Past the original 90s trilogy, the Alone in the Dark series has, uh, been through some tough times. With the title and influence of having been ‘the very first survival horror game’ there’s enough of a selling point in the IP for Atari/Infogrames to try and cash in every eight years — making some sort of attempted reboot, following whatever trends in survival horror are popular at the time — yet not with enough real thought and care to make them any good. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, released in 2001, was one of the many fixed-camera, third-person survival horrors to release in the wake of Resident Evil taking over the world, yet unlike other contemporaries (such as Silent Hill or Fatal Frame), New Nightmare never quite iterates enough to feel like its own thing, and for the most part mostly feels like a copy — and not quite an amazing one. Alone in the Dark 2008 is fucking wild: it’s got the action-oriented approach of Resident Evil 4, the parkour of Uncharted, and is also just so ambitious with every stupid mechanic it has that even if it’s certainly not great it still manages to find that special place in my heart. Alone in the Dark: Illumination is like if they made Left 4 Dead 2 but also if they made it shit: even beyond being a Unity asset flip with awful netcode the combat and gameplay are so fundamentally borked that it’s a marvel to see. Atari lost the rights to the series after this point — having sold the IP to THQ Nordic in 2018-ish — and yet, even despite the series going from one publisher to another, some things always stay the same: Alone in the Dark (2024) is another attempted reboot. And once again, it's a mishmash of what’s hot in survival horror.
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 thenot!Molded creatures present in the dark. The game does well with resource management in a way that encourages you to keep switching between your modes of combat — breakable melee weapons, picking and choosing which type of ammo you get — and doesn’t let you settle for just one thing… it’s just that two of the three things you can do are rather clunky. I have no idea what the strategy with melee combat is. You kinda just wait for an enemy to get in range, hope you can interrupt them with your first swing, and then spam the melee attack button and hope they run out of health before they can get an attack off. Apparently I can hold the button to do an extra strong melee attack. I never, ever got a chance to actually use it.
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 deathjust like the original Alone in the Dark in a way that makes the final boss, in particular a rather rough experience) but I’d hesitate to call it bad: even at its worst it’s still perfectly functional, if janky. And, frankly, for a game like this? It adds to the charm. Mostly.
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.
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.