Detective Edward Carnby looks very different today, and not just because he’s made up of a lot more polygons. Gone are the professorial waistcoat and bow tie of his boxy 1992 incarnation, replaced by the grubby suit of a battered 1930s noir detective, complete with a brandy flask for when the stress of being alone and having the lights out gets too much.
Carnby isn’t the only one to undergo a transformation in this reimagining of the classic survival horror “Alone in the Dark” before the letteror. Veterans will find plenty of references and familiar names as they wander around the Louisiana manor – talk of Pregzt Shipping Company, for example, may raise eyebrows, as may the gnarled tree that fills most of the conservatory. But like them, everything here is remixed, rewritten, relocated. Indeed, Decerto’s house is no longer empty but a “home for the mentally exhausted”, while player characters Carnby and Emily Hartwood now arrive together, having hired him to support her check on her uncle, a long-term resident who may be in danger.
Given this reworked scenario, you might be right to assume that you won’t be seeing this as often as the game’s title suggests. Still, you can’t blame developer Pieces Interactive for padding out their story with additional characters, considering the original is rather meager by today’s standards. The period setting certainly doesn’t hurt in this regard, mixing in Agatha Christie and HP Lovecraft as staff and patient, giving you a hint of suspicion whenever you come across either. It’s a fun production that gently pokes fun at its literary and cinematic inspirations without ever giving up on the darker plot lines.
In a similarly broad vein, this time around you’re not narrow to exploring the house and its immediate surroundings, as otherworldly forces direct you to dreamlike distortions of reality, from the streets of New Orleans to a wrecked steamboat and far beyond. When the first such journey occurs, you learn that Jeremy has gone missing and your chosen character is now separated from his partner, so you’re finally free to go it alone. Again, it feels like a shrewd decision to branch out in this way, accumulating a sense of the uncanny while also allowing for greater variety in the setting and level design.
The downside, though, is that there’s a far too clear division between what you do inside the house and the outside sequences. For the most part, the monsters you inevitably encounter exist only in these far-flung locations. Sometimes finding a key item or solving a puzzle in Decerto causes a tiny pocket of the dream world to erupt around you, and you have to dispatch a few ghouls to restore normalcy. But other than that, the house itself feels oddly secure, like a Resident Evil game where someone’s herded all the zombies under the stairs, and no amount of creaking around the environment is going to change your mind.
Exploring the house, then, comes down to the mechanics of an exercise—lots of map reading, lots of keys to fit into doors, and a handful of puzzles. And while everything is neatly laid out, there’s not much among those elements that will get your pulse racing or your brain racing. In a few cases, a “puzzle” amounts to picking up an object, like a switch, and hauling it a few yards into the house. More cerebral activities, on the other hand, fall into one of two camps—unraveling miniature clues or arranging and rotating tiles to form a picture. They may be logical, but they’re so standard that when one puzzle forces you to fix a literal template, you might conclude that it’s an elaborate self-parody.
This refusal to push the boundaries causes Alone in the Dark to stumble elsewhere, too. More than 30 years after the original, it enters a world where the rules of survival horror have been not only well-practiced but shaken like a snowball by the likes of Alan Wake 2. Yet despite its freshly-cooked, self-aware story elements, the game’s experience often feels as time-honored as the décor in Decerto, with modernization mostly taking the form of quality-of-life and labor-saving shortcuts rather than anything more daring.
Navigation and combat are examples of this. On the one hand, Carnby and Hartwell struggle over minor obstacles and barely get on the curb unless it’s marked with a button. Surely we’ve become more accustomed to survival horror heroes now showing more initiative and physical prowess? But they’re quite agile when facing the game’s enemies – shadowy beings that come in more or less humanoid, animalistic or insectoid forms – with a quick dodge that’s long enough to get you away from their fiendish targets in most cases, and an instant weapon switch that takes you from self-defense firearms to blunt melee strikes. As in many survival horror games, you have to make your shots count and avoid getting flooded, but it’s all a bit basic and neither particularly scary nor hard to survive.
On the other hand, perhaps the lack of anything more demanding or ambitious is for the best, because Alone in the Dark is also hampered by its technical limitations. Yes, it’s a lovely game, and Decerto in particular has been drawn in the kind of detail that might distract you from the textures of wallpaper or the volumetric airy streaming in through windows. However, scenes are prone to moments of crippling frame judder when the camera pans quickly—no matter what the video settings, I couldn’t completely eliminate it—and characters and monsters occasionally get caught and stuck to furniture. Scenes feel like they might break down if the engine was put under additional strain, as if this were a period piece running on smoke, mirrors, and stuntmen in rubber suits.
But while, like Carnby of venerable, this latest attempt at Alone in the Dark is a bit artificial and conservative, there’s still enough here to make its breadcrumb trail enticing. The two main characters are certainly a highlight, not least thanks to the voice performances (and likenesses) of David Harbour and Jodie Comer. Each provides a different window into this world when you choose to play them – Carnby is determined to earn his fee, up to his ears, probably drunk; Hartwell quickly begins to wonder if he’s just imagining all this weird stuff because of a family history of madness. There are others to control, too, with Emily quicker on her feet and with unique story scenes filling in the gaps in the other’s experience, there’s a decent argument for playing the whole thing twice.
It also helps that the later stages of the game build on the foundations laid in the more predictable first half. The environments you’re thrown into get a tad more complicated, with multi-part puzzles to squeeze through and some combat situations that force you to navigate between modes. Plus, every time you reappear in Decerto when everyone else doesn’t know what you’ve been up to, you start to get a nagging feeling that the whole thing might be all in your head. True, there’s nothing particularly original about a story that blurs the lines between madness and the paranormal, but it injects doubt and paranoia into your investigation that only makes you want to uncover the truth more. While spending time alone in the gloomy may not be as uncomfortable as it should be this time around, it’s still worth peering into the void to see what’s staring back at you, given all the changes.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by publisher THQ Nordic.
