wasn’t tempered by restraint, so every sweet idea is thrown at the wall and the execution ingloriously whiffs.

The PS3 version adds an additional boss fight and fixes the camera and driving problems but unfortunately your boi doesn’t have a PS3.   I tried to get this working on PC but the game crashes if asked to display at anything above an 800x600 resolution so the Xbox 360 version was where this review was captured; fortunately, if that’s the word for it, this version encapsulates all the good and bad extremes of this game so it works out. 

Alone 2008 is the most ridiculous and the most polarizing game in the series to date.  One minute I was telling myself “man, this game’s getting really good” and the next I was screaming that this was the worst game I’d ever played and fantasizing about snapping the disc in half.  2008 has thrill a minute set pieces, multiple control schemes for third and first person, but weirdly mediocre driving for a company that’s only made racing games, manually controlled melee combat, blinking as an actual game mechanic, and so much more.  The exhausting amount of control inputs and gameplay types can be overwhelming, but it achieves intermittent bouts of thrilling alchemy when it all comes together. 

The game stars Johnny Depp (#justiceforjohnny), I mean Edward Carnby, who’s actually voiced by Max Payne, I mean James McCaffrey , and this time he’s a foul-mouthed cynic caught up in a supernatural doomsday conspiracy similar to his role in New Nightmare.  Many publications at the time of release called this game a reboot, but in-game notes actually reference Alone 1 and 2’s events as canon so it’s really more of a sequel that selectively hears what its predecessors have said. 

That’s hardly the craziest revelation here though, as the game starts off with a bang: a devilish presence has awakened and literally taken root beneath Central Park, turning it into a disaster zone ravaged by earthquakes.  Carnby himself has recently been exorcised of this devil but lost his memory in the process and so he joins with a helpful woman named Sarah and a Force ghost version of an old friend named Theo to uncover his past and its connection to how to stop the devil and save the city.  The plot is very Davinci Code hokum and the voice acting and dialogue is decidedly B tier.  It’s oh so fun, with some of the most unhinged line deliveries in all of video gaming history (“I’m the fucking universe!” and “so fuck you anyway!”).  I know 2000s schlock when I see it, and everything from the ragdoll physics to the Unreal Engine 3 sheen that every game back then had like Batman: Arkham Asylum and SAW shows up here.  Hell, even the main enemy types are a 2000s standby: zombies---I mean “HUMANZ.” 

Most throwback of all, the game is set up like an episodic DVD menu (remember those!), split into 8 episodes that each begin with a Previously On Alone in the Dark recap.  The pause menu brings up rewind and fast forward controls that let you jump around to any desired episode or sequence like you’re using a DVD player.  The back of the box tells you that this is so “anyone can get to the end,” but this is a suspiciously self-aware feature for a game to include, almost admitting fault out of the gate, and we’ll soon go over why that was presciently helpful on their part.

CONTROLS   

The fundamental problem with this game is its overly ambitious control scheme.  There are first and third person controls much like Metal Gear Solid, controls for getting into a car or rummaging around in the glovebox and sunvisor, but also for driving, when hanging from ropes, and on it goes.  I remember very little about this game when it first released except one review detail that stuck with me, and that was that there was a button for closing your eyes.  Well, they weren’t kidding.  You blink to clear your vision if concussed or poisoned and you can even close your eyes to see ghostly clues later on to solve puzzles.  Equally unique control options extend to opening up your inventory to combine items together into weapons, and different inputs for using bandages for bad wounds or medical sprays for lesser wounds.

So let’s shift to Carnby’s personal controls.  In a strange move, the left thumbstick controls both forward movement and the camera, but it’s too tight to Carnby’s back, and often results in disorientation and lack of depth perception.  I only skipped a couple sections because I couldn’t keep the flashlight trained on these lethal shadows while also moving forward without jerking too far right or left and letting the darkness get me.   It’s possible this wouldn’t have been a problem if playing PS3 or PC, but this is a good example of how overpacked the controls are so that they make mundane tasks unnecessarily difficult.  This isn’t the only place the game fights you either which brings us to combat.

COMBAT/FIRE SYSTEM

Carnby can defend himself by picking up makeshift weapons like bats, brooms, or pipes lying around in the environment, and you’ll often have a pistol.  But the only way to kill Humanz is through fire damage; use anything else and you merely knock them down for a second or two before they get right back up.  So that means you must either douse your bullets in flammable liquid to make fire bullets, light your melee weapons on fire, or explode a bottle of flammable liquid to kill your foes.  

The right thumbstick is used to swing a weapon once equipped, but you’ll have to actually wind up and push forward or side to side to attack in the appropriate direction.  It’s actually very reminiscent of the original game’s controls.  You’ll want to lock onto an enemy to make up for the glacially slow turning radius, but I often found the thumbstick controls so finicky that it was more useful to just sort of hold out the flaming object and run it into things to catch them on fire, which felt about as uncool as it looked.  Weirdly enough, there really aren’t nearly enough objects that actually catch fire lying around; a museum level in particular litters the ground with maces and swords that look cool but don’t kill anything.  I also found that once I scoured an environment for an actual useful flammable object, I often got it knocked from my hands by a Humanz’s tongue attack, and since items only burn for a time, this can mean wasting the item entirely and not being able to advance.  I even had one zombie guy knock my weapon out of the level entirely XD

So while fighting face up is hella awkward, the shooting fares a little better, as do the creative and fun ways to fire bomb the Humanz.  Shooting lightly auto targets small enemies like the poison crabs or the flying lampreys but you have to free aim to hit Humanz who shuck and jive way too fast for the slow turn radius.  Fortunately, should you have picked up explosive bottles, you can just throw these and shoot them in mid-air; this works on trash mobs but is also the only way to kill bosses.  If you prefer to take them out cowboy style, just douse your bullets in the flammable liquids and shoot fire bullets like I mentioned before.  It makes no sense but it looks awesome, even if its weirdly hard to actually hit the glowing weak spots in the Humanz skin.  Another sweet offensive option is combining your lighter with any aerosol cans from your inventory (even your healing sprays) to MacGyver a flamethrower.  Sweeet!

INVENTORY/CRAFTING

Speaking of combinations, there’s a pretty clever crafting and inventory system.  Your inventory is represented quite literally as your jacket’s interior pocketing, which you open Neo style, with 5 slots on your left for stuff like batteries, tape, and bullets and 4 on your right for your health sprays and explosives.  While in this menu, you can craft new items by combining items from either side.  There are plenty of useless combinations, but several will become mainstays like batteries into flashlights or cloth and alcohol to make Molotov cocktails.  There are even some cute ones like making a stickybomb out of molotovs and double-sided tape, which is used to solve several puzzles too.  And while there are a plethora of crafting options, you have limited space in your jacket and have to make tough decisions about what to keep on your person, a welcome callback to the first game. 

Healing items jockey for position with your offensive options so you’ll have to be smart about which to keep with you.  They generally work like Resident Evil’s sprays, healing even Carnby’s jacket model.  Take enough damage though and the game will start a 7 minute timer in which you’ll need to use a bandage or bleed out.  As much damage as Carnby’s model shows though, there’s no reliable indicator of whether it’ll take one or five hits to actually kill you, leading to annoying confusion when you get merced and thought you had more damage to give.

Regardless, I’m a really big fan of this inventory system in theory, and it reminds me of the immersive design of Far Cry 2’s map that came into the player’s in-game view.  Crafting has to be done in real-time so if you have to swap something out or make a new item, you’ll have to be aware of any danger nearby.  To help with this tension, the game allows you to bind up to 4 of your favorite item combos to hotkeys, like an aerosol can and a lighter, a pistol and a flashlight, or my favorite, a pistol and explosive bottles.  It’s a little clunky still, as there are even some annoying extra controls like if you hit the Use button while holding a bottle, Carnby pours out its contents out instead of clicking the door or gate in front of you, but these hotkeys are a welcome quality of life inclusion regardless.

IMMERSIVE ELEMENTS

So we’ve touched on the weird controls, the melee and gun combat, the crafting and inventory system, and the fire system, but there is so much more to the game, for better or worse.  This game has a smorgasboard of different gameplay flavors, from ledge-shimmying platforming not unlike Uncharted or Tomb Raider to scripted driving sections where you must escape either flying lampreys or earthquakes. 

There are multiple cool little mini-systems and immersive sim style options that not everyone will even think to try.  Fire is all that kills enemies but there a couple other ways to manipulate it, like stabbing a hole in a car’s gas tank, driving that car at something you want to blow up, jumping out last second, and then lighting the gas trail up with your lighter for explosive effect.  I mentioned before how annoying it is to accidentally pour out flammable liquid when trying to open something but if you mean to, you can actually set this trail of liquid ablaze to surprise your enemies.  Stunned enemies can be dragged into fire to kill them if you’re fast enough.  Fires will sometimes even need to be put with an extinguisher, which can also act as a battering ram to break down doors or be sprayed into a fire to make it a flamethrower, which I’m pretty sure is the opposite of how that works.  Cars you drive around the open areas must be hotwired if they don’t have keys inside, and you can also rummage through the glove box and sunvisor for items and switch seats, just because. There are all sorts of little micro-decisions to make and the only reason they’re not thoroughly thrilling is that they’re usually far too much work to pull off when you could shoot something with an explosive bottle.  Enemies are just too fast and their attacks either knock everything from your hands or disorient you enough that it’s not worth the effort to try and fight the stupid controls for all these admittedly more interesting ways of defending yourself. 

Aside from these options being too much work for too little reward, the pace of gameplay is often dictated by set pieces will keep you going at a breakneck pace.  These often remind of the the trial and error design of Alone 1’s deathtraps.  One such sequence is the car chase which is several minutes long with no checkpoints.  The car’s slow to change direction or increase speed, there are tons of vehicles unfairly driving at you instead of towards their safety for artificial difficulty, and the street crumbles in very unpredictable ways so your car often gets stuck, making this section a real pain in the crack.  Mess up at all and you’ll have to restart. 

Later on, you’ll be tasked with keeping flying lampreys from carrying your car away.  The game says that ramming into things or achieving high speeds will knock them off, but because your car gets stuck on nearly everything and has almost no momentum accounted for by the physics engine, this almost never works correctly.  Crashing into things has inconsistent feedback, often failing to drive away the bats after a huge collision, while small bumps into lampposts or benches sends fiery debris everywhere.  I almost skipped this section but eventually I got through it.  This level of determination really applies to the whole game but especially to its weirdo setpieces.  Like Carnby’s controls, they’re usually too demanding for how loose and unresponsive the controls are.  This is really too bad as conceptually these sections are admirably creative and every now and again 2008 actually chains these disparate gameplay sections together in a way that builds momentum and excitement.  But too often the critical mass of elements are less than the sum of their parts. 

MUSIC

So as rough as the game proper is, you’ll at least get to enjoy a soundtrack that has no business being this good.  Despite its full orchestral sound, French composer Oliver Deriviere created the music using completely digital sources, the only live performers recorded being the incredible talented Mystery of Bulgarian Voices female choir.  This choir, also known more widely as Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, was created in 1952 as a folk music ensemble group specializing in traditional Bulgarian vocal styles such as  irregular timings, modal scales, diaphonic singing (parallel harmonies), and dissonant harmonies.  It’s exuberant yet full of character and history, as if it’s seen some things and I highly encourage you to check out the group’s other work too, as it’s quite an education in singing you won’t hear anywhere else.

The composer Deriviere is also responsible for plethora of great soundtracks for really good AA games, many of which I’ll definitely be reviewing someday like Greedfall, Vampyr, the Council, and Plague Tale (not to mention Get Even, Remember Me, AC Black Flags Freedom Cry DLC, and Vampire the Masquerade Swansong).  No other soundtrack has quite popped off like this one though, as this one hit the mainstream when it was sampled in Pop Smoke’s rap song “Flexing,” which currently has over 82 million views on Youtube.  Most people don’t likely know where it came from but hey, that’s some pretty cool and unlikely exposure for what is one of the greatest pieces of video game music ever created.  It’s indicative of what a fascinatingly strange project Alone in the Dark is, as it’s parts are often very unrefined, yet we keep seeing glimpses that the developers took this project very seriously: like Herve Silwa’s passion for the series, Deriviere’s soundtrack is equally committed and commendable.   

The incredible score certainly amplifies gameplay but is predictably most notable during cutscenes which contextualize gameplay well.  I’ve heard people complain about the story but I actually enjoyed its shamelessly hokey premise about the devil invading the world through Central Park and Carnby being some chosen one who’s managed to live over a hundred years because of his connection to a magical stone.  It’s certainly a less elegant and original story than New Nightmare but it’s satisfyingly campy like the Prophecy movies or Schwarznegger’s End of Days.  Probably most worrisome is the weird facial capture and questionable line delivery from a otherwise talented voice cast.  Hell, even Sarah is actually a likeable female cotagonist who factors into the game’s ending pretty heavily.  And speaking of the ending, the buildup and the ending itself encapsulate the best and worst things about the game and left me feeling rather empty once I’d finished.

THE ROOT OF ALL FRUSTATIONS

The biggest set piece or series of set pieces are the two late game sections that require you to burn up these giant roots of the devil’s influence around Central Park in order to gain access to the final areas.  The first set can be skipped over using the pause menu fast forward but the 2nd set cannot.  So the mostly linear third-person action adventure puzzle solving opens up to an Evil Within 2 stye hub world full of combat and puzzle encounters around each root, requiring you to scour the park for the necessary supplies to pull each of these off.  There’s a good mix of objectives but there just aren’t enough items lying around except in very specific places and often very far from your actual objectives.  There’s next to no signposting to give you an idea of where these spots are to restock and random pockets of hyper aggressive Humanz run you ragged while you search.  The whole set up would be fine if more resources were allocated either near an objective or made the exploring more intuitive and consistently rewarding, and overall these stupid, repetitive root sections really kill the story’s momentum, gating the conclusion just as the drama was reaching a high point.

What’s truly a bummer is how bad the endings are, especially after making you grind through upwards of at least 3-5 hours of gametime and burning 20-30 roots.  The ending level is one big, long environmental puzzle and then you make your choice of a good or bad ending, both of which are super short and anti-climactic.  A bad ending can ruin a game for me, no matter how much I enjoyed what came before, as evidenced by how FFXV’s loathsome late-game stealth sections turned me against an otherwise enjoyable experience.  Alone 2008’s endings are just a terrible reward for the absolute slog it took to get there.

Alone 2008’s clearly unfinished and rushed and I’ve heard the development cycle was pretty rough.  And while it’s a product of its edgy, schlocky time, its also a faithful love letter to the spirit of the original trilogy, from its exacting puppeteer controls, its inventory management, to its emphasis on intuitive puzzle solutions.  But 2008 can’t cobble together more than a couple sequences of smooth gameplay and so it’s parts remain disparate and satisfying only in small doses.  Carnby’s movement is sluggish, the breakdance fighting zombie shitlords are far too hard to hit and too easy to be hit by, the driving’s stiff, the floor is lava sections are atrocious to get through, and there’s just a general pall of sloppiness over the whole thing that spoils its good intentions and fun ideas like the inventory system and environmental interactivity, to the spray can flamethrowers to slow mo skeet shooting of explosives.

That being said, it’s stew of rotten ingredients still has something tasty about it from time to time and its episodic structure and emphasis on using flashlights to ward off darkness likely a heavy influence on Remedy’s Alan Wake in 2010.  It also foresaw that episodic gaming would likely be a popular trend what with Netflix and the ensuing Telltale renaissance just around the corner.  It’s possibly one of the most interesting games ever made because you can see where it could’ve been actually great and just needed more love.  It’s far too creative, insane, and sloppy to be completely ignored. 

ALONE IN THE DARK REMAKE (CANCELLED 2011) 

Atari must have initially felt the same way, because they enlisted Eden Games’ services one more time despite the 2008’s less than stellar reception.  The new game would be a remake of the original Alone in the Dark, a period piece where Carnby was beset by horrors both eldritch and Lovecraftian and it would feature the series’ classic puzzles and item hunting.  It would also emphasize manipulating lighting effects as well as quick-time events.  The game would use the player models from Alone in the Dark: Inferno, the PS3 director’s cut of Alone 2008, as can be seen in the pre-production screenshots that looks just like Carnby 2008’s face with old Carnby’s red hair and moustache.  You were supposed to be able to play as Emily Hartwood too, just as you could before. 

Unfortunately, by 2011, Atari had suffered multiple financial setbacks so they had to shut down multiple projects and the Alone remake was one of them.  Its fate was sealed and so was the potential for continuing in the series’ formative footsteps.  The next mainline restart for the franchise would pop up 4 years later in 2015, which is its own sordid tale we’ll get to soon enough.  In the meantime, the world had been subjected to not one but two miserable Alone in the Dark movies, the first of which was directed by none other than notorious shithead Uwe Boll.

ALONE IN THE DARK (2005) by Uwe Boll

2005’s Alone in the Dark film was supposed to release with the 2008 game but its development just took too long to complete.  It’s probably for the best as the movie averaged just 1% percent on Rotten Tomatoes and isn’t much of a companion piece since it instead apes details from the New Nightmare, with Carnby tracking down artifacts from the lost Abkani tribe to help save the world from a mad scientist bent on unleashing monsters from an H.R. Giger themed world.  This movie makes no bones about its Alien influences, from the snakey symbiotes that infect people’s bodies to the monster’s black scaley armor, and even going so far as to call them Xenos. 

But that’s about all the referential movie pedigree this one aspires to, although the movie’s terrible reputation isn’t as bad as you might have heard.  Uwe Boll’s a moron, but he has a budget and some sense of film language that distracts you from how actually boring most of it is instead of side-splittingly bad, with several notable exceptions. 

What’s super funny about this movie is that the original script was supposedly very true to the game, with Carnby as a normal guy doing what he could to stave off supernatural horrors but Boll insisted that there be more gun fights and car chases and monsters, and lectured the scriptwriters to no end about how little they knew about storytelling basics.  You need look no further for evidence of his inarguable genius than this compelling manifesto on suspense:

WE MUST KNOW A LITTLE MORE ABOUT ALL THIS . LOOK in SIGNS THE AUDIENCE KNOWS THAT THE ALIENS WANTS TO DESTROY - SO HE AUDIENCE IS AFRAID. LIKE WHT YOU SAY ABOUT OSAMA BIN LADEN: WE DONT KNOW A LOT - BUT WE ARE FRAID - BECAUSE OF 11.9. - SO WITHOUT ANY INFORMATIONS ABOUT THE ALIENS WE ALL FEEL NOTHING - WE ARE ALL CONFUSED BUT LETS SAY YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE SHOWED AN ALIEN IN SIGN - IT WOULD BE A DESASTER - NOBODY WOULD TAKE IT SERIOUS!!  - I mean shit, he’s right, I was riveted the whole time, what the fuck were those writers thinking?

So let’s get to the real Bollshit because that’s what you wanna hear about.  The market chase between Carnby and this Heisenberg lookalike who elbow drops Carnby from like twenty feet in the air is a hoot, before Carnby puts him on ice.  Stephen Dorff, who must be okay with his career sucking as hard as the vampires in Blade, shows up as a hammy but game paranormal FBI type to help Carnby withstand the monsters and Tara Reid’s pornstar acting skills.  Dorff’s Starship trooper lackeys spout military cliches and generally just die a lot and practice horrible gun safety to heavy metal tunes.  It’s fascinatingly dumb, and features this gem of a scene where these troopers come across a dead body whose actor gets up midscene right after they yell “let’s move!” I guess even a dead soldier’s gotta follow orders! 

It’s thoroughly schlocky and intermittently funny, and mostly just has that barely paying attention type of writing with random plot holes like the mad scientist going from being deathly afraid of the monsters one minute to literally controlling them, or the city evacuating even though the end fight occurs completely underground and never reaches the public eye.  And then we get that classic B monster movie ending where a POV shot of the monsters resurfacing after we thought we’d won and then freeze frame, cut to black.  What a ride! 

It’s bad but the effects are actually passable, even better somehow than the wire stunts, like this security guard who gets mauled from behind and is slowly lowered to the floor into a pool of CGI blood.  NOOICE!  Despite its reputation, I actually found the 2nd Alone in the Dark far dumber so let’s go there now.

ALONE IN THE DARK II (2008) by Michael Roesch and Peter Scherer

Uwe Boll doesn’t direct this one, but his producer stench is here. Frequent Boll collaborators Michael Roesch and Peter Scherer direct, and to their credit, this movie looks a lot better than Boll’s, primarily due to the decent color grading vs the flat lighting from the first movie.

Casting Carnby as an Asian gentleman is certainly an interesting choice, but unfortunately Steve Yun has the charisma of a Lincoln log, his default expression being a blank stare as he ignores direct questions and looks straight ahead most of the time.  Adding to the stupid fun is Bill Moseley from Rob Zombie’s House of the Dead trilogy who shows up to do some of the most low energy line readings I’ve ever heard in his weird Will Forte voice.

The movie opens with ghost hunter types being chased by the ghost of a witch.  They have a dagger of hers that’s the key to bringing her back to life somehow and eventually she catches up with them and they somehow think they’re going to shoot her to death, with guns that clearly aren’t firing while sound effects are still going off.  It doesn’t go well, and eventually the lone survivor, the guy who played Postal dude in Uwe boll’s 2007 adaptation, gets contaminated by touching this dagger and ends up getting Carnby contaminated too once he asks Carnby for help with his condition.  The only real link this movie has to the games is that those infected by the dagger get big veiny crevices in their skin like the Humanz in Alone 2008. 

Eventually Carnby is rescued by another group of ghost hunter types, one of which named Natalie has been marked by the witch for death.  Carnby’s dagger wound allows him to see visions that act as clues to finding her body so they can destroy it and rid the world of her influence.  The rest of the movie is one big convoluted chase scene. 

The editing is often abrupt or nonsensical, and the dialogue is leagues worse than anything in the last movie.  For instance, (30) Natalie changes her outfit just to drive over to the occultist Abner for help with Carnby’s wound. Abner’s played by Lance Henriksen, and even he can’t muster the strength to deliver the stilted dialogue, even waxing eloquent about how an unconscious Carnby he’s never met or talked to is an idealist and is going to be problem (38).  There are many little dumb things to point out, so let’s get started:

The witch attacks the house where Carnby and his new homies are staying.  Carnby’s like she’s here for the dagger, not me. How do you know, Carnby? (42:50). 

44:48 – guy takes the dagger from Carnby just to tell him its his responsibility to take care of the dagger and hand it back to him

46:30 – WITCH HITS GUY WITH a shelf and somehow he ends up with a piece of rebar in his leg.  What?

48: - horrible gun safety from Natalie

49 – “trust me” best pickup line ever

51-52 guy dies for some reason

53 cant even afford to show fire, just lights up Carnby’s face

Then next scene Carnby inexplicably changes clothes and knows way too much info he couldn’t possibly know

57 “this isn’t about just me anymore” bro, it never was. Then Abner calls him an idealist again without knowing anymore about Carnby

58 “such an old man” as his maid dusts off his pants. What?

1:00  a piece of a heart is beating XD

1:01 – coats bullets in Nickelodeon slime to shoot witch force field

1:02 – Abner warns “the witch’s lab will have lots of traps, and really…” scene just cuts XD

1:05 door mechanism gets jammed, girl goes on other side but doesn’t bother to jimmy loose the mechanism so they can get in. (use “fuck you all” Uwe Boll)

1:08 – is that someone sucking throw a straw as a sound effect?  Tell me now!

1:14 Central Park is where they come out of the witch’s lab but the editing back and forth from underground to park is edited like epilepsy, kind of like this movie review

1:18 – the witch’s spirit is reunited with her body and then immediately killed. Its fucking hilarious. After an hour and 18 minutes of slow, plodding, banal story, it’s over like that it.  But wait, there’s a twist, because it was too easy.

1:19 Abner and Carnby reread their clues from earlier and realize oh fuck, the cypher actually said “free the witch” not “kill the witch,” or were they supposed to kill her but they freed her, I don’t fucking know, no cipher could possibly get these totally different words switched but oh snap, its time for a gloriously lame final showdown in someone’s backyard and more wooden acting like Carnby’s hard of hearing once they defeat the witch and Natalie’s looking to him for emotional support.  All he’s got is a shoulder to cry but no words of comfort, and three amigos shuffle off into the house with the dagger they inexplicably left behind glinting and beating with a sliver of the witch’s heart inside because that’s how B grade monster flicks always work.  Anybody remember that old Fox kids cartoon called the Roswell Conspiracies?  Every single episode ended with a creature’s hand bursting through the ground or some slithering piece of a monster that managed to escape from the good guys, it was never over. I hate that so much XD

This movie’s technically more visually polished but is so much dumber than Uwe Boll’s.  The acting’s worse, and the line readings feel influenced like bad directing trying to push for something that isn’t supported by the words on the page.  But this movie certainly encouraged more repulsion from me, and thus was far more entertaining to hatewatch than Uwe Boll’s movie.

Well, that’s the rancid cinematic legacy of Alone in the Dark.  Having barely anything to do with the games and only tangentially touching on their themes and lore, it’s safe to say that no one should touch this series again unless they mean to resurrect it as faithfully as possible.  Speaking of reviving an old series without the right motivation, the next and final Alone property on our list today is the 2015 video game subtitled Illumination.  Atari, the publisher of the 2008 entry as well, just couldn’t leave well enough alone…in the dark.

ALONE IN THE DARK: ILLUMINATION

Illumination’s Mostly Negative User Score on Steam should help you get the picture: this is not a good or well-received video game.  Worst of all, it put Alone in the Dark back in the ground to stay.

While developer Pure FPS released Illumination in 2015, a full 7 years after the last game, the mechanics feel like barebones cribbing from 7th gen games like Left 4 Dead, Alan Wake, and Resident Evil 6.  The game is thus a generic third person co-op shooter starring Ted Carnby, a Leon Kennedy lookalike who packs a lot of guns and may or may not be in Edward Carnby in a very poor disguise; you can also play as the witch Sara Hartwood, Emily Hartwood’s great granddaughter who likes to pop that butt in your face on the character menu; engineer Gabriella Saunders who’s somehow not related to Grace Saunders; and the priest Henry Giger who has a cool hat and sweet powers.

There’s no real story, just voice-acted text popups rife with elaborate metaphors like they’re outtakes from a Max Payne script.  Each play session starts with an excruciatingly long load time before you and/or your co-op teammates are dropped into a large level.  Then objective items like wires or batteries randomly generate and are highlighted from afar and you have to retrieve them and use them to power up generators and the like.  As you search for these little macguffins, monsters relentlessly spawn and you’ll have to light trash barrels or flip on the inexplicably prevalent light switches to weaken them so you can finish them off with your guns or magic.  Your flashlight also works to weaken these enemies too, just like Alan Wake. 

And that’s really all the game is, just stage after stage of slightly remixing these elements.  Illumination somehow managed to fuck up even this simple recipe though.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the monsters and the time to kill is wildly inconsistent, sometimes monsters taking clips to kill or two shots, and the light mechanic rarely ever weakening them the same way twice if at all.  Monsters make almost no sounds so they easily sneak up on you and there’s no sound effect when they’re hitting you so you can die out of nowhere and not know why.

The priest and the hunter are the only enjoyable characters without significant amounts of time spent grinding the measly four level campaign for upgrade points.  The witch only has a very inaccurate and cheaply animated lightning blast and her mana pool is very shallow, and the engineer takes forever to unlock anything other than a pistol and some mines that sometimes go off and sometimes don’t.  Cool abilities like being able to repair light sources don’t make her much more useful either.  The hunter’s machine gun and pistol are a solid combo and the priest’s buffing powers and powerful dual pistols are fun and effective, though.

The game really has to be played in co-op because of how weak these characters are and anything above Easy will dominate you.  Even Medium was fairly crushing with me and a co-op buddy.  Sh’Kottsky came in clutch again and lit $20 on fire to come help me capture footage and let’s just say our playtesting session yielded incredible results: we determined without a doubt, that this one of the worst games we’ve ever come across.   

Thankfully, we were both recording because my footage was all freezeframes with our game and chat audio, while Sh’Kottsky had trouble grabbing the audio but had good footage.  So making this section took about three times longer to piece together independent audio and video.  (play Uwe boll “fuck yourself” clip)

Once we got into game, we tried multiple times to get the coal mine level to accurately track how many batteries we had found to get the elevator working again, but three tries all ended in the game glitching out and not recognizing the proper amount of batteries we’d collected, one time even acknowledging we had completed the objective but then not turning the elevator on so we could progress.  Another time we were about 10-15 minutes into a lengthy level called Escape where we have to gas up generators, repair a hummer and fuel a boat to get out and each little piece like a replacement car tire or bolt cutters were hidden around the level.  Well, we hadn’t actually found the bolt cutters yet but we noticed somehow that the game had auto-populated the model and opened the gate for us when we clicked it on a whim.  Strange but okay.  So we looked around behind this gate to find some more pieces we needed then Sh’Kottsky got stuck behind a gate that closed behind him, not letting me or him open the gate and then relocking the previously bolt cut gate we had come through in the first place, trapping us in a corner of the level.  After 2 hours of the game fucking us at every turn, we threw in the towel and requested our refunds.   

And we didn’t miss much, as seen by this Cthulhu boss fight at the end which should be awesome but is instead shooting at a glitchy, inanimate model before the end text popup tells you that Alone in the Dark will continue…ha, don’t fucking threaten me, Atari, I’ll sue your pants off!  Also why is every Cthulhu themed game kinda messy? Dark Corners of the Earth? The Sinking City? Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu?  Let the record show that Illumination had its last patch in 2016 and now works worse than it ever did before.  But I digress.  The game turns a suspenseful and thoughtful adventure horror series into a generic shooter with no sense of suspense, no depth, and tons of bugs and glitches. 

Well, that’s all I have to say about the wet fart in the wind that is Illumination, the end of Alone in the Dark’s contribution to pop culture and a far cry from its auspicious beginnings.  The only good news is that Embracer Group, more recently known as THQ Nordic, bought the rights to the franchise in 2018, and more recently they bought up Eidos-Montreal, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montreal so they own Deus, Thief, and Legacy of Kain among others.  They already revived my beloved Darksiders franchise with two new games in Darksiders Genesis and Darksiders 3, which were faithful continuations of the source material backed up by an actual budget, so their level of care and good taste bodes well for any forthcoming Alone in the Dark projects so I’m cautiously optimistic.

WHERE DOES ALONE IN THE DARK GO FROM HERE?

But let’s get back to the legacy of the series.  What’s unfortunate about Alone in the Dark is that it didn’t capitalize much on its head start in the genre it created.  Its tank controls, environmental puzzles, and taste for Lovecraftian scares can be found in everything from Resident Evil to Silent Hill to Dead Space and hell maybe even Dark Souls with its Metroidvania interconnectedness, high difficulty, and love of instant death traps. 

But while later Resident Evils outside of RE6 managed to answer the call for more action while still maintaining the series’ identity, Alone in the Dark has always seemed less sure of its direction.  The first three games run on the same engine and play similarly to one another, but with different modulations of the series’ core formula: Alone 1 was a slow paced, solitary trek through Lovecraftian hell; Alone 2 had its moments of dorky brilliance but its emphasis on action unfairly taxed the game’s controls and its upbeat music and campy, Santa Claus costume wearing tone was quite a departure from the original; Alone 3 split the difference, resuming a more methodical, puzzle centric gameplay experience with some imaginative and zany supernatural sequences but failed to include a compelling villain or sense of dread.  The New Nightmare took notes on Resident Evil’s recent triumphs and managed to provide a fun plot, clever puzzles, decent action, and a real sense of place, claiming my vote for the best entry in the series.  Alone 2008 is a mess but one you wish would succeed more often because of its bold mixture of ideas.  The less said about movies and Illumination the better, but they confirmed that nobody in charge had any real definitive sense of what the series had to offer anymore.

This realization caused to me ask myself what makes Alone in the Dark stand out from its competitors and how should a theoretical sequel from THQ Nordic incorporate those characteristics?  Resident Evil has accessible fiction and gameplay and a diverse cast while Silent Hill crafts harrowing journeys through personally themed hells based on the main character’s fears and failings.

Alone in the Dark has fortunately never gone action horror until Illumination and I think it’s imperative the series remain about puzzles, resource management, and interesting if understated stories.  The other immutable tenets are Carnby’s isolation, self-sufficiency, and his everyman status.  At the series’ outset, he was just a regular guy inspecting an antique piano until he was thrust into a nightmarish situation and asked to cope the best he could with limited resources and knowledge about his enemies’ true nature.  I enjoyed the New Nightmare’s prophesied savior story and 2008’s similar take with spiritual x-ray vision powers, but there’s also part of me that wants to keep him a normie to avoid making random abilities feel like his impressive qualities and not his resourcefulness and subsequent relatability. 

That’s not say that Carnby possessing any powers or prophesied destiny is anathema to Carnby being a good character, as I’m also rebuffing Alone 2’s indirect assertion that anyone baller enough to survive Derceto must be fucking John McClaine after all, not a mild-mannered, awkwardly moving Poe cosplayer like Carnby was in Alone 1.  He’ll also stand out more and stay more true to the series’ origins and strengths if he just manages to pass through mind-rending circumstances with the skin of his teeth and not feel bolstered by being the writer’s favorite, like a heroine from a young adult dystopian novel.  That’s both personal preference and the mode the series has been in at its best.  So if Carnby’s kept mostly on his lonesome and asked to use his ingenuity, it’s likely THQ Nordic’s choice of developer will be on the right track. 

Sooooo…..FUNNY STORY.

Outside of a couple concluding paragraphs, this was initially the end of the video.  Untillllll rumors started circulating that THQ Nordic’s showcase on August 12 was going to feature an Alone in the Dark remake in the vein of the recent Resident Evil 2 remake; lo and behold, these rumors turned out to be true.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  What are the odds this releases while an infinitesimally small Youtuber is making an overly long video on an obscure survival horror series from the 90s? 

Well, considering that the last three games all released within 7 years of each other in 2001, 2008, and 2015, maybe 2022 being the year a new Alone game is announced isn’t too crazy, kind of like how Twin Peaks returned to TV 25 years later just like Laura Palmer prophesied. 

Man, just when you think you got out of the game, they pull ya back in! So you know what that means—it’s time to analyze that trailer and pre-alpha footage!

Ok, so this puppy has been in development since 2019 by Swedish studio Pieces Interactive, who has not made anything like this before, but promisingly, the monsters were designed by comic book artist and frequent Guillermo del Toro collaborator Guy Davis and the story is written by Mikael Hedberg, who penned the stories for Frictional Games’ two horror classics Soma and Amnesia: the Dark Descent. 

The game’s elevator pitch is that is essentially a remake/reboot of the first game in that it’s set in Derceto in Lousiana and lets you play as Carnby or Emily Hartwood, but it also appears to have its own original story that mixes and matches elements of the series’ lore.  For instance, Derceto is no longer an old manor but a “home for the mentally fatigued” and I’d bet money that the redheaded girl singing House of the Rising Sun here is supposed to be Grace Saunders, whom you’ll remember from Alone 2.  There are also some brand new side characters with appropriate Cajun and otherwise Southern accents that seem to pepper the grounds of Derceto much like the manor servants in Clive Barker’s Undying. 

I’m generally liking what I’m seeing here because it looks like Pieces Interactive somehow heard me from the future and agreed with my assessment of what the series needed to return to.  The action looks tense and methodical and the enemies and environments are appropriately gross and creepy.  Press releases also indicate a return to environmental puzzles and exploration, hallmarks of the earlier games.  This looks and sounds a lot like classic Alone in the Dark, folks.

Now I do wish the trailer followed the spirit of Atari’s canceled remake a little more closely, because that one recreated the first game’s setpieces with fun twists and kept Carnby’s red hair and moustache.  Carnby looks like that doofus from Murdered: Soul Suspect or the guy from X-Com: Declassified now and I’m not seeing any recognizable level design that recalls the old games.  So beyond Derceto’s name and location remaining the same and Grace’s possible inclusion, it’s unclear how much is being drawn from the originals.  Of course, if the game is mostly brand new content and not just fan service, I really can’t complain too much, especially since the game seems to be getting the spirit of the gameplay and tone so right.  I’ve bitched a lot about how the series has been handled so far but I have to say, the future of Alone in the Dark looks uncharacteristically bright. 

Well, that’s the long and short but mostly the long on the Alone in the Dark series in its many forms.  It created the survival horror genre as we know it, though the term survival horror would first be coined in reference to Resident Evil, Alone’s successor.  Resident Evil learned a lot of lessons from Alone and improved the core action and controls considerably, surpassing it in nearly every way more and more as its sequels piled up and Alone faded into obscurity.  Then Silent Hill stepped from the mists of time to elevate the genre’s storytelling and atmosphere in ways that Alone could only dream of. 

But while Alone in the Dark’s influence has certainly waned over the years, the New Nightmare, itself a Resident Evil clone, would become probably the best entry in the series, and the 2008 game, despite all its many faults, certainly didn’t hold back trying to live up to the series’ legacy.  While I can’t definitively prove a connection between Alone 1 and 2 and Clive Barker’s Undying in 2000, there are some striking similarities.  This game starred an Irish mystic who journeys to a haunted manor to stop a family curse and must fend off Lovecraftian monsters as he travels over the manor grounds and the surrounding areas.  Just like Alone 1 you’ll hear the howls of beasts in the distance, and the game also features a subplot about a pirate cove beneath the manor, just like in Alone 1 and 2.  So while Alone’s influence is mostly foundational, you’ll see a blip here and there in the industry that makes you wonder if the series is nearly as forgotten as it seems to be.

CONCLUSION

So that’s the end of today’s retrospective on Alone in the Dark’s gaming and film careers.  I hope you learned some cool new info and enjoyed the walk back through time to give these often unsung games some love; I hope you’ll try them out for yourself one day.  The first three are on GOG as a bundle for pretty cheap and the New Nightmare’s not very expensive either.  2008’s a trying time but I still think survival horror purists will get a kick out of it.  Do not under any circumstance entertain Illumination and your life will be better for it.  Fortunately, we weren’t left alone for too long, as we now have a shiny new remake/reboot/sequel/prequel thing coming sometime in the near future and I couldn’t be more excited.

Thanks so much for watching this preposterously long project that took me quite a while to make and I will see you the next go around. 

Till next time, if you’re ever feeling alone (or like Edward says “I’m always alone,” I want you to remind yourself:  “I’m the fucking universe!”