The third Dread X Collection, released… wow, two months after the second, keeps a lot of the same ideas in play. There are still twelve games in total, all following the same prompt, all wrapped together with an interactive launcher. This time, each game is tied together with a central theme of ‘SPOOPY’ — dancing the line between scary and cute, making things that appear innocent on the surface but become evidently not as you delve deeper and deeper — and, like, man this is so my shit. Weird genre mashups. Bizarre and evocative visual styles. Throwbacks to the most out-there of things, and gameplay conceits unlike many other horror games I’ve seen. And better yet, even though the theming itself is already pretty strong, and well-realized across each of the twelve games here, almost all of them are at the very least really solid in their own right. There’s one or two stinkers in the pack, but all the others are hits, between the fun and weird things they do with the prompt, their perpetual really strong aesthetics, and just how well they play, especially for games each made in ten or so days.

There’s one continual weak point, though: the launcher. Not the game itself — developed by KIRA of Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion fame — which works fairly well as a wrap-around, solving puzzles in a castle to unlock more games to unlock more areas in the castle which unlock more puzzles which in turn unlock more games. More the… story content. How it screeches the game to a halt just so it can exposit to you for literal minutes. How if you just wanna go to a different game or somewhere else in the castle you’re forced to walk as slowly as possible in the meantime to listen to these two people babble on about whatever it even is they’re babbling on about. How you can mess the game up by walking past a dialogue trigger when you’re already in dialogue, causing it to not trigger and making you have to go all the way back just so you can trigger it and let the game continue. The way they handled the overarching story in Dread X 2 worked well: it was brief, it only popped up a couple of times the whole game, and if you didn’t care for it you could let it become background noise as you went to solve another puzzle/put another game into the VHS. Here they made it so much longer, so much less optional, and so much more boring: seriously, whatever it was they were talking about was really in-one-ear-then-out-the-other. Wasn’t necessarily something that tanked the collection as a whole for me, but man did I dread completing a game and going into the launcher for that exact reason.

Anyway, onto the individual games! In order from which I played them:

SATO WONDERLAND:
Fun! I love how everything comes together here: the retraux graphical style, the odd camera angles, the voicelines that sound cute but clash so hard with the vrrs and buzzes of the machines around you, this game sets up its vibes really well, and as a mood piece is consistently strong. It’s not let down by the writing, either: you’re set up with a breadcrumb trail at the start, and every part you uncover tantalizes you into wanting to know more… yet at the same time brings on even more questions, circling around and around before it all becomes clear at once. I… do think there was room for some more polish on the core mechanics, perhaps? Namely the part where you have to combine keywords: some sort of system where exhausting all the combinations for one particular word removes it from the list could help to ensure the player is continuously moving forward through things, in addition to preventing any situations (like what happened with me >_>) where the player forgets what specific things they’ve covered and start trying to brute force the game/repeating old combinations to try and find something that’ll let them progress. Other than that particular quibble (and some, uh, bugginess near the end) this was solid! Doubt it’ll end up my favourite of the pack but certainly an encouraging enough start.

BUBBO: ADVENTURE AT GERALD’S ISLAND:
So this game takes the style of, say, a Banjo-Kazooie, a Mario 64, like one of those N64 early-3D platformers where you run and jump around a singular large level, doing quests and searching for hidden nooks and crannies to get all the Jiggies and get all the coins. What I think I like most about this is how hard it commits to the aesthetic: characters grunt noises as their dialogue unfurls across the screen, the character models are simplistic but not obviously blocky, and even as the ~spooky~ things start it does so in a way that never truly undercuts the idea of this theoretically being an N64 platformer. Or at least, never really does anything that Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie wouldn’t, tonally. It’s also fairly fun as a platformer. The platforms are simple, floaty enough that you can get away with some jumps you maybe shouldn’t, yet some of the coins/objectives you need to do require enough engagement with the mechanics that you can’t just waltz through the game (let alone all the stuff you need to do for the secret ending). I think perhaps the final challenge is kind of annoying? It’s a fun idea to have to run across the entire island in one mad dash, and there are a lot of cool shortcuts you can take if you’re confident enough to try, but it’s so rough having to go back to the start every time your chaser nothin’ personnels right in front of you when you’re in the middle of a jump. Bittttt of a lowlight on what’s otherwise a pretty fun game. Would otherwise rec, though!

SPOOKWARE @ THE VIDEO STORE:
A horror… microgames collection? I’ve… never actually played any WarioWare, or anything else of that ilk (other than the Smash stages) but when I found out there was a game pack in my game pack I was rather amused, to say the least. And I stayed that way going through it! It almost feels… roguelite/endurance run in nature: to clear a level, you have to complete ten randomly chosen microgames in succession. If you clear one, you get to continue, but fail three times, you’ve got to go right back to the start. It becomes a macro game, both of desperately trying to figure out the rules of the game while you still have time to clear it, and then also hoping you’ll roll the levels you're good at and also come to understand the games that are a bit more ??? to you. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to figure out how a rotary phone works under a time limit. It’s great. Not to mention how cool the individual games are: how divergent they feel from each other, the layered-photorealistic-patchwork aesthetics going on, and all the little jokes when you pass or fail a game, this was super fun. Enough so for me to actually try the endless mode for a good bit once I was technically done with the game. Good stuff. Found out there was actually a full release for this one and honestly… I’m a bit surprised, but I’m happy. Always glad to see which out of all of these games manages to go the extra mile.

SOUL WASTE:
…Another N64-styled get-all-the-coins platformer. Huh. At the very least, it’s considerably different than the one before. You’re barely given any instruction beyond the premise, no real direction the game points you to, you’re merely just left to explore the wastes, searching for the things you need to find while fighting enemies and collecting all the things you can. It’s a vibe, honestly. The game achieves that Goldilocks-esque middle ground between requiring your attention if you don’t wanna die yet also letting you zone out and listen to your friends talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. Patricia Taxxon did the music and it works well: synth-heavy tracks that run the gamut from sparse to simplistic to suddenly loud and complex and frenetic. It’s great. Maybe wish the physics didn’t feel as icy? Maybe also wish some of the enemy encounters didn’t flood you as hard as they do? Made some sections feel a little rough playing through, but otherwise… yeah, I enjoyed this a good deal. Honestly if there were a solo release of this I’d one hundo percent play it again. This was a fun time.

NICE SCREAMS AT FUNFAIR:
Well, they can’t all be winners. I guess sometimes when you only have a few days to make an entire videogame you sometimes won’t be able to make the deadline. Nice Screams at Funfair is, theoretically, a game that involves you scooping ice cream for customers at an undead amusement park. The reality is that it’s a rather buggy mess. Customers think about the ice cream they want for a split second before standing there, listlessly, endless patience in their eyes as they watch you fumble with the tray doors as you desperately try to keep their order in your memory. Putting scoops on the cone requires you to throw your scooper, for some reason, and my booth quickly became littered with pitches that missed or bounced off the cone, almost all the challenge having to navigate the rather fiddly physics. There’s a system where you can try to avoid the gaze of the security drone in the booth to attempt to sneak in tips but also it’s bugged and even if you do it when it’s not looking it’ll catch you out anyway. I tried this once and then a customer came in and gave their order while I wasn’t looking so I was forced to restart the whole game. There’s no real rush to complete orders in time — no mounting pressure of, say, more customers coming in as you try to complete the order currently on hand — so even if the game worked as it was meant to there… really isn’t much depth here. You do like five orders and then the game ends. Perhaps, if this had more time in the oven, there… could be a little bit of something here, but as is it mostly feels like the side of game jams nobody tells you about. Sometimes you make something that’s honestly incredible given the constraints in place. Sometimes those same constraints force you into putting out a rushjob.

CHIP'S TIPS:
I’m sorry, I can’t not love this. It might not necessarily have as much as some of the other games in this pack do but it makes up for it in sheer charm, and just how hard it kinda goes for it. A Blue’s Clues style horror game is a silly idea in theory, and frankly just as silly in practice, but the game does a fantastic job at making you laugh with it, from its rather irreverent sense of humour, its animation, the way the FMV interacts with the pre-rendered backgrounds, it certainly leans towards humour harder than any of the other Torple Dook games I’ve played, but it does it so well. And not to say the game isn’t without its substance: it’s a fairly solid puzzle game as you explore and unlock new parts of the house to tick off all the items on your checklist, and honestly? as a horror game? it actually got pretty unnerving, to the point where I was loosely dreading what was going to happen as things started going more and more off the rails. I… don’t think I can particularly say more about this. It’s very much one of those games that appeals specifically to me. It’s also very much one of those things that you’re gonna have to see for yourself.

SUBMISSION:
(spoilers for this one. this game buries the lede on what it is for a non-zero period of time but tragically to talk about requires one to loosely ruin the surprise. if you were at all interested in playing this one skip this review I guess)

Having played and liked The Open House, a previous game by the same developer, I was eager to see whether this game would be just as fun and inventive, and it didn’t disappoint! Beyond the intro — which is fairly on point for what it’s trying to parody — the core of the game is you, the player, going through the same perils most game devs go through having only a few days to make an entire video game. Find the store-bought assets that don’t clash with your vision! Physically fight the code of the game to get basic mechanics to work! Solve the mystery lying at the heart of all these disparate indie horror stock locations! On sheer conceptual level it’s very, very strong. In practice… it’s a rather solid puzzler, with a decent core of mixing and matching areas and mechanics to open new spaces up and eventually complete your very own video game. It’s fun, clever, and at one point honestly a bit unnerving, though it admittedly did get rather tedious manually creating the mechanics over and over again every time I had to switch from one to the other, especially when I was stuck and a bit confused on what I’m meant to be doing next. Also awkward when you manage to break through and progress with one mechanic… only to then have to go back out and switch it out for another mechanic. Kinda wish there was a way it could’ve been streamlined because it felt rather clunky as was. Not enough to ruin the game — the concept alone super carries this, let alone just how well the game’s style of parody characterizes the whole thing — though perhaps enough to knock it below the upper echelons of this pack.

MATTER (OVER) MIND:
The… third collect-the-notes style platformer, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this retro-styled — the top-down camera, I think, pushes it out of that realm and more into letting it feel like its own thing. On the other hand, I think the top-down style also makes this game feel a lot clunkier than I think was intended. You play a goopy thing that jumps onto people’s heads to take them over, but there’s no way to really be able to judge your height as you jump, which often led me to sail past people’s heads or accidentally hit a platform I’m trying to jump onto. And even if it weren’t for the camera, your jump feels so clumsy: you have to hold down the jump for a little bit to be able to get any height at all which is great when you need to climb up a staircase while one the guards are firing 18 times into your head and chest region. The stealth… felt rather borked too, guards detecting me through line of sight blockers, remaining procced on me even when I’ve left the room, in general not feeling like it works the way it should. There’s a secret ending you can collect if you get all the coins, but dying resets the counter back to zero, meaning that should you mess up a platforming section or should the platforming stop you from getting away from a guard you have to scour the entire facility all over again. There’s certainly a good concept here: I love the “organism wrecks shit in the lab he was born in in an attempt to get free” genre of horror, and I did like the general sense of humour, but I think if any game here suffered from the game-jam time limit it was this one. Polish wise it only feels like it's only partway there.

REACTOR:
Neat little walking sim. Perhaps doesn’t truly go anywhere out there — you can kinda guess the way the story’s gonna go once it gets in motion — but it’s competently told, and even then a lot of what this game is going for is stylistic. The endless desert landscape outside your little station. The stark, blinding black and white all around you, only broken up by the pink of your AI assistant and the red of the meteor. The way walking across the ground feels: the smooth floors and staircases of the station compared to the grooves and bumps of everything else, there’s a lot that characterizes the experience even if the main story doesn’t quite feel so unique. The game was also rather buggy? Driving the car through the desert felt like I was fighting against the game a little bit, and by the end I managed to get myself stuck in such a way that I couldn’t move and had to start the game over again. Maybe gave me a bit more time to notice stuff I didn’t before, but, uh, perhaps something that would’ve been nice to avoid. Sticks out a little for the worse amongst the rest of the pack given how standard this feels compared to the… varied ways the rest of the anthology goes out there, but I’d still say it’s solid.

DISPARITY OF THE DEAD:
My favourite of the… wow there were four separate N64-era collect-the-notes platformers this pack, weren’t there? Not especially a genre I look at and naturally think ‘horror’, but this game in particular I think works in how it leans into it. The afterlife is desolate — disparate platforms dotting an endless void, the denizens left with nothing but to contemplate their life and death for eternity. Plays… a bit odd with the whole “you are a detective finding CLUES and figuring out a MYSTERY” element, thinking about it, but even then I think the writing is one of the strongest parts of this. Death and suicide are fairly common topics of conversation as you jump across the wasteland; specifically, what happens after somebody makes that choice to end their life, and how one ultimately copes with the reality of eternity. At the very top of the world is a payphone that delivers a constant stream of last words, and what struck me most was... forgive me, the disparity between how those about to die approach the end: how much consent they have in the choice, how at peace they are with what’s about to happen. It all builds up to you crossing over and visiting the land of the living, and while aesthetically it’s rather striking… it perhaps plays less well than the 3D platforming you’ve done before. The game suddenly takes on fixed-camera tank controls… and it does not control well: your perspective frequently changes and so do the controls, to the point where I honestly never knew what direction I was going to move when I tried to move. It’s at least a fairly minor part of the whole experience, and doesn’t take away too much from… just how strong this is in general. At least thematically, at least for most of the game's runtime. Honestly, the fact that it’s not first place really just speaks to the strength of this pack. There's some real heavy hitters here.

BETE GRISE:
This one is carried at least a little bit on its aesthetics but man do its aesthetics carry it far. The pixel art is just gorgeous: the bright yet off-colour… colours present everywhere you go, all the little things you can find in the background, and the way Pom always looks ever so off model whenever she’s on screen, there’s so much effort to making this all look a little off and yet at the same time just so visually striking. It made me so happy to see new things for the sake of seeing these new things. Also loved the grid movement, how reminiscent it is of, like, the flash games they used to have on the Cartoon Network website, how it always feels like you’re going to open up the elevator to something you don’t particularly want to see. Do wish there were more minigames to do as you go through the hotel — especially given that the most tedious of the three is the one you do the most — but honestly that complaint feels a bit pocket change: even if it is a bit sparse in terms of content it more than manages to make up just for how well it does atmospherically. Really wanna see what else this dev has done. Perhaps not the most memorable on paper, but not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

EDEN: GARDEN OF THE FAULTLESS:
Have you ever wanted to play the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2 but instead of raising Chao you’re raising biblically accurate angels? Well, be not afraid, EDEN: Garden of the Faultless might just be the game for you. The gameplay loop is simple: you get gifted a biblically accurate angel from above, you ram them into trees to collect fruit, and then you send them off to the races. Winning a race makes all the angels you have obsolete due to stat caps, but that’s fine, all you have to do is get God to give you a new angels, then command all your previous angels to kill themselves at the altar so that your new pet can be even stronger! It’s simple… if rather finicky. Getting your angels to go where you want them to is this whole process where you gotta click on the angel you want, go to the place you want them to go, then watch them slowly move over from where they randomly drifted off. Not to mention how buggy the game is: angels randomly switching names, angels ramming into you and throwing you into the bottomless pit below you, angels randomly despawning and making you think they’ve just disappeared forever… even despite this, though, there’s a fun, if maybe a slightly tedious core. I like that the game… doesn’t actually go full horror with its concept. It’s morbid, sure, but it always makes sure to be a little cute about it, never suggesting a particular tone around anything you’re doing, which then makes the point where it tries to sneak something past you feel much more potent. Perhaps not a favourite — having to grind up an angel’s stats became a bit tedious after a bit — but it was cute, a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Chip's Tips > SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store > Bete Grise > Disparity of the Dead > Soul Waste > Submission > Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island > Sato Wonderland > EDEN: Garden of the Faultless > Reactor > Matter OVER Mind > Nice Screams at Funfair

Well this, uh, mostly consisted of me just, like, walking around a mansion and delivering a letter. I get that this is meant to be a loose remake of Jack in the Dark — a quick ten-minute tech demo starring one Grace Saunders, meant to show the game’s engine in action — though I think the difference here is scale: while Jack in the Dark used all-new assets and locations, telling its own self-contained story, Grace in the Dark is in its entirety things that would go on to be in the full game: the mansion, the monster models, even one of the hallucinations you get where the mansion changes shape is one you get in the full game. Evidently, this is meant to give a sneak peek of the story, do a dramatic cast reveal of JODIE COMER and DAVID HARBOUR as the lead roles, and give an idea of what the full game is going to do… which means it loses a lot of its potential impact if you’ve already gone ahead and played the full game. I do like the little glimpse of a not-quite-on-kilter narrator in Grace, and I do like how certain things are utilized differently here than they are in the full game (the enemy models, specifically, and there’s a cool thing you can do on the stairs that you can’t in the main game), but as a whole… it would probably have been capable as a demo, as a little preview of what was to come. On its own, it’s a bit too short and a bit too straightforward to really be... much of anything. It’s no Jack in the Dark, that’s for sure.

Compared to the pop culture behemoth it’d so quickly become, it’s easy to dismiss the first entries in the Pokèmon series as “having not aged well.” And perhaps there’s at least a little truth in that: as the first game in the series, many of the quality of life features present in later generations aren’t quite present, and are sorely missed. It’s certainly rather annoying to be perpetually in contention with the item limit, where often you’re going to have to drop things as routes and dungeons have more things on the floor than you’re ever going to have free space in your bag. It’s certainly rather finicky to have to manually go into the menu and select the HM move you want to use, and it’s certainly rather tedious to have to navigate the PC every time you’re suddenly required to use Cut. Pokèmon learn either every move or no moves, which not only makes training up something in the latter category feel like pulling teeth, but also makes a lot of the game's difficulty fold perhaps more easily than it should: the Ghost type, in particular, being incredibly adept in a player’s hands because so many Pokèmon only ever naturally learn normal type moves.

Not to mention how… it’s a game held together by duct tape and dreams. A type meant to be super-effective against another type actually doesn’t do any damage at all. The so-called “good” AI — an RNG stratagem given to important fights, meant to push them towards super effective moves and away from not very effective moves — is anything but, making it oh so easy to trap certain important fights in a loop because they failed to take into account whether the super effective move they’re programmed to prioritize actually does any damage. Sometimes when you get the catching tutorial and then go to Cinnabar Island you rip the game open, a malignant piece of code emerging from the shoreline, irreversibly corrupting the world around you, before then challenging you to a Pokèmon battle. Between the bugs, between the bits of design philosophy that took years to be iterated on, Pokèmon Red and Blue are more of a stepping stone: important to understand just what the appeal was and how the franchise took over the world, but perhaps, in the full context of what we have now, not the best Pokèmon games to actually play.

But that’s the thing: Pokèmon Red & Blue did not set out to be Pokèmon games, they set out to be RPGs. An RPG with a central mechanic that completely reimagines how said RPG gameplay traditionally works, yes, but an RPG nonetheless, and one that hews much closer mechanically, thematically to being one than any Pokèmon game afterward.

Because, on one hand, it would be easy to say the game folds to any player who knows what they’re doing. On the other hand, that’s coming from a world where you’ve gone through Kanto in so many other games. That’s with the years' worth of accumulated knowledge of the type chart — or the years spent playing games that’ll just tell you if a given move will be effective against another Pokèmon the moment they’re registered in your Pokèdex. Pokèmon Red and Blue, on the other hand, run under the impression that they’re the only games of their kind, for better or worse. Specifically, they kind of run under the old RPG paradigm where finding the way forward often required you to take in context clues, or often explore for exploring’s sake. Kanto is huge, and after a certain point, notably open-ended: moving forward only requires whatever you need to move forward, be that a key item, a HM, or the permission to use said HM. Once you beat Misty the game becomes one huge scavenger hunt, where you’re unlocking something that’ll unlock something that’ll unlock the way forward, and oftentimes, that whole process starts with you hearing what a random NPC has to say, or you just picking a direction and walking towards the horizon, hoping there’s maybe something on the other side.

This approach isn’t limited to merely what governs progress, either. The type chart, and the way certain Pokèmon evolve, while you can certainly find all this out in-game via brute force, exploring the region and listening to what people have to say tells you so much of what you might like to know. From the gym guide giving you the lowdown on what to expect as you go up to face your next challenge, from the guy in the Celadon Department Store who gets traded a Graveller and is shocked to see it evolve, to the random trainer on the seaside who informs you how Nidorino evolves via MOON STONE, you learn so much from the people you meet along the way, and you never know just who is going to give you the exact info you might happen to want. I love how indirect this can be, too: for example, how the positioning of the Fighting Dojo relative to Saffron City’s gym tells you about how Fighting types are weak to Psychic, or Diglett's cave giving you the exact tools you need to beat the gym right next to it. If I got to have all my memories taken of a certain thing, a chance to go through the whole game blind once again… I’m not sure Pokèmon Red would actually be the pick, but man, is it up there. I love how, theoretically, the road to progress is marked by exploration, through interaction, through solving the giant fetch-quest that makes up the Kanto region. It’d be awesome to see how that all works in practice.

What I also love about the more RPG-inspired design is how nearly all the Pokèmon you encounter serve some sort of clear mechanical purpose. They’re not just cute little creatures you sic onto other people’s cute little creatures, they lean into the RPG design philosophy too, and often have a clear role in how the game is constructed. Brock’s Onix and Misty’s Starmie aren’t just each leader’s ace, they’re boss fights: who, should you know where to look later on, you can then adopt into your own team, Shin Megami Tensei style. The Dragon and Ghost types, while they play rather oddly in further generations, make sense here when they each only have one representative: the player needing to figure out what works and what doesn’t against Ghost types for them to reach the top of the Pokèmon Tower (nevermind how you need to do another dungeon to perceive them in the first place) and the Dragon type’s notable strength compared to everything else makes sense when they’re only used by the most powerful member of the Elite 4, thus making sure what the player thinks is the final boss is not a battle you can merely cheese with type advantage. Voltorb and Electrode are this game’s take on the Mimic. Mewtwo is this game’s take on your typical RPG superboss. Zapdos is the boss — and reward — of an optional dungeon, whereas its brethren in Articuno and Moltres are rewards for delving into the Seafoam Islands and Victory Road deeper than the player ever needs to. While mons like Butterfree and Beedrill emerge from their chrysalis early, and are rather powerful for the point in the game you get them, they both fall off curve hard once you start encountering other evolved mons, imparting a lesson in the player that sometimes growing up is letting go of the things you used to cherish. In the same vein, while it quickly plateaus into merely being as good as everything around it, Dugtrio is a godsend for the part of the game where you can stumble across him, going up to level 31 when most everything around you struggles to pass level 20, and singlehandedly allowing you to bypass what could be a difficult boss battle with Lt. Surge. Mankey (at least from Yellow onwards) is an early method of mitigating Brock should you have picked (or forced into) a starter that’s weak to his Rock types. While rather rare Pokèmon like Porygon, Farfetch’d or Lickitung aren’t quite worth the effort it takes to obtain them, that’s partially the point — they’re merely the more tricky steps in the process of catching them all, and the game is nice enough to put the Pokèmon more useful in terms of beating the game right in plain sight. While later generations would mostly shy away from this idea (though with some individual exceptions), the original set of Pokèmon games, even today, stands out for how it makes certain Pokèmon fill specific mechanical roles, and from a game design perspective it's fascinating to see in action, to try and guess what the idea is behind each member of the original 151.

I like how the game counterbalances its kid empowerment plot with its loose coming of age themes. Like, it’s super cool to imagine yourself at ten years old taking on and beating an entire criminal gang, but the game itself addresses that this doesn’t meaningfully stop them: even if you foil whatever caper they’re up to today, that’s not gonna keep them from doing whatever they’re going to do next. Even Giovanni, the last time you fight him, says that this won’t be the end of Team Rocket, and I think it’s this kind of, like, kid’s storytelling of singlehandedly saving the day by sailing through the bad guys’ hideout, combined with the reality of how organized crime is like the hydra growing new heads and that you can't ever meaningfully put them in the ground, that really stands out as a somewhat notable plot beat. I love the loose implication that you’re growing older as you go through the region: your rival’s sprite continually changing each time you catch up with him, starting off as a little kid yet clearly looking so much taller by the final time the both of you fight. I too love the way your path through Kanto more than likely loops you back to Pallet Town right near the end: what once was your home becoming just a quick pitstop, a quick moment to say hi to your mum, before you’re off on your way to Viridian for your last gym badge. For games that don’t necessarily focus on a clear-cut plot beyond the premise — probably in part because of Kanto’s more open-ended progression — there’s a decent amount put into theming here, at least from what I could extrapolate. Maybe I’m just reading a lot from a little (though given Professer Oak saying "You have come of age! You've grown so much older since you left Pallet Town so long ago" upon beating the champion I'm fairly sure that theme was a conscious inclusion), but the fact that the game is capable of evoking those themes so continuously I felt was rather worth note, and a loose highlight of the experience.

There are some other things I quite liked: the music is so continuously stellar, and iconic for a reason. Playing this on a system where the game had backlighting let me see the towns in the hues they’re named after, providing a rather pretty visual shorthand of where the player is at any given time. Overall… I’m never quite going to have that special connection with this particular Pokèmon game that others might have — I never had a Gameboy as a kid, my first Pokèmon experience was a couple of generations down the line — so all I’m gonna see is something… with perhaps a bit less polish than what I’m typically used to with a Pokèmon game, but even then there’s so much here that’s so cool to look at. The non-linear, old-school RPG design. How each individual Pokèmon does something for the overall construction of the game. Narrative theming that, um, perhaps takes a bit for the series to attempt again. Maybe it’s a little buggy, a little bit of a relic quality-of-life wise compared to the juggernaut it’d later become… but this was the thing that ignited the craze in the first place, and there was certainly a reason it managed to do so.

The second of three winter-themed games Nitrome released to close out 2007, and of the three, the one that hews closest to what Nitrome’s bread-and-butter is at this point. All the hallmarks are here: arcadey 2D platformer centred around a core mechanic (in this case, being able to slide on the ice, both as a method to attack enemies and as a way to rapidly gain speed going down a slope), where the game does a good job at introducing new things to keep in mind via new platform types and enemies, which perhaps dips a bit in quality once levels become really long and losing sends you right back to the start. Snow Drift mostly manages to mitigate that last issue, though! If, mainly, because it’s kind enough to pepper the level with enough health ups to at least make the endurance tests much more feasible. Not to say the levels still aren’t difficult, or… rough, in some places, but it becomes much less of a weakness when it only takes four or five attempts to make it through, as opposed to, like, 10+ tries. And it means that you don’t necessarily get tired of what’s specifically fun about this: having to position yourself carefully so you can jump over an enemy and then slide into them from behind, how certain sections constantly keep you on your feet and don’t let you let up right until they’re over, and how whenever you slide its a crapshoot as to whether you’ll be allowed to drift freely or whether the game will throw a random obstacle at you that you’re suddenly gonna have to react to. It’s fun, if not quite smoothed out — felt like there were some weird things with hurtboxes, and there’s this one enemy where getting past him without taking damage felt like kind of a crapshoot — but as a whole this was fun! Definitely the first of their more traditional platformers to really feel like it sticks the landing.

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 the not!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 death just 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.

I think it’s very funny how people claim this game killed Alone in the Dark. As if the franchise was thriving before this game threw all its momentum away. As if the franchise had an absolutely stellar reputation before this particular blight did it in. As if Alone in the Dark is even that much of a franchise at all, and not merely a dead IP from the 90s, occasionally defibrillated to cash in on its claim to fame of being ‘the very first survival horror.’ What originally set the stage for its genre — listed as a direct influence for 1996’s Resident Evil — has long since become an amalgamation of whatever trends happen to be most profitable at the time, each game past Alone in the Dark 3 being some sort of attempted reboot released ~8 years after the previous attempted reboot, doing its best to imitate whatever the newest Resident Evil is doing. Even the original trilogy wasn’t necessarily immune to changing up its approach: Alone in the Dark 2 is far more action-oriented than its predecessor ever was, for better or worse, and as a whole both 2 and 3 steer away from active horror, feeling more like Indiana Jones-esque romps which just so happen to have zombie ghosts as enemies. To say that Alone in the Dark: Illumination ‘killed’ or ‘betrayed’ the franchise — as most coverage of the game seems to — to me, is mostly an indication that you don’t know as much about the series as you say you do. This isn’t some sudden sellout. This one’s just… a bit more blatant about it. And a bit easier of a punching bag. Like, yeah, this game is dogshit, who could’ve guessed by the Metacritic score of 19, but unlike, say Alone in the Dark (2008), which is at least audacious in its baffling decisions and incredible dialogue, Illumination doesn’t even feel like it was even trying. And, frankly, that’s what truly damns it.

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.

The first of three winter-themed games Nitrome released during 2007’s Christmas season, Thin Ice involves the player using their mouse to skate across the ice, drawing circles with their movements to break the ground under the enemy's feet, Pokemon Ranger style. It starts simple, and… remains simple. While the game does what Nitrome does best — introducing new enemies and mechanics, then mixing and matching, never letting anything fall by the wayside — the core problem here is that nothing ever feels like enough: most new enemies don’t do much to contend with how they all get taken out the same way, and most new mechanics aren’t generally more than a minor annoyance. There are things around the stage that give you points (just like the game Thin Ice is spinning off, Frost Bite) but also… nothing is stopping you from just going to get them? You get a bonus for collecting five letters spelling out BONUS, yet… because the arena is so small all the letters are usually, like, right beside one another. And when the game isn’t falling over for you… it’s usually being quite annoying, and generally not in a way that feels intended on the game’s part. Some enemies only become vulnerable after doing a certain attack but then you have to wait until they do their attack, and if they do it by the edge of the arena there’s not enough room for you to draw that circle around them so you have to wait for them to hopefully do it again in a place where you can actually interact with them. Obstacles in places where you can innocuously be trying to get an enemy when you touch their way huge hitbox, freeze you, and then send you careening into damage or another freeze obstacle. Enemies that go fast enough that it’s impossible to actually encircle them, either requiring you to do the circle ahead of time or attack ahead of time and hope they randomly clip into it and die. Enemies that clip directly into the edge of the arena and force you to restart the level. If I maybe enjoyed the game otherwise, then all those issues could be merely minor annoyances, but as is… when it’s not being annoying it’s too simple, too easy, a bit unmemorable to feel fun. And that could be fine, on its own, but as the game progresses, and these annoyances start to rear their heads, there’s nothing really there to counterbalance them, nothing to stop the cracks in the ice from spreading, and nothing to protect you from being hit full force by the cold once it all falls apart.

And after the brief change-in-pace that was Pest Control, Nitrome has thrown me right back into the platformer mines. At least this one has a bit more I can say about it. There’s a really fun core mechanic here: using your mouse to pull the platforms like an elastic band to slingshot your guy across the level. It works well: there are a bunch of different platforms that all interact in different ways, a lot of different level types — where the means in how you get to the end is something more than just “use the platforms like slingshots” — and in general the game does great at keeping things fresh as you go through all twenty-five levels. Even the usual Nitrome platformer problem where the levels are extremely long and dying sends you back to the start are… mostly mitigated: while enemies/limited lives/instant death pits exist, a good portion of the game instead measures success on a system… honestly reminiscent of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, where while success takes you further into the level… messing a section up has a chance to make you fall backwards, forcing you to do the section you just did as you scramble up to where you just were. It’s so funny whenever it happens, and even if it can be a little frustrating it always feels like there’s a safety net in place, making sure you never lose too much progress, making sure you can easily get back to where you were before… at least for the levels that are like that. The rest… truly, truly suffer for not having checkpoints. Do I really have to go through the first part of the level over and over again just to reach the part where I actually die? Do I really have to do fifteen jumps back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back when messing up even once sends me right back to the beginning? I hate harping on this for every Nitrome game I review but it’s easily one of the weakest parts of all of their platformers: taking a fun concept and then stretching out the runtime by making you replay entire levels upon failure like it’s a NES game. I know these games don’t really stay that way forever — I don’t think it’s particularly long before they eventually do start putting checkpoints in — but as is it is rather sad to consistently see games with a lot going for them get drawn back by their issues. Long levels and no checkpoints are a rough combo, especially when you don’t have any tools to really sidestep it.

So, so close to being an early standout for Nitrome. Genuinely a ton of fun, at least up until a certain point. You control a swatter, there’s a bunch of bugs crawling across the screen, and you have to swat as many of them as you can before time runs out. It’s a simple concept, but there’s so much variety in the things you’re asked to do. One level requires you to use the swatter to keep a beetle in the air for 30 seconds. Another gives you precisely one chance to hit a slug falling from the top of the screen… but doesn’t tell you precisely when it will, leaving you in anticipation of when and where it’s gonna fall. One tells you to swat a mere two flies… each inside fly traps, requiring you to sneak in and bolt out lest your swatter get eaten. Levels are plentiful, but short: if you don’t think a particular mechanic/enemy type isn’t a winner then you at least don’t have to stick with it for long… unless it happens to be one of the ones the game chooses to bring back. It’s fun, it hits some good arcadey beats, and the pixel art is so pretty. I was honestly so close to really liking it… but god is the difficulty curve so, so rough. The first two worlds are fun, the third is… rough (do you want to have to click on a stag beetle 150 times in 15 seconds?), but otherwise fine, then the final world amps the difficulty up wayyyyyyy too much. Some are doable with some effort, some become much harder than they should merely due to the presence of the health bar/timer, a couple honestly felt a bit like crapshoots when I did enough for the game to count it as a win, but two levels in particular are so hard as to be genuinely impossible. And, like, that’s not just me talking: I looked up guides to see how others did it and every walkthrough I saw had whoever did it complain specifically about these two levels. And, like man, I really wanna recommend this game but I’m not sure I really could if I had to futz with Flash just so the game could be beatable. It’s such a shame, because I think the difference between this being where it is and this being where I’d want it to be is merely a case of tweaking some values to make the ridiculous stuff less ridiculous, but as is… man it was so close. Close enough that I still like it, honestly, but not enough to truly bat for it.

Having loved the playable teaser of this in the first Dread X Collection, and having then immediately learned that this managed to get a full release, I was super excited to play this during the months it took for me to get around to it. And it didn’t disappoint! Virtually all the strengths in the 20-30 minute demo translate perfectly to the full release, and the game… almost manages to weather the longer playtime without feeling long in the tooth. The game captures the appearance of a 90s FMV game perfectly, meshing real actors in with pixelated graphics not unlike, say, Harvester or Phantasmagoria, and combat where you must swing your weapon in real-time, like… the first thing I think of is Virtual Hydlide but thankfully everything feels so much smoother here: possessing some fun quirks of movement befitting the time it’s emulating, such as having to use your keyboard to look up and down, while never falling into direct clunkiness. I love the spell system: how you have to click through menus to physically chant each spell, how each spell opens new paths both in front of you and littered throughout previous parts of the game almost like a Metroidvania, and how with brute force and some experimentation you can come across spells before the game officially teaches them to you. The game’s brand of comedy works to keep the line teetering between parody/reference and yet still being able to take itself seriously, and never feels like it gets old even as the game goes on. A big strength of this developer — having gone through all his Dread X offerings — is his ability to just create a vibe that's so unserious yet so unique in how they feel, and this game has that in spades.

There are a couple of things I wish were different, though: I think the final area pushes the game into “too long” territory, and the second area in particular I think is wayyyyyyyyy too large for its own good — too much space between landmarks means there’s a lottttttt of time spent walking around, especially when you’re backtracking/looking for specific things on the map. I also wish the “walk faster” spell was given to you earlier/didn’t cost health to perform: by the time I was capable of using it it was past the point where it would’ve been most appreciated, and it’s not particularly useful for the thin walkways/compressed rooms that the game throws at you after. Also wish spells were more useful in combat: they’re usable, but never quite viable, and it always felt like I could do more just swinging my sword as opposed to standing still and watching my character chant out a spell while the enemy is free to slice me up. Aside from those quibbles, though, I think this did a good job at expanding on yet still capturing what made the Dread X Hand of Doom work so well: it’s a rather engaging puzzle game with a fun, irreverent set dressing, weaponizing its influences in such a way that it looks and plays unlike anything else I’ve really seen. If there’s perhaps an edit pass that works a bit on the pacing, maybe adds some stuff, maybe gives you a couple of things earlier than it does (as well as fixing the bugs that… a lot of people who aren’t me seemed to get) I think there really can be something special here. 8/10.

The original Alone in the Dark, while certainly not the first survival horror, planted the seeds for which the genre would soon flourish. The story goes that it served as direct inspiration for the original Resident Evil, which would then define and popularize what survival horror was and would be for the next few years. Where, then, does that leave Alone in the Dark, having not had another release since the underperformance of Alone in the Dark 3? Reinvigorated, apparently. The success of Resident Evil brought forward a slew of other studios trying their hand at survival horror, one amongst their number Infogrames, the original developers for Alone in the Dark, who hired developer Darkworks to capitalize on its status of fathering many of the things that Resident Evil went on to popularize. This… was loosely a double-edged sword, however. While it is true that many particular aspects — the mansion setting, giving their player a choice of two different campaigns to go through — were things originally devised by Infogrames, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare ends up feeling more like Resident Evil than any of its survival horror contemporaries, and in some ways feels like an imitation: a comparison that does not lend New Nightmare any particular favours.

New Nightmare imagines itself a reboot of the original Alone in the Dark, and as part of that, reimagines the series for the (at-the-time) modern day. You have the choice of playing as either Aline Cedrac, a young university professor searching for her missing father (a spiritual successor to the original Alone in the Dark’s female PC, Emily Hartwood), and Edward Carnby, a private investigator and possible descendant of the Carnby you played in the three AitD games preceding. When Carnby’s close friend winds up dead after attempting to investigate mysterious goings on at Shadow Island. Teaming up with Aline to investigate, their attempt at approaching the island is foiled as their plane crashes, leaving both separated as it soon becomes clear there are dangerous forces on Shadow Island. Regardless of whether you're Aline or Carnby, it’s up to whoever you pick to reunite yourself with the other character, find out the goings on of the island, and try and stop the Morton family, and their attempts to bring about the... "World of Darkness (c)."

The game does a decent job of making both these campaigns feel distinct from each other. While it doesn’t particularly matter doing both, or which one you do first — ala Resident Evil 2’s Leon/Claire A/B routes — the game you play is considerably different depending on who you choose to play as in the beginning. Each character takes a separate path through the game, does different things at different times, and goes through whole areas the other player character doesn’t, up to the point where both main characters have different final areas and bosses. Playing as Carnby hews a bit closer to your traditional survival horror experience: you’re given ammo from the start, you’re able to scrounge for resources, you must solve puzzles and fight increasingly tough enemies in order to find your way out. Aline, however… plays loosely like a proto ObsCure. Emphasis on loosely: because she’s a woman Aline doesn’t get to start with weapons like Carnby does, and instead must use her flashlight to repel monsters, either to kill them directly, get enough distance for you to get out of the room, or for you to find the lightswitch and instantly kill everything in the room. It’s… rather clunky in execution (and the game does go back to familiar survival horror tropes after a certain point, giving you weapons and pitting you against a Nemesis-like recurring boss) but I love there’s a concerted effort into making both characters feel different to play. Really works to add replay value (even if I was rather ready to call it quits once I’d gotten a cursory taste for how Aline played like), and it makes those moments of slight intersection — meeting the other character face to face, having them radio you what you need to do — a little bit potent, making you curious about what's going on in the other side of the story.

It’s a bit of a pity, otherwise, that this game doesn’t particularly iterate much on the formula it takes from. Or even particularly feel like its own thing. If you’ve played the original Resident Evil... you haven’t quite played Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, but you’re certainly not playing anything you haven’t played before. Again, it could merely be a consequence of how the original Resident Evil took inspiration from Alone in the Dark — and how any subsequent attempt to make a new Alone in the Dark would then provoke comparisons — but I think the real problem is that anything it does to stand out does not stand out for the better. Aline’s flashlight combat immediately shows how clunky it feels to use: feeling visually unclear whether your flashlight is damaging the enemy or merely forcing it to move, having to hold the flashlight in place for a long time before it kills the enemy/pushes it back far enough to matter, and enemies having long enough range that they can attack you from halfway across the room the moment you dare move the flashlight off them. Carnby (or even Aline, once she gets methods of fighting back) doesn’t fare much better: enemies freely, constantly respawn upon you killing them, which… is loosely horrible juxtaposed to the limited resources you’re capable of picking up. It’s never worth killing anything you theoretically could avoid, given they’ll come back the moment you re-enter the room, and eventually most rooms become flooded by enemies you’re just constantly running from. You have more ammo than you need to be able to get through everything, sure, but it doesn’t stop combat from feeling mostly irritating: fighting the same enemies again after going in and out of a room, getting hit an enemy spawned right in front of you when you entered a room, having to backtrack and having to duck and weave around every enemy on your way there and back.

There are other things that bog the experience down. The game goes rather overboard with its background lore: while previous Alone in the Dark games (and survival horror as a genre) were fond of their diary entries explaining the background lore, it never went quite so far as to give you any that was nearly 50 pages long. Nor do they ever tend to give three 15+ page diaries one right after the other. The game is kind enough to highlight any information you actually need to progress through the game but I feel like if the goal was for the player to understand the grander picture of what went on in the past that particular approach feels rather counterintuitive: if the player (especially someone who… rather struggles to learn via merely reading the information, like me) isn’t immediately compelled to skip it all under the sheer weight of how much there is to read, it’s rather difficult to retain anything in particular when it’s all dropped on you at once, and when it’s all in the midst of so many other things. The game feels… quite buggy and unfinished in places: there’s a boss I faced with Carnby, who, because I had happened to save in a specific room, would not go through its death animation upon reaching 0 HP unless you hit it during a certain part of its pattern, which caused me, at least, to reload the fight several times wondering what exactly I was doing wrong (not helped by the rather specific/non-indicative way of actually doing damage to it). The final area… is aesthetically interesting in how it jumps between several different biomes and inspirations, but is a total slog to play: throwing endless respawning enemies in your face as you wander through constant mazes all while you think ‘okay, this has gone on long enough, maybe the end is somewhat soon’ right before it gives you another maze for you to find the exit to. It’s mitigated, partially, because it gives you a gun that obliterates everything it comes in contact with and respawns ammo for it everywhere, but it’s rather clear just by spending what felt like a full hour inside it that it doesn’t feel quite as polished as the previous two acts of the game, and as a finale… is certainly the weakest point of the game.

Overall… this is honestly rather complicated to talk about. While I certainly do like the way the game utilizes its choice between which character you play as (and, in addition, what campaign you go through), it’s a bit hard to talk about how the game mostly… just feels like I’m playing a knockoff Resident Evil. Most of what it does competently is something I feel other games of the time did well, and the things that do differentiate itself from the pack… aren’t exactly fantastic. As a game meant to revive Alone in the Dark as a big name for the horror genre (the credits outright say “Edward Carnby will return”), The New Nightmare feels like a thing of the past compared to its contemporaries, and perhaps not the boost needed to bring the series into the modern day. 5/10. And while Darkworks’ attempts at a direct followup eventually became something else entirely, Edward Carnby did, eventually, return… for better or worse…

The Dread X Collection is… a hybrid anthology/game jam which asked one thing of ten different indie horror devs: distill the horror game of their dreams into a short playable teaser. To that end, the prompt was executed in a variety of ways: some of the games in the pack beg the question of how they could even be extended further, given how complete they feel as standalone experiences, while others… definitely feel more like a proof of concept than something that stands on its own. It’s a smorgasbord of different ideas and executions, the quality varying wildly between each game in the pack, which… as someone who loves horror, and new ideas, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t, this is my shit.

So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested, but without any further ado:

THE PAY IS NICE:
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.

DON’T GO OUT:
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.

HAND OF DOOM:
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.

SUMMER NIGHT:
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.

OUTSIDERS:
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour an empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.

MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO:
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.

ROTGUT:
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending- wait what do you mean my chair just fell apart irl and I have to get a new one before class starts-

THE PONY FACTORY:
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty is tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.

SHATTER:
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.

CARTHANC:
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.

Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut

Well, the good times had to end at some point.

A shame, given the… loosely upward trajectory the previous two games had taken. Like, okay, these games certainly never reached good: whatever attempts at being scary or delving into the Deep Lore come off as more goofy than anything, and genuinely it feels like the gameplay is solely focused on making the game run as long as possible to skirt the steam two-hour refund threshold. But even despite that, there were at least… signs of promise, in amongst the muck. They made some of the gameplay sections loosely fun. They mostly made the padding just having you backtrack through super long hallways, which, you know, isn’t particularly amazing, but it’s at least inoffensive: the game could, and had, been doing worse about it. They even found a way to be loosely funny without just spouting the same meme lines over and over again. Everything was looking up.

And then this game began with a first-person platforming segment and I could feel all my goodwill slip away.

Garten of Banban 6, tragically, returns to Garten of Banban 2’s method of trying to run out the timer: physically barring your progress through tedious puzzles, sections that go on for just incredibly long, and forcing you right back to the beginning every time you mess it up. Nothing as awful as 2’s killboxes, but man, do they try. Your core mechanic is that you need to use your drone to light up the ground around you as you head from landmark to landmark, as stepping into the dark is Dangerous now (but only certain kinds of darkness, other types of darkness are completely fine despite it looking exactly the same)... except the landmarks immediately start being too far away for you to see through the darkness, forcing you to kinda just fumble around and hope you’re going in the correct direction. There’s this one segment where you have to push switches to move lights to protect your partner while he does… something, and you get told to do 20 things at once and also the instructions are incredibly unclear and all the buttons you have to press are just so confusing as to what they do. It wasn’t difficult, not once I got the hang of it, but I died multiple times there primarily because I had no clue what I was even doing.

Which is a theme. Honestly, I reckon the devs did a “good” job at ensuring the player has absolutely no clue what they're even doing. There’s the usual stuff of hiding items, buttons you need to press, making the player scour the entire room to try and figure out what they’re even looking for, but this episode seems to go another level with it. I already mentioned the stuff with having to light your way to each waypoint, but there are other highlights. Puzzles where the first step is deciphering what it is you’re even looking at. Sections where the reward for solving them isn’t immediately obvious, making you wonder whether the game just moved the goalposts or if you just need to find whatever just dropped somewhere. Nothing is ever straightforward. Presumably, every second the player spends confused about what they’re even meant to do is one more second the player is spending in-game. Frankly, I think the developers of this game should make an out-and-out masocore platformer at this point. They clearly have a knack for it.

It’s still rather humorous, though, and not just the game’s attempts at being serious and scary. Honestly, even having gone through all of the above, I found it all funny, rather than frustrating. Maybe not in a tire-fire sort of way — it’s all too clear that there’s a degree of intentionality behind all of this — more bemused, more “oh my god what the fuck are they gonna do this time.” I understand that I am one of the few people who continue to believe the joke is funny (it seems like this game, in particular, is where people both dropped and swore off) but either way, even with the dropoff, I’m still onboard. It is a pity that this entry went downhill, though. Now I guess anything subsequent could go anywhere. 2/10.

If Alone in the Dark 2 doubles down on the worst parts of its predecessor, Alone in the Dark 3, at the very least, expands on what I most happened to enjoy out of… what was otherwise a rather frustrating follow-up. Key to this is the choice in setting: as a compliment to the pirate themed Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3 goes full spaghetti western, taking you to a full-on ghost town in the middle of the Mojave, fighting zombie cowboys, interacting with… perhaps not the most sensitive depiction of Native American culture. It’s certainly rather unique — compared to the areas typically used even in today’s survival horror — and the game compounds this with a rather irrelevant, oftentimes silly tone. Anything can happen, and the game is not afraid of you not taking it seriously. There’s a section where you reincarnate as a cougar and you kill werewolves. Dropping down holes is the most Looney Tunes animation and it’s a coinflip whether doing so will kill you or let you progress. Carnby states that his current situation has left him Alone in the Dark at least, like, three separate times. It’s goofy as hell, and it’s such a blast. So much of the fun was just seeing what the game was going to do next.

As far as the actual plot goes, you play as Edward Carnby, one of the player characters of the first game, ascended to being the main protagonist in the second. Dubbed the ‘Supernatural Private Eye’ after his previous successes, Carnby receives another case: the disappearance of a film crew in a ghost town, amongst their number Emily Hartwood, the other player character of the first game. Heading into the town to investigate, Carnby soon finds that a curse has overtaken Slaughter Gulch, and a gang of zombie outlaws has taken over the ghost town and dispatched the film crew. Alone, and with no method of escape, Carnby must now delve into the depths of Slaughter Gulch, finding his way through, finding help where he can, all in hopes of eliminating the curse over the ghost town and, hopefully, being able to rescue Emily.

Gameplay-wise, Alone in the Dark 3 certainly feels much more iterated than previous entries. While combat returns, and while it’s still… not quite amazing, it’s dialled way back compared to 2’s constant enemy encounters, and there are also a couple changes that make it much less annoying for the player. Your animations (at least until the endgame…) are much quicker, reducing the chance that a given enemy will just stunlock you to death, you have customizable difficulty modifiers that let you fine-tune things to your choosing, and differing kinds of enemy encounters: ones where your goal is less to shoot what’s on screen, more to solve a puzzle to get them off your back. While I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say I fully liked it, it’s certainly an improvement, and I’d certainly say I preferred fighting enemies here than fighting them in either of the first two games. I also enjoyed the upgrades made to the way the game delivers its background lore. While the pages and pages worth of books were… okay enough to manage in previous games, Alone in the Dark 3 varies its approach: sometimes the pages will be annotated with pictures. Sometimes you’ll get some film and you’ll see a projection of previous events. Sometimes it’ll be addressed directly to you. While the tomes of yore are still present, they’re juxtaposed with other methods of delivering the background lore to you, varying the approach and making it so much more easily digestible.

For every step forward, though, a few are taken back. Scrounging around for items feels so much more finicky than it ever did previously. Even if you can see an item on a table or cupboard or desk, you must use the Search command to initiate a lengthy animation when just walking towards it was enough to work in previous games. The process of using them also feels so randomly specific. You can have the item you need, you can know where to use it, and you’re still going to waste time trying to use it and failing because you haven’t found the exact spot and position the game wants you to use it. Sometimes I felt like the game was glitching out and not letting me progress despite having the correct answer, which really played well when the game started actually glitching out and forcing me to reload near the end. Puzzle solutions feel like they’ve become more esoteric: I think the whole thing with the miner you have to whip/specifically kill with a gold bullet has been covered well enough, but as a whole I’m… not sure how I could’ve solved some of these puzzles, at least without major trial and error. There’s a moment where you have to jump from platform to platform to avoid falling into a river of lava (don’t ask, I don’t know why either) with a core mechanic being to jump on certain pillars to make more pillars emerge from the ground. You reach the end, with one more pillar you need to raise… which doesn’t come up. Is the answer to the conundrum to, say, go back and jump on one of the side pillars you skipped? No, stupid, obviously you need to use the amulet in your inventory you’ve already used before so a Native American man can teleport you across to the end of the cave. Obviously.

(I do also think the game veers a little long: the last third really feels like it should get to the climax quicker. this is more a minor thing imo because this could’ve just been the stress of wanting to beat the game before I had to go to class compounding on me but it really feels like you’re spinning your wheels right up until the end. given that you start getting bottlenecked by combat around this point, given that the game starts glitching out and at some points softblocking you, it’s… sure not a winner. at least gameplay-wise.)

At the very least, though, all the steps back are made up for by all the little gameplay improvements. And even beyond that, the well-realized setting and the bizarre, anything-can-happen tone really boost the game, in both quality and entertainment value. I… tragically wouldn’t go so far as to say I fully liked it — the combat still hasn’t quite aged well, and that last segment truly does its best to end the game on a sour note, length aside — but god did I have fun. Both Alone in the Darks 2 and 3 aren’t generally well remembered as the original nowadays — both because of how hard they diverge in terms of genre, and because the original is just that influential in the history of survival horror — and while I’d say the second is best left that way… I’d definitely make a case for this game. If not a reappraisal — I don’t think it could bear that sort of scrutiny — at least let it be known just how off-the-walls this game can get. It’s certainly a piece of entertainment. 6/10.

I love this game’s visual design. It’s tragically rather undercut by how the lighting is wayyyyyyyyy oversaturated — and washes out everything it touches — but there are so many cool things here otherwise. The abandoned apartments feel so grotty: all the litter everywhere, the layers of graffiti covering the walls, the layers of dust and mold and mess that lends so much character to the world around you. The design of the monster is so evocative — how it seems like the cherry blossoms are trying to burst through its skin — and I’m a fan of how, by design, you’re never quite able to see its full image, at least not for more than a glimpse's worth. I love how the flashback cutscenes showing Maya so effortlessly segue between graphics and what looks so convincingly like FMV, really helping to contribute to the idiosyncratic, off-kilter vibe the game takes whenever we go to the past. I’m not quite sure how much of this is meant to be a tech demo — or whether this really is just meant to stand on its own — but if the aim was to show off its engine it certainly succeeded on that front, even if it’s more the artstyle itself that stands out over its graphical fidelity. And even if it really could have used an option to lower the brightness.

It’s a bit sad, in that case, that I’m rather less into most everything else. Particularly the writing. There’s promise in the premise: I could certainly see a world where I really vibe with what the game has to offer, but I think where this game is let down most is by its dialogue. There’s no subtlety. The game will spell out everything a particular moment is trying to communicate just in case you might not get it. It kinda suffers from a lack of patience, too. There’s this one segment that earnestly does the PT-style looping hallway in a way that gels super well with what’s going on thematically, setting the stage to perfectly represent the downward spiral you know is coming... then the game proceeds to throw you straight down to the bottom, having things immediately go wrong and having the whole thing only end after, like, three loops. Things and themes are brought up and then never quite mentioned again, and while one of those is the kind of painful portrayal of social media and The Gen Z Quest For Likes which I was happy to see go, there’s some stuff that really felt like it needed to be addressed or expanded on which… wasn’t. You’d think that if there’s a scene where (I think) the main character grabs a razor to cut her wrists, with the scars on their arm indicating that this is a rather routine thing, that that might… come up later, but if you thought that, you thought wrong. It just kind of happens. And unless there was something I missed… it never gets brought up again. Feels like a bit of an oversight.

(also: the game is set in Germany and yet… the characters are going to college? but can’t actually go to college because they… have to pay tuition fees? the americans might not realize that other countries don’t work the same way the US does, but trust me, we’ll notice your cultural assumptions :V)

The script never feels particularly naturalistic, either. Characters go through stuff and talk about the stuff they go through like it’s some sort of cyberbullying PSA, and… as somebody who went through some of the sort of stuff some of the characters here did, it never really felt like my experience. I know that it’s loosely going for heightened reality — I don’t think the game was literally suggesting that our character walked down her school hallways every day while random jocks yelled “Go away!” and “Slut!” and shoved her towards the lockers — but if the game is really trying to sell this as a real thing people go through, I feel like maybe there could’ve been an ear towards having the bullies say things bullys actually say. If you’re going to talk about how The Gen Z Quest For Likes makes people feel alienated and inferior from their peers, maybe don’t make it seem like you’re making fun of it instead. If you’re trying to treat the complicated and nuanced topic of suicide and mental health with the care and respect that’s required… Look, I wouldn’t necessarily say this game is as triggering on the subject of mental health and suicide as others made me think it might be (it never goes as far about it as, say, something like 13 Reasons Why or Doki Doki Literature Club ever did) but also it was insanely funny just how many times they throw the content warning disclaimer at you. Like, I read through it when I started the game. You don’t have to show it again every time you portray something that could be a representation fucky-wucky. It just kinda makes your case worse.

There’s other things, as well: the chase sequences were kind of annoying to play. They’re like this weird looping maze you have to brute force until you find the arbitrarily correct way through and also the monster will just suddenly appear from in front of you and immediately kill you if you can’t react in time and I haaaaaated having to do them. Overall, though, I’m… rather mixed on this. In a way where it really could’ve been something I liked, as well. Because while visually the game is rather adept, below the surface… god the writing really betrays it, especially the slipshot way it handles its delicate, complicated thematic material. If this is a teaser of the future of the Silent Hill franchise, it’s… certainly indicative of what’s to come. In more ways than one.