Review – Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark, the 1992 original, has one of the most impressive introductions to a horror game ever seen for its age and how much it tried to do with such great technical limitations. The character models – not least the adorable monsters – are mostly a bunch of loosely joined geometric shapes, but the game still gave me and many others cold sores and sweaty palms.

It all starts with a frog jumping across a road. Then we follow one of the game's two selectable protagonists up into the attic to a really creaky haunted house. After a bit of exploring, a zombie emerges from a gap in the floor and some sort of strange flapping beast throws itself through the window (several years before that dog jumped through the window in the first Resident Evil). It is, or at least was, really heart-pounding. The really brilliant thing, though, is that you can prevent both monsters from even entering the room by moving a chest over the floor hatch and shoving a wardrobe in front of the door (also borrowed from various later horror games).

New Alone in the Dark starts the same. So, it starts with a frog on a road. Otherwise, it has none of the brilliance or innovation that distinguished the original. Instead, we get some dialogue between a pair of renderings of Jodie Comer, who plays Emily Hartwood, and David Harbour, who plays Edward Carnby. So they are the same characters as the geometric abominations in the original game. They sit and talk in a car, followed by a fairly uneventful walk through a basement.

“A collection of ideas we've already seen better implemented before”

The objective is to explore the Derceto Manor mental hospital to find Emily's uncle Jeremy, who seems to have either gone mad or stumbled upon some sort of occult secret. Just like in the original, you get to choose which of Emily or Edward you want to play as. It does make some difference to dialogue and how different cutscenes play out, but from what I've seen the game is pretty much the same regardless (I passed the game as Edward, but have also played a bit as Emily).

With some solid layers of atmosphere, a good script, or just interesting monster and environment design, even a standard horror can lift, and Resident Evil 4 proved long ago that good action and twinkle in the eye can make up for weaker horror elements. But Alone in the Dark doesn't really take any specific direction fully, but instead borrows a little here and a little there for a collection of ideas we've already seen done better before. Alone in the Dark anno 2024 does not show the way, it lags behind.

It's not that the developers don't try to spice it up. Sometimes the game tries to have a little more psychological weight – or at least ambiguity – to it Silent Hill-held, and other times it wants to offer intense battle sequences and even a couple of bosses. Alone in the Dark has its moments, not least the environments (the 1930s American South has a natural, nauseating claustrophobia that sometimes breaks through), but it never really wants to take off. We solve standard puzzles (shouldn't we ban sliding puzzles soon, humanity should be able to agree on this?), shoot uninspired, stomping monsters and unravel a Lovecraft-scented mystery that rarely feels particularly mysterious, and which ends in a real anti-climax to the final boss.

“A Lovecraft-scented mystery that rarely feels particularly mysterious”

Unlike the original game, you'll occasionally run into other characters (patients and staff at Derceto), but they remain paper-thin figures and the dialogue becomes more frustrating rather than mysterious as everyone tends to talk past each other all the time without taking the blade from their mouths. It's a difficult art to write mysteries where you as a player don't know who can be trusted or what's really going on – if everything is just happening in the main character's head or if there is actually something occult going on.

Alone in the Dark is far from the worst attempt I've seen, it just has a hard time asserting itself properly. It's been over 30 years since the original, so it's not fair to expect a new game in the series to be as innovative, but instead it needs to keep up with the games that raised the bar in those decades – but unfortunately does it not really that.

New Alone in the Dark is overflowing with loving and reasonably clear references to the original, so it's clear that the developers really like the series and wanted to make something good out of it. I love the original, but even I have to admit that it hasn't aged very well (no new player would get any sweaty palms playing it today, other than possibly out of frustration at the game's many archaic quirks), so a modern update would have been very Welcome. Not least because we got so many bad sequels in the series over the years.

After all these years I had simply hoped for more than this; I would so badly like to see a light at the end of the tunnel that is AitD-series decay. The good ideas found here ultimately get lost in the darkness of clumsy combat, uninspired puzzles, and a plot that, despite good attempts, doesn't quite go all the way to the finish line.

Footnote: Alone in the Dark is released on 20/3 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series. Tested on PS5.