This is one of those games where it's better to watch it on Youtube than it is to experience it yourself. I find myself intrigued by the detective-y noir presentation of the story, and the many notes that you find harken back to the vibe of the original Alone in the Dark. Truth being, I mainly tried this game out because its writer was also involved in Soma, and I think they're doing a pretty alright job here. However, these are not strong enough pulls for me to deal with this game's many puzzles, or especially its lackluster combat paired with forgettable enemy design. The attempts at incentivizing stealth alone severely put me off, the protagonist walks so slow that the enemies you're tailing behind are more likely to do an entire loop around the area and catch up behind you before you reach your goal.
It's funny, because putting it into perspective, the original Alone in the Dark is a game with infinitely worse combat and puzzles that are way more obtuse than anything found here. There are so many things in that game that are out to kill you in cheap and unfair ways, there are potential softlocks to run into, and its guns don't work half the time. And yet, I beat that game. I beat it exactly because of this sort of aggressive cruelty and unpredictability it offered, where every individual room felt like its own unique challenge to overcome. It was the game's strongest point, and it's something that the reboot desperately lacks. Trading in the wonder of discovering a huge jellyfish wriggling in a bathtub, or walking out the front door of the mansion only to be consumed by a giant monster, or touching a statue only to summon a poltergeist that violently shakes the screen and relentlessly pursues you... Alone in the Dark (2024) sacrifices all of this in favor of plain and boring predictability. True, you might not know in what sort of place you're going to wind up next, but you'll always know what's going to happen, a bunch of mindless combat against a bunch of mindless zombie-like enemies. This is not a reimagining, it's an unimagining.
It's funny, because putting it into perspective, the original Alone in the Dark is a game with infinitely worse combat and puzzles that are way more obtuse than anything found here. There are so many things in that game that are out to kill you in cheap and unfair ways, there are potential softlocks to run into, and its guns don't work half the time. And yet, I beat that game. I beat it exactly because of this sort of aggressive cruelty and unpredictability it offered, where every individual room felt like its own unique challenge to overcome. It was the game's strongest point, and it's something that the reboot desperately lacks. Trading in the wonder of discovering a huge jellyfish wriggling in a bathtub, or walking out the front door of the mansion only to be consumed by a giant monster, or touching a statue only to summon a poltergeist that violently shakes the screen and relentlessly pursues you... Alone in the Dark (2024) sacrifices all of this in favor of plain and boring predictability. True, you might not know in what sort of place you're going to wind up next, but you'll always know what's going to happen, a bunch of mindless combat against a bunch of mindless zombie-like enemies. This is not a reimagining, it's an unimagining.