The first survival horror game! Or, well, if not the first survival horror game, it’s at least the first 3D survival horror game. Or, well, if not the first 3D survival horror game, it at least sets up the template that later genre-codifiers such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill would later popularize. Classic conventions of the genre, like exploring a non-linear map, resource scarcity, and inventory management, while iterated and simplified in the years since, originally had their place here. A lot of the issues that the developers had to work around — the use of dramatic, fixed-camera frames, and a control system where you move your character in a way akin to a car in order to obscure that the landscapes you walked around were only 2D images — would be repeated with a degree of intention, even as advancements in technology and processing power meant that later developers would not have to adhere to the limitations Alone in the Dark faced. Even despite predating what it inspired by roughly 4-5 years, Alone in the Dark… honestly still plays exactly like one of its progeny, and while it might be outshone by what came after it, I… definitely still think this game is worth taking a look at, even regardless of its place in history.

You can play as one of two characters: Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood. Regardless of who you pick, the general premise is the same: a man by the name of Jeremy Hartwood has committed suicide by mysterious circumstances, and in the wake of his death, either Edward or Emily has been sent up to his attic to investigate a piano — in Carnby’s case, to obtain it for an antique dealer, and in Emily’s case to try and search for her uncle’s suicide note. Upon making it to the attic, however, they’re placed under siege by monsters, and, afterwards, soon find Hartwood’s mansion cut off from the outside world, and beset with the undead. Now whichever player character you chose must now do their best to scavenge and explore the mansion, avoiding creatures and solving puzzles in order to access new areas, both in hopes of finding a way out, and in hopes of finding out what exactly is haunting the Hartwood mansion.

And for an early work in the genre — and for something that… didn’t quite possess the benefit of knowing where previous survival horror games succeeded and failed — it’s pretty solid. I like the way this game approaches level design. The mansion is large, sprawling, and above all else, open: it’s up to the player to find out what they can access and what they can’t, and through that, what the player needs to do to open up new areas. It creates a nice feedback loop, where by opening up a new area you’re rewarded with the means to open up new areas. The game carries some fairly disparate influences — specifically, the works of H.P Lovecraft, George A. Romero, and Dario Argento — but manages to blend them all together in a way that feels not only seamless, but to the point where the game really feels more like its own thing than it does any of said predecessors. Furthermore, while it… does feel a bit weird to talk about how something being jank actually works for a game’s benefit as if that’s just a core expectation of a survival horror game, there are moments where the limitations of the time manage to enhance the experience. Any point where I had to run away or something, or carefully navigate around traps or enemies, I felt the controls added a little degree of added stress and adrenaline to the equation, and made those parts of the game feel more standout.

Tragically, I do think that other than in that example, the conceits of the time… manifest more as downsides than things that boost the experience. Combat is bad. Instead of just using a weapon, there’s a whole system with equipped weapons where you choose which hand to use and/or which direction to swing. What it intends is a system a bit reminiscent of real-life sword-fighting, where where and when you swing is key to interrupting your enemy and landing a strike. How it works in practice is that you’re beholden to this clunky system where you have to wind your strike up before you can swing, and meanwhile the enemy can attack quickly enough to interrupt your animation before you're ever allowed to attack. Thus, it’s oftentimes a much better idea to avoid combat unless you can actively avoid it — not because of any sense of resource management, or cost vs. gain, but because if you try it’s more likely the enemy is going to stunlock you for half your health before you can even actually land a hit on them. While I do like the contrast in how the last third of the game is much more linear and straightforward than the rest of the mansion, I enjoyed much less how the game became the very first a 3D platformer: the clunky jump controls, the camera angles the game chooses, and the steep price for falling into the water definitely made that whole endgame section kind of a slog. It also, coincidentally, throws a bunch of enemy encounters that you can’t really run away from, so the previous issues combined with getting constantly stunlocked by enemies definitely left… a rather low mark on my experience.

Still, though, even if it does feel a little obsolete compared to the games that more directly kickstarted/defined the genre, and even if I certainly had my frustrations going through the game, I do think this is still a game definitely worth experiencing, presuming you want to. Whether it’s because you want to see what inspired the original Resident Evil, or whether you want to play the game on its own terms, it’s absolutely worth taking a look. It’s much closer to its progeny than you might think. 6/10.

I’ve found, oftentimes, when a work exists relative to another work — be it a sequel, adaptation, etc. — that the general audience has a tendency to judge it purely by its relation to the original. “Loyalty” becomes the touchstone for which the work is defined, and should it feel significantly different from the original, or change things in adaptation, it’ll be decried as a bad work compared to the original, regardless of its actual quality separated from that context. Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, from what I understand, was no stranger to this type of reception. On its original release, in 2013, it was criticized for feeling much more stripped back compared to what it was following up on. Core mechanics that defined Amnesia: The Dark Descent, such as managing your inventory, fueling your light source, and making sure you don’t lose your sanity were not present within Machine For Pigs, in an attempt to gear the game as more of a narrative experience, as was the modus operandi of primary developer The Chinese Room. It was a tall order — especially given just how popular and influential The Dark Descent was for indie horror — and sadly reception proved to be rather mixed because of that. What the general audience wanted was something reminiscent of the original work, and when the process of creating a follow-up resulted in something far different, it was rejected: not on its own merits, but because of outside expectations that this work didn’t entirely cater to.

So it’s a little funny on my end that of all the Amnesia titles, this is the one random chance chose for me to play first. Having not played, or even watched much of anything else to do with the series, I’m coming into this divorced from a lot of the context or outside expectations that surrounded the game on its release. I wouldn’t necessarily feel this game to be stripped back in terms of mechanics, since I never had an understanding of those mechanics in the first place. I wouldn’t think about this game in comparison to the original Amnesia… mostly because I prefer to view things on their own merits, but because I came into the experience absent any previous experience. It’s far from the first game in the series (especially if you consider Amnesia as a spiritual sequel to Penumbra), but, personally, this one would be my first foray into it, and, likely, the blueprint for what I'd expect to see should I delve further into this series.

You play as Osmund Mandus, a wealthy industrialist, who wakes up from a coma of several months right on the last day of the 19th century (or, well, actually a year from the last day of the 19th century, but shhhhhh) to find that his two children are nowhere to be found. His search takes him through his manor, through the streets and sewers of Victorian London, listening to the directions of a mysterious man on the telephone who tells him he knows where his sons are. He’s eventually led into one of his factories, and through this factory, towards a machine of unknown aim and infinite proportions. As he gets closer, however, Osmund finds that the workers of the machine are anything but human, and that he might know more about the machine than he seems to think...

I think this game’s strongest point was its narrative. I think the writing did a good job of getting me to know and like the characters, and I was particularly into the varied, wild directions the plot happened to go. Beyond how effective it is at building up a mystery — and drip-feeding the player information as it slowly unfurls — I think what I really loved is that this is a story that operates on multiple textual levels. While you’re fully capable of taking the game at face value without really feeling like you’re missing out on anything, this is something that begs to be read a little deeper. Particularly, one can question how literal the events going on even are, with a knowledge of Victorian England potentially providing an indication that the events that are depicted… perhaps could be interpreted as a metaphor for something much less fantastical. I made a point to look up plot details after the game specifically because I wanted to know more, which to me I’d say is a compliment as to how much this game made me want to think about it.

As a horror game, I’d also say it’s solidly effective. The nighttime environments feel suitably dark without it being absolutely impossible to see anything (which, believe me, so many games can’t seem to get right). There’s a subtle sense — through how the sounds you keep hearing are the only things that break through the silence, how empty the streets of London are — that something is wrong from the start, driving the core mystery and providing an aura of unease as you delve deeper through the game. I’m also into the way things… escalate as the game goes on: from down to earth as you explore your mansion, then veering into the fantastical as the monsters begin to show up, then more and more off the rails the further you delve into the heart of the machine. The sections with monsters are simple, but effective stealth sections, with their presence feeling imposing enough to make the player not want to mess up. When you’re caught, or when the game dispenses with the idea of stealth, enemies are loud as they rush you down, inspiring a blind panic as you try to figure out how you’re meant to get away. It’s the little things that contribute to a horror game’s atmosphere — and mean just as much as any big setpiece or scare — and in regards to the micro level, I think this game does pretty well on that front.

Where it falters, I feel, is mostly in direct gameplay. Less the ‘walking simulator’ aspect, more when the game throws puzzles at you. They’re mostly fine, but what it really suffers from is a lack of… indication of how your actions affect the world around you. Oftentimes, I’d solve a puzzle, the game would acknowledge that I solved a puzzle… and then I’d have no clue what to do next, either the puzzle requiring an extra step that wasn’t quite clear (at one point I thought the game had glitched and softlocked me), or because the game has issues with signposting where exactly the player needs to go. There were so many points where the game was like “walk down the path we’ve set for you” but the path was in a large enough area that I got lost, or the way forward was absolutely coated in darkness that I couldn’t see it. I kept looking at guides, not for any of the puzzles, but for a lot of what was in-between, when it… really did not feel like that was what the game had intended, nor something that particularly felt like a ‘me’ problem.

Other than that — and divorced from whatever context that might have given me different expectations, or any sort of in-built comparison — I felt that this was a fairly solid narrative game. While a lot of the gameplay, and most of the segments where I was walking from place to place, felt like they could’ve been made more clear, I felt the horror to be rather effective, and the story to be something super worth delving into and interpreting. As my personal first experience with this series, I felt like this was a fairly decent introduction. Can't wait to be shocked that the next game in the series has actual mechanics. 6/10.

From the moment I started to play Alone in the Dark (2008), it was love at first sight. When I first got control of my character, and found out that there was a whole mechanic where the main character had to manually blink to refocus their vision, I knew that this was the start of something special. When I got a taste of… basically everything to do with actually playing the game, I knew that this was going to give me brainworms long, long after I beat it. I love stupid garbage survival horror. I love games that really think they’re pushing the grain when they’re really just doing what everybody else is doing except badly. And I love games with no self awareness — I love things that just have so much earnestness, that really think they’re going for something, and also have the budget and backing so that I don’t feel like I’m picking on the little guy. This is the type of thing I only get to play, like, once a year, maybe a bit more. I have to treasure them where I can, and… man this thing was a fucking gem.

You play as Edward Carnby, an amnesiac who wakes up in modern day New York with a gun to his head. While his captors clearly have ill intentions for him, they don’t get to act them out — for they are then intercepted and eaten by malevolent cracks in the floor. While trying to escape the rapidly falling apart building, he learns two things: that the cracks in the floor turn people into zombies, and that these zombies are looking for a mystical stone: one they are under the impression that he has. Meeting up with art dealer Sarah Flores and priest… “Theophile,” they manage to escape the building, only to find that the outside is in just as much chaos, and that what happens tonight might have world-changing effects…

And God it’s amazing. This is a game that cribs from every survival horror popular at the time into some weird amalgamation with the sole purpose of following what’s trendy. The game is absolutely obsessed with action setpieces and sections where you must scale the environment. Every sentence somebody speaks is littered with swear words as if it automatically makes the dialogue that much better. The game pretends like it’s connecting itself to the previous Alone in the Dark games, as if that’ll change the fact that this is completely alien to the series it’s trying to “reboot” if it weren’t for the title, but then it manages to get basic information about the series wrong. Combat is just… incredible. The zombies you go up against only die permanantly when they come into contact with the fire scattered across the landscape, but the only way to actually make them touch the fire is to stun them with the game’s incredible melee combat and drag their bodies over to the flames… but also you can only pull enemies. You can’t push them. If you want to drag them into the flames you have to walk through them yourself. You could also drop a flaming weapon on them (or, like, just hit them with a flaming weapon, but also the game sure likes not letting you attack half the time when you have a flaming weapon for some reason) but… also enemies don’t run faster than you and you never need to backtrack, so, like, why try fighting in the first place? You can just run past them no problem. The game’s really generous with checkpoints and you heal to full every time you come back so, like, there’s no real need to manage resources or anything.

And even with sections that would otherwise be rather unpleasant, that general sense of ‘oh my god, this is a trash fire, it’s so amazing’ really managed to dull whatever pain there might have been. There’s an early part I was directly warned about, where you have to drive a taxi to Central Park while the city collapses around you, and it’s… truly something. The car you’re driving turns absolutely horribly (which, uh, isn’t great from a company that specializes in racing games), and the time you have before any given section kills you is incredible strict, which means that if you get stuck on the environment, sandbagged by another car, if you accidentally drift too far, or if your game happens to crash, you have to do the whole ~three minute section right from the beginning. It’s very obviously not great (and, given that you’re allowed to skip ‘scenes’ a la a DVD menu, there’s really no reason to actually do it), but even then it honestly just became a fun challenge, me replaying it… way more times than I honestly should’ve until I finally made it to the end. There’s also a persistent mechanic regarding instakill purple goo on the floor that can only be repelled by light. While later sections involving the goo give you tools to trivialize it, the first one requires you to use your flashlight in a way that’s… decidedly inconsistent — sometimes the goo just won’t go away even when you flashlight it, sometimes you get killed even when it isn’t touching you — but every time you restart it you get this unskippable, really funny cutscene where a bit NPC succumbs to the goo, and it became funnier every single time I was forced to watch it.

From the moment I started to play Alone in the Dark (2008), it was love at first sight. When I first got control of my character, and found out that there was a whole mechanic where the main character had to manually blink to refocus their vision, I knew that this was the start of something special. When I got a taste of… basically everything to do with actually playing the game, I knew that this was going to give me brainworms long, long after I beat it. I love stupid garbage survival horror. I love games that really think they’re pushing the grain when they’re really just doing what everybody else is doing except badly. And I love games with no self-awareness — I love things that have just so much earnestness, that really think they’re going for something, and also have the budget and backing so that I don’t feel like I’m picking on the little guy. This is the type of thing I only get to play, like, once a year, maybe a bit more. I have to treasure them where I can, and… man this thing was a fucking gem.

You play as Edward Carnby, an amnesiac who wakes up in modern-day New York with a gun to his head. While his captors clearly have ill intentions for him, they don’t get to act them out — for they are then intercepted and eaten by malevolent cracks in the floor. While trying to escape the rapidly falling apart building, he learns two things: that the cracks in the floor turn people into zombies, and that these zombies are looking for a mystical stone: one they are under the impression that he has. Meeting up with art dealer Sarah Flores and priest… “Theophile,” they manage to escape the building, only to find that the outside is in just as much chaos, and that sinister forces have been waiting for Carnby to awake for many, many years...

And God it’s amazing. This is a game that cribs from every survival horror popular at the time into some weird amalgamation with the sole purpose of following what’s trendy. The game is absolutely obsessed with action setpieces and sections where you must scale the environment. Every sentence is littered with swear words as if it automatically makes the dialogue that much better. The game pretends like it’s connecting itself to the previous Alone in the Dark games, as if that’ll change the fact that this is completely alien to the series it’s trying to “reboot” if it weren’t for the title, but then it manages to get basic information about the series wrong. Combat is just… incredible. The zombies you go up against only die permanantly when they come into contact with the fire scattered across the landscape, but the only way to actually make them touch the fire is to stun them with the game’s incredible melee combat and drag their bodies over to the flames… but also you can only pull enemies. You can’t push them. If you want to drag them into the flames you have to walk through them yourself. You could also drop a flaming weapon on them (or, like, just hit them with a flaming weapon, but also the game sure likes not letting you attack half the time when you have a flaming weapon for some reason) but… also enemies don’t run faster than you and you never need to backtrack, so, like, why try fighting in the first place? You can just run past them no problem. The game’s really generous with checkpoints and you heal to full every time you come back so, like, there’s no real need to manage resources or anything.

And even with sections that would otherwise be rather unpleasant, that general sense of ‘oh my god, this is a trash fire, it’s so amazing’ really managed to dull whatever pain there might have been. There’s an early part I was directly warned about, where you have to drive a taxi to Central Park while the city collapses around you, and it’s… truly something. The car you’re driving turns absolutely horribly (which, uh, isn’t great from a company that specializes in racing games), and the time you have before any given section kills you is incredibly strict, which means that if you get stuck on the environment, sandbagged by another car, if you accidentally drift too far, or if your game happens to crash, you have to do the whole ~three-minute section right from the beginning. It’s very obviously not great (and, given that you’re allowed to skip ‘scenes’ a la a DVD menu, there’s really no reason to actually do it), but even then it honestly just became a fun challenge, me replaying it… way more times than I honestly should’ve until I finally made it to the end. There’s also a persistent mechanic regarding instakill purple goo on the floor that can only be repelled by light. While later sections involving the goo give you tools to trivialize it, the first one requires you to use your flashlight in a way that’s… decidedly inconsistent — sometimes the goo just won’t go away even when you flashlight it, sometimes you get killed even when it isn’t touching you — but every time you restart it you get this unskippable, really funny cutscene where a bit NPC succumbs to the goo, and it became funnier every single time I was forced to watch it.

Unfortunately, the honeymoon period ended. It wasn’t that it got old, it was more that the game switched things up to actually just be really frustrating and unfun. The game decides to just spam enemies at you, and also gates progression behind understanding mechanics the game never told you about and that you never needed to know beforehand. The “resource management” part of the game goes from being a pointless addition to an active frustration, as you need certain items in order to complete certain puzzles but also you only get a limited amount of the items you need and also you have to shuffle your inventory and drop useless shit you don’t need and it’s such a slog, even when the puzzle itself is relatively straightforward. This culminates near the end when the game decides that actually it wants to be an open-world experience, stopping the game in its tracks and forbidding you from progressing until it deems you’ve wasted enough time you collect enough “spectral vision” in order to see the way to the end. Cue more annoying puzzles, cue more enemy spam, cue more annoying encounters, and more specifically, cue more resource management: as the way to get spectral vision is to destroy tentacles across the map, and the only way to destroy these tentacles is to blow them up: this then means that you have to find the tools you need to blow them up… wherever they are on the map. Better hope that the visual distortion that’s around every tentacle doesn’t mess up your shot, ‘cause if you do, you’re going to be spending a loooooooooong time scrounging around for more bottles.

So… yeah. That whole section of the game sucks. It at least ends on a high note, though. After you’re done with the stupid grinding section, it’s back to the gold standard the first half of the game set: really silly design decisions, a story that’s just a joy to watch unfold, and gameplay that’s mostly just… fun, in a stupid way. I recognize, maybe, that this is a thing that may not appeal to everybody — and that my brain is poisoned in such a way that I can find bad things just as entertaining and worthwhile as good things — but… honestly, even if the game goes too long, and even if the second half of the game takes a pretty major nosedive, I still love this game. Absolutely recommend it. 2/10.