Alone in the Dark

The Good
The Alone in the Dark games are some of my favourite games from the early to mid-nineties. Carnby was sort of a hero for me, and I've spent hours and hours playing the games...more than once. The first game was, as I recall, one of the first (if not the first) Infogrames games to take advantage of the Cthulhu license. Yes, the game is in fact set in the universe of H.P. Lovecraft, where ancient horrors once ruled the world and man lives in blissful ignorance of the truth. The game doesn't reveal much about the Cthulhu mythos though, choosing instead to be more of a haunted house story. The interface is similar to that of the more recent Resident Evil games, as are the graphics. The camera angles are what you can expect from a horror game - creepy and suggestive. If you play this at night with headphones and all the lights turned out, don't be surprised if you feel more than a little edgy. Another high point of the game is the sound (not to mention the music). I'm not sure if there's a disk version of the game, but if there is, it must be vastly inferior to the CD version, which has CD audio not only for music, but also for the incredible speech in the game (which you only hear when reading books/letters).

The Bad
The game may be a bit too hard for some. I don't believe there are any difficulty settings, so if you're looking for a straight adventure game, Alone in the Dark is not for you.

It's also not as good as the second game :).

The Bottom Line
An excellent survival-horror game with excellent production values. Although one would expect so, it still holds up to the expectations of the modern games player ;).

The Good
Very creepy for its time. Lovecraftian theme! And of course the gameplay was so original when it first came out.

The Bad
The controls were pretty awkward, especially running. Also the fact that you can trap yourself in a certain situation with no way out especially if you didn't save the game first was very frustrating.

The Bottom Line
An adventure game that paved the way to games like Resident Evil and other "Survival Horror" type games. You control an investigator on a mission to discover the weird happenings in a mansion sometime in the 1920's or 30's. The graphics are a bit dated but they were pretty good at the time. This game was very fun to play with complex puzzles and a spooky atmosphere.

The Good
This is a great game, better than it's two sequels and still comparable to the many 3D adventure games it has inspired.

Firstly, the graphics are great considering the time it was made. The hand-drawn backgrounds are very atmospheric, and although skins and true color palette didn't exist back then the polygon characters still look good. The movement (animation) is also very fluid although the gameplay itself has a few quarks (mentioned later).

The "horror" atmosphere is done very well, with a dark, muted graphics palette and suitably chilling music (as well as classic horror movie jump music whenever a monster pops into view). The monsters themselves are a nice variety ranging from classic zombies and hellhound-rats, to more surreal Lovecraftian horrors such as a 100 foot worm that fills the entire screen. Some monsters can even move through walls to chase you to your death.

The combat is implemented splendidly in this game, much better than in its sequels. The swings, punchs, and kicks performed by the main characters actually look real and connect with the various monsters quite satisfactory, unlike the sequels where the main character made dainty little jabs which made it difficult to see if you were hitting the monsters or not. There's also quite a nice variety of weapons lying around, ranging from swords, rifles, and even a bow & arrow set.

One of the best aspects of this game is that it's very much open-ended. You can explore all three floors of the house from almost the very beginning , and if you are having trouble with one puzzle you can always move on to another one without feeling blocked. In fact most of the puzzles aren't neccesary to finish the game, but can help you tremendously (for example if you figure out how to defeat the suit of armor, you get a nice sword which doesn't break like the old cutlass you start out with).

One final thing which must be mentioned is the large amount of text in this game, in the form of various books lying around the house. These books are great to read, providing much background information about the story and also providing some vital hints to solving various puzzles. Unfortunately in the CD-ROM version of the game the voice-overs are dry and uninteresting (with the exception of the deceased owner's suicide note and diary, which are laugh-out-loud over-the-top cheesy).

The ending to the game is short but nice and fitting, and does kind of surprise you. However because of it's nature it might leave you wondering if you've forgotten to do something and that there's a better ending somewhere (there isn't).

The Bad
One major grip I have about this game was the trouble I had getting it to run. It was buggy on my 486 (Music switched on and off, I had to re-install the game every time I wanted to play it) and doesn't run on my Pentium.

I had some rather large issues with a few aspects of the controls. For example, in order to run you have to tap the forward key twice. Unfortunately it's hard to tap the key in such a way that the program recognizes it, making it difficult to get your character to run(this was especially a problem when being chased by something nasty). It would have been simpler had they made you run by holding down a key (like shift).

Another problem is that it's very difficult to aim your weapons such as the pistol and the rifle, because the 3D third person perspective makes it difficult to see if you're aiming at the monsters or to their left/right. This results in many misses while you readjust your aim (ammo is also scarce). Fortunately, this isn't a major problem since many of the monsters are relatively slow moving, and close combat (especially with something sharp in your hand) is well implemented enough to make guns not necessary for survival.

Most of the puzzles are generally intuitive, and while they might take some thinking (or browsing the books for hints) none of them are totally obscure, and can be solved without too much frustration. I must mention that one exception to this is the very last puzzle. In order to defeat the mummified sorceror Pregzt two actions are required, one of which is fairly obvious (and specifically explained in several books) and the other one is totally obscure. In fact I quit playing several times over it, and only solved it by lugging every item in the game down to the last room and messing around with each and every one of them. Of course once I did perform the necessary action, I did realize it was somewhat logical (if a bit obscure and never mentioned anywhere else in the game).

The Bottom Line
Alone in the Dark is essentially the game which inspired the 3D adventure/survival horror genre. If you enjoyed Resident Evil, Nocturne, Ecstatica, or Bioforge, you might want to play this game to see where it all started. And its a damn good game in its own right, too.