I have always been a very big horror fan but I haven’t always been a fan of horror video games. The horror games that were coming out as I grew up always relied on heavy inventory management and ammo conservation which was such a bummer for me. I wanted a game where I was fast, armed to the teeth, and a monster in my own right. With the string of Resident Evil remakes among a few other great horror remakes that have hit a great balance of modernization and the classic formula, the remake of Alone in the Dark never lit a fire for me. The performances by the lead actors are great but the game feels like it was made for the late PS3/early PS4 era of gameplay. The games controls and movements feel clunky. The other humans in the world feel and look like something from the uncanny valley. While there are a few things that bring some unique elements to this remake, if you don’t have nostalgia for the series then I think you should skip this one.
The basic premise of the game is that Jeremy Hartwood has gone missing but a disturbing letter to his niece, Emily Hartwood (Jodie Comer) prompts her to visit his old house which resides deep in the Bayou. She is accompanied by the Private Detective Edward Carnby (David Harbour) to investigate. Things very quickly deteriorate around them as they are pulled further into the strange darkness surrounding the home.
Even though I have no past experience with the series, I was very excited to play through this game. Before I get into the negatives, I wanted to point out a few things that I really liked that may make you want to check out the game. The biggest part of that being is the leads with Jodie Comer and David Harbour. From the start of the game, you chose which of the two you want to play as in the game. I went with David Harbour because I just love his voice and I have a soft spot for private investigator stories. The other lead will pop up through your playthrough but mostly as a sidekick type role rather than an equal lead. The choice doesn’t make a big difference in what you experience until later in the game. Both of the character models are perfectly modeled on their real life counter parts. That allows the two to be the only convincing human performances that drive the story forward. Their unique dialogue and interaction in the world is what drove me to keep digging deeper into the game when the gameplay otherwise may have made me put the controller down.
Even if the major gameplay in Alone in the Dark was clunky, the puzzles you had to solve were actually very fun. There was many where I was sifting through notes I had found earlier to try to make sense of the logic puzzles put in front of me. It actually made me think a bit more than something like finding a colored key to open a certain door might have. It does take some time to solve things which I didn’t think I would enjoy but it forced me to think a bit more than most games would. I have to commend a lot of the very well designed puzzle portions of the game. There are also certain parts of the game where the world around you shifts to something much darker and you have to quickly problem solve to save yourself. Those scenes were the only ones that gripped me because I didn’t see them coming most of the time.
The world of Alone in the Dark was rich with monsters and atmospheric horror that only the Bayou could deliver. The monster designs actually caught my eye especially as I got futher into the game. The first enemies that you see most of the time felt like a very generic sludge monster design but as you progress the world and the monsters get more horrifying. There are monsters with giant maggots crawling through their body that got a pretty big pop from me when I saw them. The streets, stores, and buildings you fight the monsters in are often beautiful and you can find yourself getting lost looking at the architecture. I often found myself looking around the world to kill time before I actually had to play the game.
While I have a lot of nice things to say about Alone in the Dark, the game itself just isn’t fun to play. It follows the third person survival format that the series pretty much invented but it feels like I am playing a game from 1992 like the original. The shooting and movement are clunky. There is no better way to describe it.
Everything feels slow as if I was playing a game on half speed. It makes horror situations more of an annoyance than a selling point. There were multiple times where I was being attacked by multiple enemies but the clunkiness of the character movement lead to my death more than anything else. When there are remakes like Dead Space that improve massively on the gameplay of the original, I was hoping Alone in the Dark would feel like a well polished survival shooter which there are many of. Instead it feels like slogging through any survival horror game made before Resident Evil 4.
It’s just not a good time to play and at the end of the day that is the most important part of the game, the gameplay. If I feel like I am forcing myself to play more rather being drawn to try new things or just finish the next quest, it just isn’t meeting the mission of what it was meant to do. Even if the game boars two superstar leads, creative puzzles, and some cool enemies to look at there just isn’t enough polish on the game itself for me to say it’s worth your time and money. If you have no nostalgia for the series, you’re better off buying a number of other better survival horror titles.