Alone in the Dark Review: Madness Awakens in the Louisiana Bayou

There are few titles that can claim to have shaped an entire genre like Alone in the Dark. Released in 1992 by Infogrames, this survival horror pioneered concepts that would become staples: isolation, scarce resources, and an atmosphere thick with dread. Characters moved in 3D while eerie, pre-rendered backdrops coalesced into forbidding locales.

A much-needed jolt to the stagnant adventure genre, Alone in the Dark blended supernatural terror with brain-teasing puzzles. Sadly, the once-groundbreaking series stumbled through a slew of mediocre sequels before sinking into obscurity. But three decades later, Pieces Interactive has resurrected the property with a re-envisioned remake.

Setting the action in 1920s Louisiana, this new Alone in the Dark beckons players back into the darkness – re-introducing deranged cultists, cosmic entities, and plenty of mysteries to unravel. While imperfect, it emerges as a compelling resurrection – honoring the original’s spooky spirit while injecting some fresh new frights.

Bayou Bedlam

The new Alone in the Dark wisely keeps its narrative tethered to the original game’s setup: a niece hires a private investigator to unravel her uncle’s disappearance from the ominous Derceto Manor – a crumbling sanitarium harboring dark secrets. Players can take control of either the tenacious Emily Hartwood (portrayed by Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer) or the grizzled Edward Carnby (Stranger Things’ David Harbour) as they venture into Derceto’s arcane shadows.

What begins as a standard missing person case quickly spirals into something far more unsettling. The manor’s residents are a motley crew of oddballs exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior. Strange phenomena manifest – rooms warp, objects dissolve, and gateways open onto nightmarish pocket dimensions. Before long, our protagonists find themselves battling cosmic monstrosities while grappling with existential dread.

The slowly unspooling tale leans heavily on Lovecraftian influences, drawing from the iconic author’s musings on the terror of the unknown. Sanity-shattering revelations await those who piece together the lore – with ancient occult rites, extradimensional entities, and mankind’s insignificance in a boundless universe all thrown into the unholy gumbo. The writers don’t shy from allusions to racism, mental illness, and repressed sexuality of the era either, adding welcome depth.

Regrettably, the narrative loses some steam due to uneven performances from the big-name cast. While Comer acquits herself well, Harbour’s typically charismatic screen presence feels disappointingly muted here. His gravelly baritone delivery lacks dynamism, sounding too subdued amid the escalating mania. The supporting characters fare better, exhibiting more theatrical flair befitting the Southern Gothic surroundings. Still, Alone in the Dark constructs an engaging, unsettling story – even if some characters struggle to sell it.

Untangling the Madness

At its core, Alone in the Dark adheres to the established survival horror gameplay loop of explore, solve puzzles, confront threats. The creepy corridors of Derceto Manor make for an intricate playground to scour for clues and unravel head-scratching conundrums. Environments are meticulously crafted labyrinths lined with readable notes, obscure symbols, and other breadcrumb trails teasing at deeper secrets.

The puzzle design shines, striking a satisfying balance between logic problems and hands-on physical puzzles. While rarely outright frustrating, solutions require genuine brainpower – whether interpreting cryptic texts, piecing together clues from the environment, or solving intricate sliding tile puzzles. An optional “old school” mode disables hand-holding hints for hardcore riddle fans. The modern default settings still keep things challenging while smoothing out potential sticking points.

Unfortunately, the puzzle variety does grow stale the deeper you delve. By the latter chapters, you’ll have seen most varieties repeated ad nauseam, deflating the sense of progression. A wider assortment of novel stumpers would have been welcome in maintaining that adrenaline-fueled “eureka!” feeling.

Combat remains a decidedly less impressive aspect, though its rough edges could be chalked up to design intent rather than oversight. The shooting and melee feel appropriately weighty but lack the refined finesse of more action-oriented games. Controls can feel sluggish and enemy encounters often boil down to simple kiting strategies. A painfully limited carrying capacity for ammo reinforces a more survival-minded approach, making guns a precious resource.

While functional, the action sequences primarily exist to facilitate jump scares and ratchet up tension during exploration segments. Only a handful of enemy types appear, with just a couple uninspired bosses providing cursory gameplay diversions. For such a pivotal pillar of the genre, Alone in the Dark doesn’t do much to innovate or elevate its combat.

Pacing proves another sticking point, as the gameplay hits noticeable lulls during overlong backtracking stretches through recycled environments. While shortcuts do open up navigation somewhat, the interconnected layout can’t quite make up for the repetitive level design. A few ill-advised padding quests that simply task you with trudging back and forth don’t help either.

From a technical perspective, performance remained largely stable except for the occasional hitch when streaming new zones. Some mild texture pop-in and frame dips during hectic sections did rear their head but nothing game-breaking on modern hardware. More worryingly, enemy AI demonstrated some jankiness – I witnessed monsters getting stuck in scenery or behaving erratically far too frequently.

Southern Gothic Spooks

While Alone in the Dark may not boast the cutting-edge visuals of a big-budget AAA production, it still conjures an oppressively atmospheric aesthetic that perfectly captures its Southern Gothic inspirations. The dilapidated Derceto Manor itself oozes character from every cracked beam and peeling wallpaper tendril. Scattered about are wonderful little environmental details – dusty bric-a-brac, sinister crimson stains, and fluttering insect life.

As the story plunges into more phantasmagorical realms, the art team’s creativity shines even brighter. Eldritch pocket dimensions, primordial swamplands, and mind-bending locales inspired by ancient civilizations all drip with a palpable sense of place. While the visual fidelity won’t wow on a technical level, the artful scene composition and Gothic ambiance more than compensate.

The sound design also excels in ramping up the tension and disquieting tone. Discordant jazz intermingles with ethereal chants and stomach-churning bio-acoustic textures to utterly unsettling effect. Even seemingly innocuous spaces like manor hallways come alive with eerie creaks, distant shrieks, and skittering critter noises that’ll have you constantly on edge. Gunshots boom with weighty impact too.

Kudos as well to the camerawork during the many cinematic cutscenes which stitch the narrative together. Camera angles frequently shift to highlight key story beats and visual flourishes while dynamic character framing and subtle focal points convey emotional undercurrents. The scene direction elevates some of the cheesier dialogue and performances.

While Alone in the Dark’s presentational strengths won’t singlehandedly induce nightmares, the committed art and sound teams have succeeded in bottling the essence of classic psychological horror. Their work instills a constant feeling of wrongness and all-pervasive dread that’ll have you scanning every shadowy corner in trepidation.

Revisiting the Nightmare

Alone in the Dark understands that its brand of psychological horror works best when the player is left to stew in creeping ambiguity. That’s why an optional “old school” mode strips away many modern gameplay concessions to cultivate a more authentically unsettling experience. Gone are obtrusive markers for already-explored areas and shortcut paths. Resource-tracking gets minimal, and puzzle solutions receive no helpful highlighting.

This mode makes for an enjoyably more immersive ordeal where you’ll need to lean on your observational grit rather than UI hand-holding. Notes must be pored over meticulously, environmental details scrutinized, and maps extensively mapped out. It transforms Alone in the Dark into a pleasantly old-fashioned point-and-click adventure with survival horror stylings.

Further incentivizing replays is the option to experience the narrative through the differing perspectives of Emily Hartwood or Edward Carnby. While their core investigations remain largely parallel, these dual campaigns splice in surprising story branches – unique levels, conversations, and the occasional shocking shift in perspective that recontextualizes events.

Extending the replay hook are a host of collectible “Lagniappe” trinkets strewn about the world. Gathering specific batches unearths new narrative insights and can even unlock entirely new endings upon reassembling them across multiple playthroughs. A few of the rarest Lagniappe combinations opt to withhold their final reveals unless you’ve thoroughly explored every nook and cranny as both protagonists, too.

Between branching perspectives, hidden lore fragments, and the two gameplay modes, Alone in the Dark packs a lot of replayability into its economic 8-10 hour runtime for completionists. Those who prefer a lean, uncompromised first experience can simply drink in the haunting atmosphere in one potent gulp on normal difficulty. Either approach has distinct merits and maintains the thematic strengths.

Slick Scares, Stuttering Streams

From a technical perspective, Alone in the Dark delivers a relatively polished experience – with a few caveats. Performance remained smooth as silk on mid-range hardware, with framerate sticking to a stable 60fps even amid frenetic action sequences. Load times could be a bit pokey when fast-traveling between larger locations, but never egregiously so.

The one glaring issue marring the otherwise clean presentation is frequent hitching as new areas stream in geometry and textures. These small but consistent hitches in animation occur with alarming regularity, breaking immersion at the most inopportune moments. While not quite rising to game-breaking levels, the constant jitters grew increasingly grating over longer play sessions.

On the controls front, Alone in the Dark feels best experienced with a controller in hand. Keyboard/mouse controls are serviceable for menu navigation but feel imprecise during exploration and combat compared to the gamepad’s analog movement precision. Aiming and reticle sticking in particular felt loose and twitchy with mouse input.

Beyond some occasional AI hiccups where enemies would get stuck on scenery, Alone in the Dark runs admirably smooth from a technical standpoint on modern PC hardware. Those streaming textures remain the sole blemish on an otherwise solidly optimized package that runs well even on lower-spec systems. Just be prepared for some herky-jerky camera action when pushing into fresh locales.

Shining a Light in the Darkness

Alone in the Dark emerges as a solid, if flawed, reanimation of the franchise that kicked off the survival horror genre. Its greatest strengths lie in nailing the haunting atmospherics and psychological dread that made the original such a landmark title. The detailed environments, dizzying shifts to nightmarish dimensions, and stellar sound design all coalesce to instill a pervasive sense of wrongness that’ll get under your skin.

Where it stumbles is in failing to meaningfully innovate the core gameplay tenets it helped establish decades ago. The puzzles, while largely well-designed, grow repetitive far too quickly. Combat encounters feel like obligatory checklist items rather than properly integrated challenges. And some baffling technical hiccups like stuttering geometry load-ins can’t help but break the immersion.

Still, these flaws aren’t quite enough to extinguish the creepy ambiance Alone in the Dark cultivates so well. For series fans and psychological horror aficionados, it makes for an engaging – if admittedly straightforward — resurrection of a pivotal piece of gaming’s DNA. With some refinement and creativity injection, there’s still bloody life left to be wrung from this venerable franchise’s reanimated corpse.

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