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At least they leaned into the trends pretty well, this time!
Alone in the Dark (2024) is quite a lot of different things, none of them original. The most obvious inspiration is 2019’s remake of Resident Evil 2, what with its third-person-over-the-shoulder angle, its in-game map showing which areas you’ve ‘completed’ and which you still need to find things in, the ability to switch skins between modern and retro models, even the animation for using an item on a lock is taken straight from the RE Engine. A lot of the game’s segmentation seems rather inspired by, from what I understand, Alan Wake — where there are clearly defined sections where you interact with NPCs, solve puzzles, try to find the centre of the mystery at hand, juxtaposed with sections that are primarily combat: scavenging for ammo and health, fighting enemies, going through setpiece after setpiece down a linear path before you reach the end and switch back to solving puzzles. I laughed so hard the first time there was a switch and the game’s soundtrack started playing the fucking Hereditary horns. As a whole, the game is… not exactly making itself its own thing. What it does is employ its inspirations well. It by and large picks and chooses things that worked well, employs them in a way that lets them mesh well with each other, and while it may not reinvent the wheel, and while it might not necessarily iterate on these systems, it works well for what it is.
What I think I like most is its structure, and how it uses its area design to play into that. Decerto Manor is, in application, sort of your hub world. You talk to the various denizens, you solve puzzles to scavenge out rooms and access new wings of the mansion, and, once your exploration takes you to what seems like a dead end, the walls of the mansion twist and turn around you, sending you out into a nightmare world… quite different in biome than the mansion you were just going through. These are mostly combat-focused — interspersed with the occasional puzzle where you get rid of whatever’s stopping you from going down the linear path forward — but what gets me is just how varied they look. You go from a French streetside to a swamp to a churchyard to a harbour to a couple places I don’t wanna spoil, and even the one time it used the city streets again enough, it felt changed enough to still feel like I was somewhere new. It honestly reminds me of just how well the original Alone in the Dark trilogy utilized its set dressing, and it’s so awesome to see that aspect get leaned into here too, even as more and more disparate biomes start connecting themselves to the mansion. I also really enjoyed when the lines between hub and level became blurred — when the room you’re scrounging through suddenly changes and you have to fight a couple of enemies off (even if I hope a patch makes the transitions, uh, a bit more smooth looking), or even when you enter a new area… and it’s a giant puzzle box, the occasional enemy not getting in the way of how you have to primarily figure out the way forward. Throughout the game I was eagerly anticipating where it’d take me next, what new part of the mansion I’d get to unlock, what kind of places I’d be suddenly sent to, and as a whole I loved how the game used physical location to segment its action-heavy sections with its downtime. Really neat to see in action.
I also enjoy how reverent this game is to the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. References aren’t new — all the attempted reboots post New Nightmare try to relate to the '90s trilogy in some way — but this one goes beyond, not just copy-posting names or basic wiki-skim-info just so maybe somebody who went through the original games can do the Leo pointing meme, but genuinely attempting to tie in with their lore while yet choosing to go in its own direction. I was expecting a… faithful-ish reboot, the opening section of you exploring the mansion mirroring the opening cutscene of the original where you go up into the attic, but then the game pulls out the rug from under you and shows that the mansion is filled with people and lets you know, immediately, that this is going to be something different, but yet something that took the care to relate itself to the original game in a way that’s more than surface level. I was surprised, for example, that the game brings up Slaughter Gulch, the attempted movie production that sets up the premise of Alone in the Dark 3: it’s such a random deep-cut reference that you’re going to have to have played that game to get, yet it’s brought up without much of a second thought. Characters familiar to the original trilogy appear, and are reminiscent of who they were then, but are re-imagined for a partially new setting in a way that almost feels seamless, taking the original’s loose cosmic horror and leaning into it in a totally new way. It’s not a rejection of the past, nor is it something that merely pays lip service, this is a game for those who’ve done a deep dive into the original Alone in the Dark trilogy. I’m… not quite sure how many people (especially these days) have actually done that, but it’s kinda awesome to see how the game goes for it anyway.
Combat is, uh, notably clunky. The gunplay works fairly well: they have a good bit of power to them, but this is in conjunction with how hard it is to hit enemies with them. They jolt and weave, duck their head down as they rush towards you, strafe around you faster than you can keep a bead on them… your gun does a good job at killing them, but first you’ll need to hit them, and it’s more often than not that you’ll run out of ammo trying to hit the
The third option for combat is… distractions — bricks and bottles and Molotov cocktails lying around the environment, which, despite the game’s explicit directions, you’re meant to throw directly at enemies to damage them, as opposed to trying to divert their attention. There are two ways to use this, neither of them exactly practical: you can hold the button to hold onto it, letting you arc your throw and also walk extremely slowly to wherever the next encounter happens to be… or just press the button to immediately yeet it on the surface of wherever you picked it up, sometimes auto-aiming at an enemy if they happen to be near. No option to like, pick something up and use it later, you have to either throw it away or force yourself to trudge over to the next opportunity to hit something with it, and while they’re… maybe effective? at doing damage to enemies? it doesn’t quite make up for how janky they feel to use, nevermind how the game doesn’t even explain them properly. As a whole, is the combat good? No, I’d say it’s only one-third of the way there (nevermind how any encounter where multiple enemies corner you will immediately result in you being stunlocked to death
Some loose notes: nottttttttttttt quite sure how I feel regarding the casting of TV actors as the leads? I picked Carnby, so I spent most of the game with Stranger Things’ David Harbour, and for the most part… he was fine? He does a mostly decent noir detective, even if sometimes it's kinda clear he’s reading off a script? I’m just not especially sure what he brings to the table compared to a more professional voice actor, at least aside from name recognition (I streamed this for friends, and one of them immediately recognized ‘Hopper’ the moment they saw him, so I guess that was who the casting was meant to appeal to?), but by and large I guess he did okay enough not to raise too many of my eyebrows. By and large, I love a lot of the background lore, love how they modernized the way the original Alone in the Dark read out its notes to the player… not sure how I feel like a lot of the more traditional cutscenes: it felt like the game was slowing to a halt so characters could exposit things to one another and it didn’t really feel like the correct approach for a game such as this. I like the soundtrack — how it carries a bunch of different influences with, like, noir jazz, southern folk music, the aforementioned Hereditary horns — enough maybe to check it out outside the context of the game. The retro skins are hilarious and absolutely worth the price of admission: talking to people and encountering eldritch horrors as this weird polygon man honestly brought such a smile to my face. I’d… maybe wait for a patch before I buy this, perhaps? There were enough points where Carnby got stuck on the environment, enough points where the game couldn’t land a transition, enough weird graphical things to perhaps get in the way of the experience. It wasn’t enough to be a dealbreaker on my end (I knew what I was getting into buying this day one), but it was enough to be noticeable, and enough to get in the way, especially when it happened during enemy encounters.
Ultimately, though, this was fun! Perhaps not perfect, or even great — the combat is rouuuuuuuuugh, and I’d… never quite say the game rises above its influences, or even does much to differentiate itself from them — but as a whole, as far as reboots of Alone in the Dark go, I’m glad to see one that mostly sticks the landing. With a reverence for the source material which shows in every familiar character you meet, every note you pick up, in conjunction with being a pretty solid survival horror in its own right… it’s certainly not the best thing in the world, but I’d honestly still call this a good time. I’m hoping this sells well enough for this to maybe revive the franchise a bit. I’d love to see a sequel that iterates on both the good and bad here. And I’d love to see just how they choose to cover the remaining two of the trilogy. Here's hoping. 7/10.
This time, the Alone in the Dark series has been re-imagined as a co-op zombie shooter, a la Left 4 Dead or Resident Evil 6. You get in a game with up to three of your friends, you each play different characters with different skillsets, and you barrel through legions of eldritch forces, solving…… ““puzzles”” to clear a path to the end of the campaign. What distinguishes this game most from its influences, however, is the genre crossover at play: not only is it a co-op zombie shooter, but it’s also a Unity Store asset flip. You know those random Steam Greenlight-looking games that look like shit, look like they play like shit, and always seem to top some publication or YouTuber’s year-end worst list because they’re easy enough targets not to make anybody actually mad they were called the worst game of the year? Yeah, Atari looked at those and decided they were gonna make one of their own.
And god, did they succeed.
Imagine Left 4 Dead except it sucks. Zombies (or, well, “The Creatures of Darkness”) spawn in wherever they feel like, often appearing right next to you without you even realizing it because there are no noises or feedback or anything that’ll let you know where they are aside from physically being able to see them. The core mechanic is that you light up things around the level to drastically reduce enemy defences, and, like, that mechanic is functional, I guess, but when you’re not in the light it’s impossible to tell if I’m even doing anything. Like, I can empty a full SMG clip into their face and they’ll be still standing and I have no idea whether I did damage or not because enemy health is high and there’s no feedback on anything you do to them. Several points where I was fighting this game’s equivalent of a tank, with an upgrade that let me circumvent the ‘enemies need to be in light to take full damage’ and I just had no idea whether they still needed to be in the light for me to hurt them because I was running out of ammo and they didn’t seem any more damaged than they were at the start.
It’s not just the combat that sucks, either: running is tied to this awful stamina system that runs out so quickly and then takes forever to come back, resulting in this loop where you’re stopping and starting, desperately trying to get to wherever you need to go yet at the same time constantly slowing to a total crawl. There’s virtually no diversity in objectives, it’s either fight through a stupid maze or collect [x key item] or go collect [x key item] in a stupid maze. The game is inconsistent about enemy density: a lot of the time it’ll flood you with dudes from the get-go, kill nearly your whole party, and then you’ll go the entire level barely encountering anything else. It also spawns roughly the same amount of enemies no matter how many people are playing, so unless you pick the easiest difficulties it’s almost impossible to do anything doing the game singleplayer. And this presumes that the game chooses to work: that everything goes as intended, that some objective doesn’t break, that the platform you need to jump onto has a visible model, that the explosive you just armed actually bothers to explode, that the game doesn’t suddenly change up how you pick up items for one level, causing you and your party to think the game has bugged out and left you unable to pick up a thing you need to progress. Getting through this game is partially about changing variables until you find a combination that doesn’t softlock you.
I’m going to use the very second level as an example here: me and my friends start the level, we go down an elevator only for it to break, our first objective being to fix it. We’re made to get three batteries. The level only spawns in two. We play for a bit before we proceed to realize the level isn’t actually winnable in this state, so we switch to easy difficulty. The good news: the level actually spawns in all the things we need to pass it. The bad news: sometimes when you put a battery into the machine the game just eats it, taking it from your inventory but then not proceeding to actually advance the objective. We think it’s a problem where we’re placing a battery where there already is a battery, but no, the game’s just broken. We brute force it, and no matter what we always get one battery eaten, and we can’t pass the section. I then switch to doing it singleplayer… and it works fine. I get the batteries with no problem, and after several more sections of having to find [x collectable] in a maze (including one where I have to find a battery that’s just… plopped on the ground right in front of me, right by the thing I need to put it into) I clear the level. I save the run. Me and my friends can go through the rest of the campaign, for better or worse.
Again, that was only the second level. And that’s a glitch, obvious from the outset, that makes progressing through the game impossible without a workaround. Of the game's three main campaigns, only one is possible to clear all the way through in the game’s multiplayer mode. You can tell they really put their care into this game.
There are four main characters you can choose between — and, by extension, four classes you can pick, defined by the weapons and special skills each given to them. The Hunter’s unique mechanic is that he’s limited by ammo constraints. The game intends for him to be The Guns Guy, yet it’s him who must scrounge for ammo while The Engineer and The Priest just get… infinite ammo on their weapons? For the Engineer, that infinite ammo gun is meant to be secondary to their ability to scavenge resources to put mines on the ground… but even if you actually get an enemy to step on them they do jack shit. At the very least, they have an infinite ammo sidearm that’s considerably more useful… but then, as what happened to my friend, sometimes the game just glitches out and doesn’t let you use said gun, forcing you into laying endless mines, all next to each other, in hopes that maybe they’ll actually do something. Priest… man I don’t even know what Priest even does. They have an infinite ammo sidearm just like Engineer but then also sometimes they erupt in a bright flash of light which doesn’t seem to do anything to enemies but sure does make it so that nobody on the team can fucking see anything for the next few seconds. The Witch… oh man. In lieu of traditional weapons, the Witch can instead enchant a light source to do DoT to any enemies in it (useless) or fire a lightning bolt at enemies to fry them. This is limited by both cast time and mana: if you run out of mana, no more spells unless you happen to find a crystal ball to get it all back instantly, or wait for the manual recharge of one mana every five seconds.
It takes ten mana to cast a lightning bolt.
What usually happens to the Witch is this: once the initial volley floods you with enemies, you immediately use up all your mana only for that to merely be a dent in the horde. With nothing else to protect you, you’re near-completely defenseless as the horde proceeds to mob you to death. Theoretically, levelling up will increase your mana recharge/improve your quality of life, but beyond the rather small gains levelling up gives you, you often die so early without party intervention (and the other party members usually have their own drama to deal with) that you don’t gain nearly enough EXP to level up. And even should you survive that opening volley it’s not like you’re not a liability: I was Hunter, my friend was Witch during… this game’s equivalent of a campaign finale, and literally I had to run around, scrounge for ammo, kill the enemies who dropped the items I needed to then be able to damage the boss… while all my Witch buddy could do was superficially shoot lightning bolts and hope that maybe those did damage. Playing Witch is a catch-22 at its core: you start without anything that’ll truly help you contribute to the team and survive the campaign without gaining a couple of levels first, but then because EXP is based on killing enemies/surviving the campaign you don’t actually get the stuff that’ll help you contribute to the team. All the classes (bar Priest) are to some degree pretty borked, pretty counterintuitive, pretty not amazing to play, but man, the design ethos behind playing the Witch is truly something special.
The online, as expected, does not quite work wonders. Admittedly I could be the problem here: I’m Australian, and was primarily playing with Americans/a Norwegian, but even then this is more a “these are funny things that happened” footnote than something I’m honestly gonna fault the game for. The netcode is rough: fatal errors abound, sometimes from being dead too long, sometimes because the game’s just being a Gemini. While my Norwegian friend managed to stick around for most of the first campaign, from the second campaign on it honestly became a bit of a race to see how long we could last before the game eventually took him from us, like a leaf on the wind. One of my other friends pretty consistently got stuck on things and had to wriggle himself out. On one of my other other friends ends I went through some real shit: at one point one of the not!Tanks knocked me down, but on said friend’s end I never got back up, and I was picking up batteries and shooting enemies while sliding across the floor. After a certain point in the campaign I’d randomly inherit the Engineer’s ability to see the auras of light sources all the way across the map upon their death. One time, after they died, they randomly got to free-roam the map and went so high into the skybox they saw God and crashed the game for everybody Another time I guess I just jumped weirdly and after that point was stuck in the falling animation, this expression perpetually stuck on my face. That wasn’t just a thing on my friend’s end, either, oftentimes people would jump weirdly and then just start floating off the ground, nyooming around at the speed of slow. As a whole, when the game wasn’t softlocking or denying progress or doing the things that otherwise made playing it rather intolerable, it was at least rather funny to see the trashfire in motion.
Ultimately… I think, perhaps, talking this much about what makes Alone in the Dark: Illumination rather awful is a bit of a needless endeavour — I feel like the virgin wojak going on for paragraphs and paragraphs while the chad just goes ‘this shit sucks.’ But frankly, I’m just amazed at what’s on display here. I really got the brainworms just playing through it, and honestly just trying to gather my thoughts and write up on everything I wanted to talk about was a ton of fun. This might just be a cash-grab asset flip — or maybe even some attempt to hold onto the IP; like how they kept making Hellraiser sequels just so Clive Barker wouldn’t get the rights back — and it might be a dogshit Left 4 Dead clone, but there’s a difference between knowing something is bad and knowing just how it falls short. And honestly, this was bad in much more interesting ways than I was led to believe going in. From the borked, buggy gameplay and netcode, from how I legitimately had to fight the game just so I and my party could progress, from how none of the characters you can play work the way they’re supposed to, from how the game honest-to-god has a “A Winner Is You!”-type ending in fucking 2015, Alone in the Dark: Illumination is a gem. So much so we have to throw it back down the mineshaft. 1/10.