Alone in the Dark from 2008 (also known as Alone in the Dark: Inferno on PS3) might be the last truly ambitious game of the last 20 years. That’s one hell of a statement to make, but I have good reasons to say it – what this game attempted to create is on a level that has not been attempted since. Possibly because the game didn’t turn out great and wasn’t positively received. I loved it back in 2008 even now for how frustrating a lot of the game is, I cannot help but love the effort and potential. While at the same time knowing well, that I can’t really recommend playing this game to the majority of people.
Let’s quickly set the stage. While Alone in the Dark franchise has been incredibly important in evolving the action adventure genre, it wasn’t exactly full of hits. I’ve revisited the original trilogy and The New Nightmare already. So it would be enough to say that it’s been 7 years since the last game, most people forgot this brand even existed and classic survival horror genre was more or less dead with survival action having varying popularity. If a new AitD game were to be released, it had to invent a new identity for itself. And the developers at Eden Games, who are still mostly known for racing games, seemingly decided to shoot for the stars and reinvent the genre just like the first game in the series did.
Alone in the Dark (2008) is everything. A lot of its mechanics are fully systemic – things break consistently, fire spreads naturalistically, item combinations behave the way you’d expect them to, liquids, ropes and cables are properly simulated… A lot of the puzzles in the game are fully built around those systems – breaking down doors, sticking explosive things on a timed fuse to a moving enemy, getting cables out of the way, setting a chair on fire to light your way and then burn down a bunch of planks that are blocking you, then grab a fire extinguisher and extinguish the flames… You can jump and climb on things. You can drive cars. There’s an entirety of New York’s Central Park that works as a small scale open world. There are incredibly impressive, even for 2023, scripted scenes with really cool set pieces and fun gameplay. You can also start the game from almost any moment and play it completely out of order with each part of the game being treated like an episode of a TV show. It’s like mixing Uncharted, Alan Wake and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – having crazy sandbox system driven gameplay and ultra polished cinematic experience. Released in 2008!
So how come this incredible thing wasn’t popular? Sometimes it’s systemic nature goes against it as it works too “honestly” for a cinematic game. So if the physics simulation decides that you will fiddle with something for 5 minutes, you will. Driving model is at times too sensitive for driving over the uneven terrain of Central Park. Sometimes when you need to remove an obstacle by burning it, you just have to sit and wait until fire realistically does it’s thing. And when you need to hold a burning object for a bit, it may get too hot to hold at an inappropriate moment.
And sometimes things just plain do not work or a poorly designed. You get RE4-like tank controls, except they feel extremely sluggish and unresponsive. Which could still work for a more gun-based combat, but it’s usually about melee or focusing on using item combinations, like spray and lighter to have a flamethrower. Camera often goes for the cool cinematic angles, just like in a classic survival horror, but in this game it’s almost always a detriment. So it’s far more comfortable to play in the first person mode a lot of the time. But it doesn’t work for everything and has its own little annoyances. The melee controls are set to the right stick which is a cool idea, but a lot of movement is poorly tracked and looks awkward. And sometimes the game just fails to do something it should do. PC port in particular was notoriously unstable since launch and even with modern fan fixes it can occasionally randomly crash or have odd physics-related glitches.
That’s not even covering how the design for the scenarios constantly jumps from being exciting and fun to being frustrating and idiotic. How sometimes a puzzle sequence can be smart, and sometimes the solution to a problem makes no sense. Because it’s something that happens exactly once and without warning or is just entirely unintuitive. Also the plot… I like the concept behind it, and it is a direct sequel to the original trilogy in a curious turn of events. But it jumps from plot point to plot point, lacking any character development and storytelling sucks. And a lot of the comments and dialogue lines have became infamous for a very good reason.
Still, when you are in the middle of an incredibly inventive sequence that uses complex system interactions and allows you to invent your own solution with tools that you just happened to scavenge from around the location – it feels incredible. Especially for the semi-optional tasks in the open world – a lot of them are set up as puzzles/challenges and it’s extremely entertaining to solve it your way, even if that way is extremely over the top and silly, like sticking a burning molotov to a car that you launch off a ramp so that it rams into a thing you need to destroy and explodes. It’s satisfying and very unlike a typical horror themed action adventure that retain the classic adventure game rigidity in its design.
That said, these optional objectives, for whatever reason, become available in very limited chunks, some of them have no fun challenge attached and a lot of the problems are solved by the slo-mo throw of a bottle with gasoline that you shoot in mid-air. Makes combat less frustrating too – it’s an experience you want to avoid because it’s annoying to fight the controls more than the enemies, not because it’s tough and burns your resources. Also the game only saves progress if you manually save or exit to the menu – force close or crash and all of your progress is lost. Oh and the PC port still has SecuROM DRM and doesn’t work without fan fixes at all…I almost cannot explain why Alone in the Dark from 2008 is so fascinating and inspiring as a game, because it does so many horrible things as well. But it really is something incredible.
I wish I could easily recommend this title. But to like it you must have patience for “ambitious, incredible, but deeply flawed” kinds of games, where you have to look past what’s before you to see what it could’ve been. Not that it looks bad, it still looks quite good and the soundtrack is fantastic. But I’m talking about the gameplay experience. And also while I’d love to see a remake of this game, I don’t think anyone will ever attempt to – the ambition of Alone in the Dark 2008 is just too great to do right, and not doing it in its fullest means you shouldn’t do it at all. If you do wish to play the game, I’d suggest the PC version with the fixes or, if you own PS3 and can get this title, your version will have some improvements over the original release, but also some odd additions and changes that were unnecessary. Whatever happens to the franchise in the future, I doubt it will ever risk to do something as insane and impressive as this game did and that is quite a shame.