#158: Alone in the Dark
Enter the world of survival horror with this gloomy action-adventure
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 15, 2019
Initial release: 1992
Platform: PC/Mac OS/PC-98/FM Towns/3DO
Developer: Infogrames
Welcome to the world of survival horror. You all know it, you all recognize it: clunky tank controls, slow moving, blocky monsters, creepy music. And it all started here, with a quirky, innovative game by some French weirdos. There’s hardly a Resident Evil retrospective anywhere on the internet that doesn’t bring up the series’ intellectual predecessor, and for good reason — much like how Ultima and Wizardry were the basis for the jRPG genre, Alone in the Dark was a big hit in Japan.
Comparisons between Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil are obvious — both feature a big, creepy old mansion filled with monsters, puzzles and traps; both offer limited means of self-defense and even more limited inventory space, requiring you to think things through. And both have crap controls. (Okay, to be fair to Resident Evil, its controls are far more responsive and logical than the sluggish, unintuitive mess that is Alone in the Dark — but more on that later.)
As far as alone in the dark’s history goes, development was borne from new technology and skills in the development of early 3D games such as 1990’s Alpha Waves (known as Continuum in the US) which expanded the horizons for imaginative new design theories. The now-legendary coder Frédérick Raynal was inspired by an idea suggested by then-CEO of Infogrames Bruno Bonelli; Bonelli’s idea itself never materialized into anything but Raynal, a big fan of horror movies, ran with the opportunity to make a serious horror game. At least, that’s how the development lore goes anyway. They started out with some basic design goals — essentially, Raynal wanted a big creepy haunted house, and you initially had a single goal: escape. With the basic concept down, they set to work on some innovative concepts.
The technology then seemingly wasn’t ready for a fully textured, fully 3D world you could move about in (though Looking Glass Studios’ Ultima Underworld, also released in 1992, proved that wrong) and so they used static cameras looking at 3D wire meshes, with 2D backgrounds. An early attempt at using photographs of a real house built in the 1920s turned out to be problematic, so it was dropped, and hand-drawn bitmaps were used instead, created by internal artist Yaël Barroz (whom Raynal eventually married.) Thanks to the need for static cameras, the design team took the opportunity to make use of dramatic angles in keeping with the game’s horror film inspirations — check out this crazy dutch angle!
Of course, even though everything was rendered as 2D, they still took advantage of burgeoning 3D technology to create some very basic, low-poly 3D models — extremely primitive by today’s standards, but for 1992 it was quite impressive.
During development, Infogrames was in contact with Chaosium, the owners of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG franchise, with the idea of licensing the name and creating an official Call of Cthulhu video game, but Chaosium soon dropped the idea as being too simplistic. That didn’t stop the game’s main writer, Hubert Chardoz, from adapting several elements of the Cthulhu mythos into the game, including two of the most infamous fictional books, one of which, De Vermis Mysteriis, will kill you if read outside of a specific safe spot. (Chardoz later went on to write Infogrames’ more traditionalist adventure title Shadow of the Comet, which was retroactively named an official Call of Cthulhu title after release and expands on some of the background stuff you can find in books in Alone in the Dark.)
That leads us to the plot. It’s 1924, and Jeremy Hartwood, a wealthy Louisiana artist, has committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Private investigator Edward Carnby (or Hartwood’s niece Emily — you pick) visit Jeremy’s now-empty mansion to look for a piano in the attic. Everything seems fine at first — front doors slamming shut notwithstanding — but shortly after finding the piano, all hell breaks loose, and now our hero(ine) must sort out the bullshit, find why Jeremy killed himself, and find a way out of the mansion. Easy peasy.
So with all that said and done… how does the game play? Well… it plays like an adventure game, don’t it? Lots of cheap deaths, lots of aimless running around, lots of opportunities to unknowingly fuck yourself over hours before you realize you’ve done it. Add to this some brutally clunky controls, which you have no time to learn before throwing enemies at you. That’s right: twenty seconds into loading the game, a monster busts through the window screaming “WASSAAAAP” — unless you know to block the window with a cabinet. Of course, knowing’s only half the battle. Your every action is dictated via the Ingame menu, as the game utilizes very few keys. You select an action in the menu, and then the action button actually does it. It’s… not the most intuitive system.
Of course, you’re also going to be dealing with tank controls, the bane of many a gamer. There isn’t even a run button! You have to double tap the forward key. (The 3DO version fixes this with a dedicated run button, by the way. I’ll talk about the 3DO port in a bit.) Combat is particularly clunky. While there aren’t that many monsters, and some can be avoided or even blocked, you’ll have to fight a bunch of them, and it’s a nightmare. First: you have no lockon. Second: actually using your weapons is non-intuitive.
You have to hold down the action key, then one of the arrow keys. For melee, any arrow key will do — swings, kicks, overhead smashes, whatever. For ranged weapons, left and right will turn you, forward fires. Bet you’re missing autoaim right now aren’t ya?
The worst is what’s essentially a climactic boss fight. It’s not a “final” boss fight as you still have some things to do, but it’s the toughest fight in the game and it’s mandatory: sword fight a zombie pirate. You can’t shoot him, you can’t throw things at him. Swords only. It can take several attempts to sort him out, largely because the angles in the room he’s in are lousy at helping the player determine distance, and he takes a while to kill. Once he’s down, though, if you know where to go and what to do, it’s a cakewalk. Emphasis on if.
In short, this game is extremely a product of its time. while even Resident Evil — and I do mean Resident Evil, that clunky ass 1996 monstrosity — stands the test of time with its comparatively forgiving gameplay, Alone in the Dark’s adventure game roots are very strong.
It’s not all bad, of course. Barroz’ artwork is distinctive for its simplicity, making good use of an extremely limited color palette that seems to mostly consist of pinks and greens. If there’s a flaw to her work it’s that her sense of perspective can be wonky sometimes. True to survival horror storytelling tropes, you can find books and notes scattered throughout the mansion and the writing in them is quite good — though heaven help you if you’re playing a version with voice acting! (We’ll get to that in a moment.)
The whole mansion reeks with atmosphere; as you basically start the game in the attic, it can sometimes feel like the mansion is much larger than it actually is. (The lack of an in-game map exacerbates this feeling.) The soundtrack bears mentioning; Philippe Vachey is legendary for his work on this game (he also did the soundtrack for Shadow of the Comet, one of that game’s better aspects.) It’s a good mix of unusual instruments and even a little jazzy stuff that is surprisingly fitting. The game originally came on floppies; a later CD-ROM release had the soundtrack in Redbook audio as well as some dubious voice acting. While it’s better than the shitshow that is Resident Evil’s early attempts at voice acting, it’s hammy and obnoxious and every single readable is now read out loud. Slowly.
While the original DOS version is the version that everyone knows and gets sold in digital distribution today, it also saw a number of ports, mostly to other computer platforms like Macintosh and Japanese home computers, but the only console port, the 3DO version, is notable. Essentially, it’s the CD-ROM version of the game, but with the added benefit of being able to use a controller. While the controls are no more intuitive with the 3DO controller (itself a lousy knockoff of the Super Nintendo pad), the addition of a run button is a godsend. Thanks to the magic of the Phoenix 3DO emulator (which is in Russian, but there’s an English patch) it’s the most accessible version of the game out there, at the price of slightly downgraded graphics. It’s almost certainly the best game on that depressing wasteland of a console.
Final thoughts: this is not a game for the impatient. It’s often times a slow, cheap, nasty game that delights in fucking you over thanks to a design ethos that has long been left in the dust. But one can’t deny its importance in creating an entire new genre of video game.
And of course, everything happens in circles; while the franchise has had a few revivals over the years, an outright remake, just over thirty years after the original, is coming down the pipe in October 2023. We’ll see if it’s any good.
