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 untilit 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.
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
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.