#161: Alone in the Dark 2
A Christmassy creepshow continuation that doesn’t quite compare
Initial release: 1993 (European floppy release, unknown date)
Platform: PC/Mac OS/FM Towns/PC-98/3DO/Playstation/Saturn
Developer: Infogrames
Infogrames’ original Alone in the Dark is a classic, a foundation stone of survival horror as a genre, a genuinely creepy ride with genuine Lovecraftian undertones. Its tremendous success guaranteed a sequel. And so, in Alone in the Dark 2, you… shoot pirates while wearing a Santa costume.
During development of the first game, a few ideas had already been tossed around for a sequel; Alone in the Dark was originally intended to be the flagship title of “Virtual Dreams,” a whole line of games that used the same engine, that never materialized. After Bruno Bonell, Infogrames’ founder, took most of the credit for the game’s success (a familiar tale in this industry) most of the development crew walked off, forcing the need for a new team to be founded to crank out a sequel as soon as possible. Hubert Chardot would remain as lead writer, however.
It’s a few months after the original game’s conclusion, and an old friend of Edward Carnby’s has disappeared while investigating the kidnapping of little Grace Saunders, the eight year old heroine of Jack in the Dark who disappeared on Christmas Eve. It seems Grace’s kidnappers are a bunch of bootleggers operating out of an old cliffside manor in California. Carnby’s investigation opens with him blowing up their gate, which is the first clue you get that this is a big departure from the original game. In a way, the sequel is the Aliens to the original’s Alien, moving away from an overtly horror theme to a supernatural action thriller with quite a lot of shooting, attempting to capitalize on the popularity of id Software’s smash hit shooter Wolfenstein 3D and the hype for the upcoming Doom. So what follows is basically the same thing as the original game, except with a lot more shooting and stuff blowing up. The Lovecraftian stuff is almost totally gone; what we get instead is some nonsense about voodoo-powered Undead pirates masquerading as mobsters. The manor and its grounds are a lot less mazelike and sinister than the house from the original game; the house itself, known as “Hell’s Kitchen,” is much smaller, for instance.
This, however, doesn’t change the fact that the game is still fairly opaque in that old-school adventure game fashion. Indeed, true to form, I wound up in an unwinnable situation because I placed some melted ice too close to a door and half an hour’s gameplay later I couldn’t go back through the door, resulting in me being unable to get past an enemy. Regardless, if you know your way through the game or have a walkthrough at hand, you can get through in about 5 hours or less…. unless you’re playing the Playstation or 3DO version. (More on that in a bit.)
The game does boast some subtle updates on the engine. Backgrounds are now animated, allowing for some neat effects that add a little atmosphere to the run-down old manor, even if they have no actual bearing on the gameplay. The game also allows for greater numbers of enemies on-screen at once; though this rarely actually comes up, once or twice you might walk into a room full of bad guys and they’re gonna give you a hard time. While there’s no choice of player characters like in the first game, the game does occasionally switch to Grace’s perspective, usually when Carnby needs someone to get him out of a jam. She’s completely defenseless, but she can get into places Carnby can’t.
In all honesty the music is probably the high point of the game, an eclectic mix of vaguely jazzy Christmas and pirate-flavored jams that are honestly miles ahead of the rest of the sound design, which includes voice acting that’s even worse than in the original.
As before, most of the story is consigned to books and other readables scattered throughout the game, but occasionally the villains will actually talk to you, resulting in some gorgeously drawn 2D slideshows as they relate their life stories in some truly atrocious overacting.
That being said, it’s hard to take any of the story seriously when the game is just so aggressively goofy. Even the original Resident Evil managed to be creepy in spite of its legendarily terrible voice acting; here, it’s just an action game with corpselike bad guys.
As before, the game was ported pretty far and wide. Aside from the requisite Japanese home computer ports and a Mac port, there was also the 3DO port which is pretty much a straight port, this time almost 1:1 with the PC version… except plagued with long loading times. The game also saw the original trilogy’s only mainstream console ports on the Saturn and Playstation, dropping the “2” in favor of a subtitle. The big feature to these ports was texture mapping for otherwise featureless models — hilariously removing Carnby’s iconic moustache.
The other addition is FMV transitions. For example, a ladder Carnby is climbing down on collapses — on PC, he’s just dumped unceremoniously into the caves under the house. On Playstation and Saturn, there’s a short FMV where he slides through radioactive sewers first. It’s completely pointless and adds nothing to the game, but I guess when they were porting it they wanted to take advantage of what the hot systems of 1996 were capable of — especially since the franchise’s spiritual successor, Resident Evil, was providing some competition.
In addition to these pointless FMVs, certain other parts of the game were converted to FMV as well, despite it not being strictly necessarily. Amusingly enough, the character models in these FMVs lack the new texture mapping.
Also, as bad as the 3DO version could be about its load times, the Playstation version takes the cake. expect multi-second load times for so much as changing camera angles. It’s incredibly infuriating how slow the game is. The saturn version, curiously enough, is fine.
Like the original, it’s not a bad game so long as you know exactly what to do and are willing to put up with some classic adventure game horseshit. But it’s so dramatically removed tonally from the original that I’m hard-pressed to really consider it a true successor.
