O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
It’s been a while since I’ve last played any Alone in the Dark game. I admired the original and genuinely liked the 2008 game despite all of its numerous flaws. My favorite one was the first reboot, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. But the original still had that “something” about it that I really liked. Not the sequels, however. But for the sake of revisiting every game, I decided against my better judgement to play all of the first three Alone in the Dark games, knowing well that I will not enjoy the two thirds of the journey.
It would be remiss of me not to talk about how important and influential Alone in the Dark was for the action adventure games. And, of course, especially the then not yet existing “survival horror” subgenre. While the game itself wasn’t billed as such and from what I know was just considered an adventure game during development, there are odd rumours I’ve seen on the internet that claim the game was called “ambient survival horror” and it was the one to coin the subgenre term. I’ve not seen any confirmations on this anywhere and from all the information I’ve known, Capcom invented “survival horror” to sell the idea of Resident Evil. That said, Shinji Mikami has confirmed, several times, that it was Alone in the Dark that influenced the way the camera would work in RE1 during the early periods of development, when the game was planned to be in first person perspective.
So what’s the idea behind the series? Almost all games are centered around Edward Carnby, a private investigator who just happens to investigate paranormal situations. Although, the original core of the franchise was born out of the desire to turn the horror setting of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG by Chaosium into a videogame. And the initial pitch was about an idea of being in complete darkness and using faint light from the match to light the surroundings and see glimpses of unimaginable horrors. An idea, that many considered impossible to realize through a videogame. But this idea fascinated the designer Frédérick Raynal so much, that he decided to push for the game to be made.
In the original game, you have a choice between two characters and later games in the first trilogy would implement some sort of a character switch as part of the story. But the main controls in the game remained the same. The game had fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds, while the interactive objects, enemies an the characters were all real-time 3D. The character was, of course, tank controlled as it was the most logical approach for controlling characters in 3D space at the time. But unlike many later games that would have a walk/run modifier set to a button, in this game it was tied to a double tap of the forward button. Which is very unfortunate, as it works half the time… All of the interaction commands are set to just one button, so you constantly need to go into your inventory space to switch what that button does. It got simplified with later games, but the concept remained the same. And also unlike what survival horror as a genre would do most commonly later, you could just use your fists and kicks to fight enemies if you ran out of ammo and did not have a melee weapon. Saving could also be done at any point and it was very important to do and in separate save slots as you could create unwinnable situations in all three games. Oh and also curiously, the main character had no max health limit, so you could use healing items as soon as you found them and it would only add up.
But let me talk about each game separately now.
For how much I admire it, revisiting the original Alone in the Dark is not the most pleasant experience. What was innovative and incredibly fresh in 1992 feels very clunky and unresponsive in 2023. The amount of unwinnable situations you can create is possibly the biggest of the whole series. And most enemies can stunlock you to death in a dumbest way possible.
Yet… There’s something quite brilliant about its design to this day. Most of the location is open from an early point and it’s on you to decide which things to tackle in which order. Some puzzles have alternative solutions. Some of the paths are partially optional. And even though the choice of the character at the start changes very few and mostly insignificant things, it was still neat to have. There was a curious balance between the combat, puzzle solving and trap avoiding. The variety of said traps and enemies was also really impressive. And if you were very curious, you could read a lot of mini-stories in numerous books thrown around the game.
But some of the puzzles have no reasonable explanation. Lots of items are pointless and managing the inventory is frustrating (inventory is limited). Game never discards items that were useful but are no longer needed automatically either. Some actions that look like a cool preparation for a later problem turn out to have no use. The jumping section is dreadful as are some sections where you just have to guess that a thing you’re looking at is interactable.
However, I can also see how easily this whole concept could be remade with modern quality of life features and work with almost no changes. And an idea of an Alone in the Dark randomizer sounds like it could be extremely fun. While I would love to recommend people play this game, and I will for those fascinated by survival horror origins or with Lovecraftian stories, I would do so while mentioning that playing it as is, without a cool new Remaster, is a mostly frustrating experience. That is worth going though, I’d say, but still frustrating.
Jack in the Dark was released as a short puzzle focused teaser for the upcoming official sequel and it was a sign of things to come. The “puzzles” make zero sense, interactions are bizarre and inconsistent and the tone is odd, to say the least.
Alone in the Dark 2 is so incredibly terrible, I’m still surprised it didn’t immediately destroy the franchise. It might be the fact that it was a still novel experience for the time and also that the game is so outrageous. Right from the get go the tone is different. Carnby is now cool, he blows up the front gates of the evil zombie pirate gangsters and the game title appears in front of the explosion. And then you kick the first enemy and grab his tommy gun to start mowing down dozens of enemies in the first several rooms alone. Even the base mechanics are changed to remove all interactivity options except for pushing, which is seldom used anyway, and everything that you can pick up always pops up into view as you walk over it. Even the inventory itself is simplified and items that are definitely one-time use are permanently discarded automatically.
To its credit, the game does try to build up its collection of enemies. The variety is far greater, all of the main pirate crew enemies have a little backstory you can find somewhere and a gimmick to them. And while combat is still absolutely dreadful and you can get stunlocked to death or stunlock enemies to death, there are plenty of changes and updates to make it work for this action heavy sequel. It’s still annoying, though, and made even worse when its tied to any kind of puzzle solution instead of just combat. In some cases you have a puzzle interaction to avoid the combat, which seems like the correct thing to do. But in reality, the combat solution still forces itself upon you, just later.
And the puzzles, if you can even call them that, are now definitively outside of realms of logic or reason. Use random items in random spots for no real reason and stuff happens. Sometimes game deems it necessary to block your progress with a meaningless message about not being able to pick up an item that’s just laying on the ground, because it wants you to do something else first. Because it was scripted that way and not because there’s any logical reason behind it. And what you might be missing is an item somewhere on the floor that is that one pixel of a colour that is slightly different from the rest of the floor. While some things in the first game were clunky and unclear, some of the problems you have to solve in the sequel are next to impossible to “figure out” – you either succeed by randomly trying everything on everything, or check a walkthrough.
But it is a somewhat fascinating trainwreck. You can dress up as Santa Claus which slightly helps in precisely two rooms an is otherwise pointless. There’s a random teleport that skips the whole opening section in one spot of the first room, which seems like a debug tool that was simply kept in the release version of the game and all its ports and re-releases. Playing as the little kid Grace is even more infuriating than it was in Jack in the Dark as they made her slower, but if she falls she has an umbrella she uses as a parachute… The plot is just stupid and most sequences make zero sense. It’s all horrible, but somehow ensnaring. Playing this is highly not recommended, but watching it played is a trip. Oh and this game also had a port for consoles that gave most 3D models far higher detail models and added a few stupid and over the top pre-rendered cutscenes, so it’s even more unique and dumb. Seriously, though, don’t play this if you value your sanity.
And to finish it off, Alone in the Dark 3 was an attempt to mix the things from the original game with more of that action focus of the sequel. An attempt that occasionally works well, but most of the time features the worst of both approaches. The game is still quite heavy on action, but far less so than the second game. The game is also mostly less outrageous story-wise, but it gets quite crazy by the end. And just like the second game, it doesn’t really try to do the Lovecraftian horror, except instead of pirates and voodoo it goes for ghosts and undead cowboys. And to set the mood, the game makes a title drop as a complete joke. It’s kinda funny, I’ll be honest, but also sad because you realize what state the series ran itself into.
Overall the game plays and feels similarly to AitD 2, except it’s even more driven by story triggers that you must witness in full before you can continue and the “search” command was returned, except it’s so bad they should’ve kept things as they did in the previous one. As a positive, this is the game where they realized that having a map might be beneficial to a game like this. Sadly, the map is quite useless in practice. There was even a difficulty selection that was very modular and nice. This is the game where they heavily leaned into native american mythology, more than in the first or the second game, which might’ve been one of the key influences for the story that the series would get with The New Nightmare reboot later. And to get it out of the way – yes, jumping is sadly back, it sucks even more than it did in the first game. Also you turn into a cougar to be reborn later and merge with your zombie cowboy doppelganger… Yeah…
What really kills the enjoyment with this game is that the puzzles make even less sense than they did in the previous game. Previous game was really bad, but randomly trying things out could be enough. In this game solutions are sometimes so stupid, it’s hard to believe that it’s happening. Door is locked? Just use open. Doesn’t work anywhere else, but will work here. Another door is locked? Just shoot it. Not kick, push, open, punch or use an item. Shoot it. Why? Because developers decided so. There’s thing you need to jump but there’s no jump command? Just run at it full speed and cutscene will start that let’s you jump. Except the very next and much smaller jump will just kill you instead. Also, one “puzzle” solution is basically a check for “have you played the previous game and remember it well?”
And on one hand, there’s far less stuff that genuinely infuriates you in the same way AitD 2 constantly does. But on the other hand, you might as well have a walkthrough permanently open in another window and not even try “solving” most of the problems because you will never guess what stupid order of events is the correct one. I will say, though, that for how otherwise primitive and silly music was for most of the series up to this point, this game does have a few pretty good and memorable tracks. But nonetheless, I would not recommend playing the game unless you’re ready to just use a walkthrough. And in that case, might as well watch a longplay video instead.
The influence of the franchise has spread very thin by now, but it’s still felt. And while Sweet Home might’ve been the main influence for what would turn out to become Biohazard/Resident Evil, without Alone in the Dark (and Japanese games that copied it earlier, like Doctor Hauzer on 3DO) the series could’ve been very different. And “survival horror” in its classic incarnation could’ve been extremely different. But, the games themselves have aged rather poorly. The original is still full of cool concepts and I can only hope that at least some of them will be revisited in the upcoming remake (though I doubt it). But the first two sequels, which had some merit for their time, have become completely insufferable by now and should be avoided.