The Haunted Hoard: Alone in the Dark (PC)
It’s hard to go back to the original Alone in the Dark without feeling the weight of its legacy. It is an innovator, bringing the barely formed survival horror genre into the form it would become most recognizable in, the legendary Resident Evil series using its ideas as a template for its 3D game design. At the same time, coming out in 1992 and utilizing 3D makes the game look incredibly antiquated, and like many innovators, stepping into new territory also lead to design pitfalls that later games would have to refine. It would be easy to write it off as a historical relic, but while it certainly has its rough elements, it isn’t as flawed as its rudimentary visuals might make you believe.
To begin Alone in the Dark you must first choose which of two characters you’ll send to the haunted Louisiana mansion of Decerto. Functionally, both Emily Hartwood and Edward Carnby control exactly the same and experience the same plot, the only real difference beyond appearances being the narration they provide at the start on their motivations for heading to the mansion. The mansion’s owner, Jeremy Hartwood, took his own life, and while the private investigator Edward Carnby sees this as a chance to drop by and pick up some valuable antiques, Emily has the more personal motivation of trying to uncover what drove her uncle to suicide. Whoever you pick to play as, they’ll find out very quickly that the mansion won’t be so easy to leave, it packed with unusual supernatural creatures and phenomena that tie back to the history you’ll be working to uncover.
Funnily enough though, if you never pick up the parchments or books around the house that contain the relevant information, there are no cutscenes or situations that will elucidate anything, and with it sometimes being unclear if there is anything valuable in a space due to some awkward detection for when you’re trying to search, you can miss the deeper references to things like the Cthulhu mythos or Decerto’s history that goes back much further than Jeremy Hartwood. The documents that are found are read aloud in the voices of whoever wrote them, and this actually feels like an important touch, the player getting a better feel for the personality of the writers and the tone intended by these often over-the-top but character rich readings. Decerto has quite a complicated history ultimately, one that barely connects to the protagonists but one that can sometimes provide the only clues you will find for some of the game’s more unusual puzzles.
Alone in the Dark comes out swinging with its horror and its issues. Starting in an attic, you’re given little time before an unusual creature bursts through the window, it looking somewhat like a squat wolfman but the game’s sharp polygons and rough detail work leading to it being called a “zombie chicken” not just by the game’s fans, but one of its creators. The zombie chicken does at least provide a first look at some of the game’s uncanny designs. Edward and Emily unfortunately just look like ugly humans as the game struggles to construct a decent face from simple shapes, but the monsters you encounter can swing between comedically strange looking to a little unnerving because they can’t quite be realized properly. A strange red translucent figure sitting quietly in a chair doesn’t need to look good to be ominous, and while you’ll really need to work your imagination to get something out of the fact that sometimes a deadly force is literally just a whirlwind of colored orbs, the game does at least make you respect them because of how vulnerable you find yourself. That zombie chicken at the start will likely kill you the first time you play, and maybe a few times more even if you try to utilize the game’s rather rough hand-to-hand combat. This is unfortunately perhaps the worst possible introduction to something that becomes more manageable later on, the player often needing to experiment with situations that have instant death looming over them if you make a wrong choice.
If you can survive the attic encounters though, you’ll find Alone in the Dark has an incredibly friendly save system that immediately turns what could have been a grueling trial and error adventure into something you can gradually push your way through. Yes, Edward or Emily will always move rigidly, aiming the rarely used firearms and blades feels sloppy, there are reasonable actions you can take that immediately get you killed, and there are ways to lose important items forever, but if you make a new save before entering a room, you can both engage with the rough moments of vulnerability and gradually puzzle out the way around these obstacles. Alone in the Dark is at least wise in usually not outright screwing you over, you might have a vital item like a pair of mirrors that will shatter if you’re hurt while carrying them, but the area you use them in is close by and you’re given a message when something of importance has been rendered useless. In a game where reading the wrong book or walking in the wrong part of an innocuous room can lead to inescapable death, being able to save any time and create multiple save files actually makes these almost a bit fun to seek out. You can easily recognize how unfair some of them are and they would be aggravating if they set you back far, and the game admittedly still isn’t without some irritation as being unable to defend yourself cleanly or walk around fluidly can sometimes lead to retrying little fights or trials repeatedly, but the save system really helps Alone in the Dark be a manageable experience where usually awful ideas like instant death traps and missable vital items are at least abated some.
An accommodating saving system can’t quite brush over the fact the game is defined pretty heavily by those tricks and traps though. There are small puzzles you’ll need to solve to access new areas of the mansion and remove the monsters and hazards in your path, and while there is an interesting range of creatures from a squid monster in the bath tub to a pirate ghoul, at the same time the solutions to problems are a bit unusual or involve experimentation where it isn’t always clear what works. To be able to use items, search, fight, or most anything you’ll need to open your inventory and select the items or even just the actions there, and as mentioned earlier with the searching, detection isn’t always the game’s strong suit. You can go groping around a cabinet and not have the relevant item get picked up, making you wonder if one is even there. Attacks that work usually cause a spray of blood or smoke, but throwing items is sometimes awkward as at times they’ll drop right at your feet instead of fly across the room. Figuring out the range on your weapons is guesswork too on top of the aiming woes caused by the game’s tank-like controls, and while some vulnerability is expected as the game tries to up the sense of dread, irritation is probably the more likely emotion as you try to wrangle your character properly. This is definitely a result of its time of creation as are moments like when the fixed camera angles can’t render certain objects in detail due to distance. While the save system helps it avoid being an unplayable relic for modern audiences, there will still be signs of the time it was created in that it couldn’t have overcome unless it wanted to just not include some situations, and while there’s an argument to be made it shouldn’t have pushed to do things it can’t handle well, those moments feel messy but like something that can be conquered with some grit and persistence.
THE VERDICT: Alone in the Dark doesn’t hold up, but it does hold together. The controls are stiff and the graphical presentation often undermines the experience, but because the game isn’t afraid to throw a dangerous situation or instant death at you, you do come to approach each new room with uneasy trepidation. Something simple could be your doom, but a helpful save system means that when you do face an unfair death, it’s easily undone rather than another source of irritation. There is some interesting backstory to learn and some creativity in the dangers of the Decerto mansion, so while it is undoubtedly rough and often struggles to realize its ideas properly, it’s not too difficult to do some horror game archaeology and experience one of the grandfathers of the survival horror genre.
And so, I give Alone in the Dark for PC…
A BAD rating. Undoubtedly, Alone in the Dark would be agonizing if you couldn’t set up saves with such frequency. At present, watching Edward or Emilia float up into the air and twist around after reading a cursed book is able to be amusing because you can witness the unusual outcome and then quickly pop back a few seconds in the past and avoid it. If you had to commit to every choice, if you had to walk away from every battle with however much damage you took trying to get the fighting controls working, then Alone in the Dark would be far too hostile and not worth investing your time in even for historical curiosity. The save system is not a perfect salve, but it does mean you can better engage with its world, some moments still able to be a little tense like weaving around deadly dancers in a ballroom because there are at least short-term consequences for failure. A lot of the game’s rigidity and sometimes outright ugly visuals are just the result of coming out in the same year that 2D games like Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Street Fighter II were considered graphically superb, technology not quite at the point where it could easily handle things like detecting when polygonal models are interacting. The fixed perspectives for each room at times let it handle the positioning well and at others unfortunately hide useful information, but even though things don’t always work as well as they would if this game was released later, there are still things to figure out and judgment calls to make. You need to figure out how to escape immediate doom or wrangle an inventory that both grows to a considerable size but has limits that mean at times you have to figure out what’s important to keep carrying or what can be tossed aside. Even then the game keeps discarded items on the ground for later collection if you made that call wrong, Alone in the Dark feeling like it at least understood to leave lifelines in place to offset its worse elements.
If you can’t put yourself in the right mindset, Alone in the Dark might just be a strange looking game with what seem like annoying gotchas. Even back when it was a new release though, undoubtedly the game was able to earn some of its attention and interest because it balanced what seemed like unfair tricks with the ability to pop right back in and try again. It’s not a perfect balance, it even puts one of its worse cases of not preparing you well right at the start, but the originator of 3D survival horror isn’t entirely archaic, this genre progenitor able to provide some moments of interest despite some fundamental flaws that will make it hard to go back to if you try to play it purely for enjoyment.