Another decade, another attempt to revive Alone in the Dark. I’ve recently covered all of the previous games in the series (excluding Illumination, because who cares). The inspiring original trilogy that shaped modern action adventures, but aged poorly. A much simpler first reboot The New Nightmare that nonetheless did several incredibly ambitious things. Overly ambitious Alone in the Dark from 2008, that attempted to reinvent the genre but failed miserably. And now we have a third game simply titled Alone in the Dark, except this lacks any ambition of the previous entries.
This time I will skip the history lesson and go straight into what Alone in the Dark from 2024 is. It is a mostly linear horror themed story driven action adventure game. That serves as a new reboot, a “reimagining” of the original game that directly references this fact in its cosmic horror “nobody knows what’s real” plot. But design-wise it is completely unlike any of the previous entries in the franchise focusing far more on said plot than the gameplay.
Mechanically, this is another game taking Resident Evil 2 (2019) as a reference. Except, it only covers the controls and combat, while completely ignoring the rest of the gameplay experiences of both new RE2 or the previous games. As a result, this game doesn’t fit the core pillars of survival action (let alone survival horror) and lacks any meaningful exploration, while the rest of the pillars are underserved as well. There’s one central location that you get to revisit between the almost entirely linear levels which pretends to behave like a typical interconnected survival horror spooky mansion. But in reality even the “exploration” of this location is on rails and the game constantly closes and opens paths in such a bold way that even the most egregious examples of this from Fatal Frame look tame in comparison.
But hey – not being a survival horror/action isn’t a bad thing and Alone in the Dark doesn’t have to fit the limitations of a genre to be a fun game. This title focuses on being a story driven experience and to give it credit – the writing for the characters and character performances are genuinely impressive. The writing feels as if something that came out of the Lovecraft novel (minus the racism) and some of the cutscenes are really well directed too. Unfortunately, the plot itself is extremely dumb. It gets caught in its own delusions and attempts to be “meta” and in the end loses any sense of direction or point to it. I mean, sure the storyline of the original game wasn’t particularly interesting either, but that game was released in 1992 and also had a lot of other cool things going for it. While the only thing this new game seems to have is the storytelling.
The rest of the game aspects range from barely functioning to potentially interesting. Combat is not good, but it’s also not the worst even within the limits of franchise. Plus it tries to spice things up with the throwable objects and Alan Wake dodge, which are fun additions. Puzzles range from exceptionally primitive to obtuse in an unfun way. The idea of unlocking secret endings or scenes via collectibles is curious, but collectibles themselves can be hidden in an unacceptable manner – like in a tiny spot just few steps from an invisible trigger that blocks you from being able to grab it. There is no meaningful resource management and the ammo/health pickups system is incredibly silly in its execution.
Then there are also countless bugs and poor design decisions. You will constantly get stuck on decoration objects and it more likely than not will require a reload of the last save. Animations break for characters and enemies. Sound may suddenly break and you will get a cacophony of noise in the background or a character line will be unvoiced. Map breaks all the time adding confusion to the already frustrating pixel hunting, as pickups may not be interactable unless you’re standing at a specific angle. Collectibles and items may reappear when you’ve picked them up already, sometimes infinitely. Occasional interaction spots appear when they shouldn’t. There are several spots where you can completely break the sequence of events without even realizing it, which breaks the script of the game… The game is in a genuinely unacceptable state and some of these issues could’ve been identified and designed around very early in development.
Yet, despite all of this during my first playthrough I was relatively positive and hoping that the game will still manage to surprise me in some way. But no there is simply no ambition in this project. No cool systems like in AitD 2008, no non-linearity like in the original, no wild mechanics and plot points like in the AitD 2 and 3. Even The New Nightmare, for how closely it followed the Resident Evil formula of the time, did genuinely inventive things with the flashlight and created two unique playthroughs for its two characters, with unique locations, story and puzzles. While Alone in the Dark 2024 is completely linear, its story is almost exactly the same between characters and there’s just one mostly insignificant and uninteresting location close to the end of the game that differentiates one character from another. There’s nothing inventive here, nothing unique or interesting. Just a rehash of things you’ve seen done better before.
So while I originally considered getting all secret endings in the game, I just stopped during my third playthrough. Alone in the Dark from 2024 is short, I was about half-way through, rushing through everything on easy and in just about an hour or so I would’ve been able to see more of those secret things I’ve already unlocked… But then the thoughts of spending even five more minutes with the game became so suffocating that I had to stop. And will most likely never play it again. If it ever gets properly fixed so thousands of its bugs are gone and you see it at a huge discount, maybe it could be worth one playthrough. Just to check the dialogues between characters and have a simple linear walk through this title. But until that happens I would not recommend it at all.