I'm going to write about the new Alone in the Dark reboot because no one else will

Alone with my Snark

I had to be the one to do this. As the internet man whose current internet brand is “Playing bad horror games” I’m gonna be the guy that has a take about the Alone in the Dark reboot. Despite being delayed twice to avoid competing with heavier hitters, THQ Nordic successfully managed to release this game right in front of Dragon’s Dogma 2, which has seemingly sucked up all of the discourse in the room not currently devoted to the rest of February and March’s big releases. When an ostensible big PS5 exclusive like Rise of the Ronin is barely getting talked about, a mid-budget horror revival has no chance. Even in a better release climate, I’m not sure this would be talked about much, which is a pity. Credit where credit is due, I think they managed to bring back Alone in the Dark in an interesting way, even for all its shortcomings.

The original 1992 video game Alone in the Dark is staggeringly important, both on a technical level (having like five polygons on screen!) and a mechanical one (adventure game but you’re navigating a 3D space, tank controls, et all.) However important it is, I’d argue it doesn’t really have a consistent identity outside of its grab bag of goofy haunted house trappings. Its sequels make a surprising pivot toward action, unintentionally mirroring the same progression Resident Evil would make, but I’d say they’re all “pretty rough” to go back to. Part of that comes down to the controls, which are clonk even by my standards as a notable Tank Controls pervert, and part of that is simply the punishing trial-and-error design all three games run in. There’s a reason why Resident Evil is the touchstone for most of the gaming sphere while Alone in the Dark is a historical footnote, and a lot of that has to do with RE not randomly killing the player as a goof.

Attempts to bring the series back have gone all over the place, 2001’s The New Nightmare more-or-less ouroboros’d itself into a mediocre Resident Evil imitator, one I managed to finish in a single sitting. It sticks pretty firmly in the middle of my various Dubious Horror Game adventures; not bad enough to be camp, not good enough to be memorable. Infogrames (who by that point had rebranded as Atari S.A.) would try one more time with the infamous Alone in the Dark 2008, which is a game with plenty of fascinating, terrible ideas and basically no foundational connection to the original beyond having a dude named Edward Carnby. It’s easily one of the more spectacular trash fires I’ve played on stream (literal, given the fire tech they have going on) and is worth looking at as a piece of inscrutable ambition.

If you wanna see me play through what accidentally ended up being most of the original AitD, I have great news. The video below will do that for you! I also, for whatever ungodly reason, have a full playthrough of The New Nightmare and a decently long stream of 2008 on my youtube archive channel. Truly I am an accomplished streamsman.

Alone in the Dark (2024)

So that brings us here, and to my question of “how does one even bring back Alone in the Dark?” In the ensuing 16 years the rights were sold off and Embraced, and development duties were handed over to Pieces Interactive, a Swedish studio whose prior accomplishments were Magicka 2 (not 1) and both of the modern expansions to Titan Quest. Did you know they made two more expansions to Titan Quest in 2017 and 2019? Now I do. Thanks, THQ Nordic. This is their first big AAA (or at least AA) project and for what it’s worth I think they did a solid job with this. I think I’m probably on the more positive end of things, especially compared to some of the more damning reviews from larger gaming outlets. Not going to claim this as being a God Hand “they just didn’t get it” situation, but maybe more that my own preferences and tolerances are going to be different than the average freelance video game writesperson.

I will be clear and upfront here, because I’m a sick person and you need to know where I’m coming from: I was fully expecting this game to be a very Eurojank take on Resident Evil 2 remake, and while it’s kind of that it’s not nearly busted or misguided enough to fully earn that descriptor. The combat can be clonk (especially with melee), and some of the facial capture can be stiff, but in my parlance the essence of Eurojank is that of ambitions outpacing design, technical constraints, or budget. Evil West is Eurojank, Gothic is Eurojank. This is more of a lower-case eurojank. There are plenty of aspects where you can see the lower budget, but they're smartly designed around (or at least curtailed) in a way that is easy to overlook.

Surprisingly for something one could label as “Eurojank”, I think Alone in the Dark (2024)’s greatest sin is its own sense of restraint, especially during the first half of its runtime. Of the many ways to bring back a series whose defining characteristics are “Spooky House” and “Guy named Carnby” I was not expecting a slow-burn, dreamlike descent into madness. The lead writer Mikael Hedberg was also responsible for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and SOMA, and you can see that in the way the story is presented. A lot of it is implicit or pieced together in notes, collectibles, and conversations. Despite my assumptions the celebrity talent would phone it the fuck in, I think David Harbour and Jodie Comer both deliver solid performances, leaning more towards understated than anything. I’m also a sucker for whenever the more obscure ends of cosmic horror are brought up, and there were a few special treats for me, guy who owned a copy of Arkham Horror and played it maybe four times.

The thing is though, this is also a survival horror game where you shoot eldritch monstrosities in the head (or orifice where head should be) with a Thompson SMG and solve puzzles involving sliding tiles, neither of which really benefit from a more meditative pace or constrained scale. Structurally, the game bounces between the mostly safe areas of Derceto manor and various nightmare worlds, which tend to have most of the combat encounters. It’s never really going to be that hard to figure out where to go next, and for the most part the solutions to the various puzzles are going to be in or around the rooms they’re contained in. Some of the puzzles are clever or require a certain amount of outside thinking, but I wouldn’t call any of them especially taxing or involved. They’re mostly on par with the Resident Evil remakes (if perhaps overly-reliant on a handful of different puzzle types) but compared to recent indie games such as Signalis or Tormented Souls, they’re downright tame.

I guess the way I would describe my issues with this game are pretty simple: either the action set pieces need to be louder, dumber, and more memorable, or the puzzles need to be more involved. That’s maybe a complicated way of saying “the game would be better if they made it better” but I also think Alone in the Dark would have benefited from slightly more focus on either of these aspects. Vibes alone cannot carry a $60 survival horror game. The consequence of the (mostly) clear delineation between “puzzle time” and “shooting time” is that there’s not a ton of tension during the former and there’s very much always going to be enough ammo for the latter. The shooting is inoffensive and functional given its infrequency, but the real secret is that your dodge has enough iframes that you can often just run past everything. The last few areas, when things get more… cosmic, are probably my favorite parts of the game, but they’re all over fairly quickly, even on a casual playthrough.

Still, my genre-specific preferences aside, I can’t help but still be on board with what Alone in the Dark manages to accomplish. It’s almost parody at this point for me to advocate for a lower-budget video game that “has moxie” but it’s a probable contender for this year’s “Most 7/10 video game” award. No, you should not pay $60 for it. I didn’t pay $60 for it at launch. It’s going to flop horribly and will likely lead to the studio getting downsized or axed as part of the greater Embracer Sowing/Reaping cycle, but it’s *doing stuff*. A little dry in spots, perhaps, but a much better performance than I was expecting. There. I did it. Feel free to go back to playing Dragon’s Dogma 2. I give you permission.

I honestly forgot there was a new AitD remake until I saw this blog.

This is definitely a wait until it goes on Game Pass or PS Plus game for me. Based on the reviewer at Gamespot who gave it a 4, he implies the game ripped off plot elements from another game. I'm suspecting that game was Alan Wake 2, but I could be wrong.

Good write-up! I was psyched to see this announced a while back and had it wishlisted on my PSN account forever ago. AITD+Jodie Comer+David Harbour=I'm in. I'm keeping my expectations on the lower side and will pick it up once it goes on sale.

Thanks for the write up. This looks like a solid $10-15 game for me at some point. I don't know that Dragon's Dogma II is really to blame for its inevitable failure so much as it being a kind of low budget survival horror game at a time when Survival Horror is, if not quite back to its glory days at least receiving regular, polished, big budget projects like Resident Evil and Alan Wake. While it's a genre that does have fanatics who really miss the days of Blue Stinger and Carrier, I think most people probably want to play 1 or 2 games per year in the genre at most, and those are already covered.

And there's no real nostalgia left for Alone in the Dark. It's too old and has had too many bad games attached to it. It's an important franchise, yes, but it never had a huge fanbase and a lot of that was eroded by repeated terrible games.

This game seems cool as a thing that exists and that I may play some day (it's prime for the "schlocktober" projects I dabble with) but as a commercial product it makes no sense.

I enjoyed it and can't disagree with your write up. It feels like a solid foundation and the emphasis on puzzles and exploration does give it a vibe more distinct than Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I think expectations are met quite handsomely here.

I should check out what the directors commentary is like.

Sounds like there is nothing terribly wrong with the game which means that it's better than expected for me. Looking forward to picking it up from a sale or some subscription service. If it has a long tail on sales and the development was cheap, it might not be a financial disaster after all. Lots of mediocre games end up on "very positive" reviews at least on Steam once people stop treating it as a full-priced release.

Resident Evil is obviously the king of the hill for these types of games but there's room for more. I'm getting a little tired of the formula where all those games always end up in some underground research facility where you learn that man was the real monster all along. I'm very much in the mood for something a little more supernatural than that.

Good write-up. It looks better than I expected but admittedly that bar is so low a cockroach couldn't limbo under it.

Good write-up. As someone whose only exposure to the Alone in the Dark franchise is the movie, I don't see why this name carries so much cache. The only times I've ever heard anyone talk about this series is in a negative tone. I don't see the appeal other than the first game did some stuff on the PC that wasn't done before but other games did better afterwards.

@chamurai: How much cache does it really have? It has some recognition and a hardcore fan base, but it's been wheeled out on all kinds of cheap and low rent products over the year. It has a little bit of name recognition (and a great name) probably in part from the movie, but really it's just one of those franchises that keeps resurfacing in yet another cheap product for whatever reason.

Where it does have cache it's because it really was a foundational game for survival horror, and also it did things on the PC that weren't being done back then. You have to remember that PC and console were more separated in terms of audience than they are today (where most games cross over anyway) so for PC gamers of a certain generation it was an important game, and they didn't have anything else like it for quite some time. That gives it a little bit of value.

On the other hand you could argue that for this project it had negative cache. A lot of people are saying "oh it's not as terrible as I expected for an Alone in the Dark game." And yeah the name got some eyeballs on it but it made expectations low. Meanwhile if you played up the Hollywood actors involved and maybe tried to draft off Alan Wake II's success it might not have come and gone as quickly as it seems like it will.

Definitely sounds like a game I'll enjoy under $20 though!

I've always had a fascination with Alone in the Dark despite never playing any of them, it's always been around hanging out in the background in the shadows of other successful franchises but never popping off itself.

This game seems like the most effort the franchise has received in a long time, but it still seems a bit like a budget RE borrowing most if not all of its ideas, that's not a bad thing but it is a bit of a "wait for a sale" game. I do want to play it, and as a remake of the first game it's a suitable place to start.

Also i think it's just a cool name, Alone in the Dark.

@cikame: I mean, you can argue that the original Resident Evil borrowed almost all its ideas from OG Alone in the Dark. It just did things with more polish, much cooler subject matter, and on console where this kind of game fit better at the time.

Alone in the Dark is in some ways the Pitfall! to Resident Evil's Super Mario Bros., though honestly there are more similarities between AitD and RE than Pitfall and Mario.

Yeah, Alone in the Dark isn't just in the same genre, but RE lifted some pretty notable scares from it, like the dog jumping through the window.

@fisk0: Heck, I might be remembering this wrong but isn't the reason they pivoted from supernatural horror to sci-fi in Resident Evil / Biohazard solely because they felt they were veering too close to just copying Alone in the Dark? Because originally RE was supposed to be a remake / sequel to Sweet Home, which is very much a haunted house game.

I genuinely like this remake. It has it's problems, the full pricetag being the biggest one, but all in all, it's a decent game of a smaller scope. I thought the story (at least the Emily side) is genuinely captivating and well written, managing to capture that Lovecraftian feel but with a more modern twist to it. The games I'd compare it to are the Sinking City and Deadly Premonition, but unlike those games this doesn't fall into the trap of trying to create an open world with lots of busywork, so the pacing feels better. However, I do agree that the combat is just kinda meh and the puzzles could be more elaborate. For me, I'd kind of drop the combat entirely as it kind of causes that Tomb Raider (2013) ludonarrative dissonance where you shoot up samey monsters by the dozen, but in cutscenes it's an entirely different story of your character questioning their sanity. The combat just doesn't add anything to the game... and I've got to say, even though they don't phone it in, the big name actors don't really add anything either. I do love the voiceovers for every written piece of lore in the game.

Games have always been this way (milking IP with some vestige of fanfare/nostalgia), but have we fully arrived at the place where movies are? I have nothing against the game, series, or publisher and haven't played it. Not necessarily in my wheelhouse, might pick it up on PS Plus when the time comes, and despite the lukewarm reviews the game looks interesting. I guess my question is chicken/egg based:

Why reboot a franchise that has had two releases in the last 15 years with most hardcore fans preferring the games released 30 years ago? Why not try a new IP? How many people playing games today were playing games then, that must be a narrow base you're appealing to.

Is the developer just trying a take on "survival horror" and the IP happens to belong to a friendly publisher? Is the publisher trying to punch a hole in the market and farms an old IP out to a hungry dev? Wouldn't you be better off going with a new IP and a fresh take people can get organically excited about? Or does it not matter? I feel like a new IP could generate excitement in a way reviving a dead IP couldn't. A million articles on the game devoting a paragraph to explaining to new gamers that this was a thing from a bygone era probably bloats general audience interests. Or maybe not, maybe most people don't read gamespot, etc. I'm not sure. Just generally curious what the community thinks.