Alone in the Dark Review

In the early 1990s a young, anxious Ben Sheene had to quit out of Alone in the Dark.

Ben had only been used to 8-bit games on his Nintendo Entertainment System, where the concept of “scary” was a darkly-lit level and musical stings. This was a time, mind you, when Jason Voorhees in a purple jumpsuit killing camp counselors off-screen was violent. Or when eerie music began to play, signaling a chill down the spine and a “Freddy’s™ Coming.” Atmospheric scares were abound in Ninja Gaiden when thunder would crash and cause all the platforms to disappear in the dark as cheetahs pounced around while Ryu hoped to not fall into the drink.

Growing up with a beloved uncle who absorbed all things horror and a mother who was prone to watching content like Silence of the Lambs on TV around her kid, I became moderately desensitized towards terrifying media quickly. Outside of watching the original Scream late at night in a home that wasn’t my own and becoming too horrified after Drew Barrymore’s death to continue, I can’t think of the last thing that’s actually scared me outside of an actual “IRL” fear like debt or existing.

In the early days of gaming, legitimately scary content was hard to produce with such limited hardware and I mostly skimmed past outright horror films until breaking into my teens.

But Alone in the Dark was different.

Booting up that 1992 Infogrames work, I would not have been able to tell that it was a seminal piece of interactive entertainment. One that would be responsible for so many recognizable names today. That’s because within minutes a Zombie Chicken burst through a window and relentlessly attacked and stalked Detective Edward Carnby throughout Derceto Mansion.

Looking back, I’m sure I was absolutely spooked. That kid with a healthy diet of 8-bit action games was not used to this new world of 3D polygonal characters. My younger brain couldn’t comprehend how to escape the Zombie Chicken’s wrath and it likely all felt very real. Alone in the Dark laid the foundation for survival horror. You can see the tendrils snaking into Resident Evil, which would release soon after.

In a few years time, Alone in the Dark would look almost comical standing next to similar games. The tank controls, the limited camera angles, the obtuse puzzles. But all these elements have been polished up over time in arguably better games. Silent Hill and the first handful of Resident Evil games–much like Alone in the Dark–have claim to legacy but show age.

Yet Alone in the Dark somehow got left behind. The magic of the first game was carbon-copied onto two sequels, a whole trilogy delivered in three years. Since then, only three other games in the series have been released with the 2008 “reboot” being the last true attempt at survival horror since 2015’s Alone in the Dark: Illumination is mainly a co-op action game that is heavily panned.

Countless innovations in gaming and survival horror have taken place in the 32 years since Alone in the Dark released. Those first three games were simple, ones I dabbled in when my palette became more mature but couldn’t quite grip me due to their age. So it makes perfect sense that 2024’s Alone in the Dark is a reimagining of its forebears. But what makes this Alone in the Dark such a worthy successor is not in its ability to modernize but in its devotion to replicating the tone invoked by that 1992 game.

Developer Pieces Interactive smartly recognizes what has given the series its enduring legacy and, possibly, what has held it back for so long. The Alone in the Dark games have been victimized by numerous tropes and never managed to carve out of the hole they were buried into.

Much of this game’s success stems from its focus on Derceto Manor and the twisting nature of the horrors that lie within. In horror, the more constricted you are, the more unease you feel. While this often is expressed in the form of limited bullets and methods of dispatching nightmares, it also applies to location. In John Carpenter’s The Thing, the crew is stuck on a remote research base in Antarctica. A vast wilderness of white is open but would serve no purpose except to cause those who flee to freeze to death. Inside the tight hallways of the facility, a shape-shifting being hides among the ranks. In Spencer Mansion, opulent rooms house not only zombies and other creatures but twisted puzzles and terrible secrets.

Derceto Manor is constructed to be that ideal horrorscape, one that is familiar to the player yet hides an unfathomable darkness.

Retaining its 1920s setting in the America South via Louisiana, Alone in the Dark immediately limits player expectation on what kind of fail-safes there will be. Puttering cars, slow-firing guns, no cellphones, and shoddy electrical wiring are one thing. Worse is the lack of medical knowledge, fallout from World War I, and the mysticism of the world becoming a bigger place.

There’s a tendency for games of this nature to do too much with their premise and Alone in the Dark avoids that trap by housing most of its drama in the various rooms of Derceto. Rather than being a private home for an obscenely wealthy family, Derceto is now a home for the “mentally fatigued” which I’m sure you know is never a good thing in this context. Emily Hartwood is summoned to Derceto after receiving an alarming letter from her uncle Jeremy. Accompanying her is Private Investigator Edward Carnby who may have experience in dealing with a few of the world’s stranger things.

After an initial cutscene setting up the plot, players are allowed to choose if they wish to control Emily or Edward. The hook is that while both characters will experience the same broad narrative strokes, certain paths and interactions are unique between the two. Deciding to go with Emily as it was her uncle, I slunk into the garage of Derceto because, of course, the front door was locked and no one was answering.

For anyone who has followed the lead up to Alone in the Dark, emphasis has been placed on the likeness and voice of Jodie Comer as Emily and David Harbour as Edward. Perhaps it’s a testament to either actors’ skill or work done by Pieces Interactive that I wasn’t taken out of the element. Both carry their roles well and make no attempt to oversell it, offering rather subdued performances throughout. And I imagine that is partly due to the surrounding cast being on the more extreme sign, a sentiment I offer with love.

Alone in the Dark places an incredible amount of stock in its voice cast and side characters. While journeying through Derceto, players will come across a number of “patients” who poke in and out of scenes to further mystify the overarching narrative and the questionable underpinnings of what might really be happening. Though part of me wishes for more “quests” to involve these people, it may have only served as a distraction.

The game is moderately linear, funneling the player around Derceto at a pace usually dictated by what rooms and hallways aren’t locked by one method or another. That logic applies to side characters as well, as no one is ever idly sitting in their room waiting to be spoken to. Personally, I feel like this touch makes Derceto feel more haunted as it is obviously occupied but no one is seen with any type of consistency.

Instead, Alone in the Dark supplements its insular world with incredible art direction and tone. A quick glance into any room easily identifies the patient it belongs too. While I still had issue getting my bearings in the late game when trying to explore or make a shortcut, there was never a time I didn’t fully recognize where I was in the greater context of Derceto. Players will find themselves taking short pauses to look at a shelf or decorations to see how it paints a picture of a personality or mental state.

Most notably, Alone in the Dark is absolutely stuffed with fully-voiced collectibles and notes. While players can certainly read through the text of anything found, I quickly recognized the joy in listening to the audio play. Not only is each new step of the journey narrated by an ominous figure that raises its own questions, a wide range of characters that we never actually meet provide their voice to the game’s various texts. At times, it may serve the player best to let the audio for a note play out as there are voice lines not included in the text for the note, sometimes sprinkling in a bit more world-building.

Anyone who has watched The Office and relished in the cast’s impressions during the “Murder Mystery” game are probably going to grin a few times listening to the voice actors in Alone in the Dark. Yes, a few times someone might fall into a slight British accent instead of Creole or forget to pronounce a name or word differently but this is truly some exceptional stuff. At least an hour of my game was spent listening to everything I could, relishing in how deeply involved it may me feel with the lore of the world.

Derceto immediately feels unsettling due to its silence. However, the nature of piecing out Jeremy’s whereabouts grows more sinister. Alone in the Dark manages to juggle multiple narrative threads throughout its runtime, peppering in one or two greater mysteries that require deeper investigation. Pieces Interactive knows when to twist the direction towards a potential red herring and when to sneak in a more resonant clue that might not make sense until later.

Being set in the 1920s, players will encounter references to voodoo, wondering if it will apply to the investigation. Questions arise if the entire journey is a confluence of mentally unwell people or darker forces are to blame. What’s important is that players emphasize thoughtful exploration of the texts and dialog provided to them, as nothing feels carelessly included.

I’m hesitant to reveal anything about the story at large but do want to emphasize how playing through both campaigns opens up the story. Though I wish there were more individual moments specifically tailored to Emily and Edward, the shifting tone between their narratives not only enriches the protagonists but the residents of Derceto. Thankfully, an individual playthrough can run around 8 to 10 hours. Additionally, spread throughout levels are collectibles called “lagniappes”, a Creole-French term. While not interesting in their own right, collecting all three of a set may reveal background information to the world or potentially unlock items or narrative bits for the game. However, players are required to go through the game as both Emily and Edward to find them all.

During my time playing Alone in the Dark for review, it felt a bit buggy with flashes of white when the camera would shift, a character getting stuck on an object here or there. My biggest issue arose near the end of the game when the sound started to crackle at higher volumes but it was infrequent enough that I couldn’t tell if it was by design.

Still, combat is probably going to be the low point for most players as the game has about four or five enemy types on hand. Taking notes from Resident Evil 7, most enemies are a varying type of shambling humanoid coated in black grime or a horrifying skeleton. A flying bug, a bile-spitting monster, a scurrying tentacle thing, and a burrowing dog-like creature are usually kept to individual sections of a game that also only houses a couple bosses.

Third-person shooting is serviceable but I found the most success in using melee weapons that break after felling about two enemies and dodging when they attack. Players can throw objects as a distraction or to do harm but stealth is pretty one-note when most paths are so tight.

But I didn’t want Alone in the Dark to be an action game and I think Pieces Interactive barely scrapes by when offering this kind of threatening tension. Action-horror is a slippery slope and Alone in the Dark keeps things “survival” by offering relatively limited bullets to kill monsters that can eat a few. Personally, I found enemy attacks to be one of the only uses of jump scares in the game, which I appreciated. It doesn’t make the combat anymore exciting but the few times Emily and Edward are overwhelmed, there’s just enough tension built up that killing everything in sight yields a satisfying breath of relief.

Again, there’s enough self-awareness that combat is kept to separate parts of the game, ones where reality becomes distorted and players are whisked to locales outside Derceto. These contained stretches of gameplay opt for a sense of place wholly different from what Derceto offers, a kind of nightmare realm where sanity is in question.

Alone in the Dark is a game drenched in shadow and it can often obscure detail and visual fidelity when there is little source of light. I admired a number of the game’s setpieces but found myself wanting different gameplay sequences outside of cobbling together clues and scrounging for bullets for the eventual tussle.

The fundamentals work here but where the combat is primarily forgettable, the puzzles serve to truly test players outside of what the narrative asks.

Leaning more towards old-school adventure games, Alone in the Dark on its base difficulty and guidance, offers players little outside of their own intuition on some puzzles. A number cleverly use environmental clues that involve multiple parts. Some ask that players investigate their notes. Only a handful of times was I truly stumped or over-thought what I was supposed to do. Thankfully there’s nothing as obscure in the 1992 original. And I can understand where that lack of obtuseness may make the game a little too easy in both combat and puzzle solving.

Alone in the Dark is very obviously a narrative-forward game that relies on setting and eerie mood and how its cast enriches how unsettled a player may be. In attempting to tie itself as a kind of reboot of the original but with eyes on the progress made in survival horror over the decades, Pieces Interactive doesn’t push any gameplay element too hard.

While this may serve to not alienate players who hold no nostalgia for the name, it potentially may cause the game to feel relatively dull for those looking for something not so narrative-centric. I recognize the few technical issues I experienced but on PlayStation 5 the game was quite stable. Really, I just wish the combat was either non-existent or similar to writer Mikael Hedberg’s other game, Soma.

Alone in the Dark‘s revival has been a long time coming. And while this new take on the mysteries of Derceto Manor carry a decades-long weight of survival horror innovation, Pieces Interactive almost missed the mark. Barring underwhelming combat and a lack of polish, curious players will be met with an expertly acted, unnerving tale of madness that just might be the spark Alone in the Dark needs to reemerge from the shadows.