When I first played Alone in the Dark, I didn’t have a clue what to expect. It was 1992. The video game business was going through some changes. Infogrames, a French video game company, was right in the middle of “reimagining” what was possible. And when I booted up this title, on what I now see was an ancient computer; well, when I first heard the unsettling, creepy way the game made use of MIDI music and presented me with some truly spine-tingling visual tales of darkness, I knew this game was something that would light up the evening for me, in ways I didn’t expect. It’s also something that has held up. Again, let’s play the game from 1992 that’s largely responsible for pretty much every single creep-fest we’ve seen since then.
The horror genre was relatively young in the world of video games when Alone in the Dark was first unleashed. Back in the day, most of what could be described as horror games were a bit crude and very often full of cheese. To be perfectly honest, when it came to video games back then, most of what we now remember as classic horror was an awful lot like the TV show Scooby-Doo; they were somewhat corny and not really all that scary. Still, they were worth playing because they were the first forays into the horror genre for video games.
Starting Alone in the Dark for the first time was filled with awesome expectancy. Its introductory scene, a superbly uncanny vignette draws the player into the game’s sinister world most effectively. After that scene, we’re given our choice of characters to attend to next; and our selection, in my case, was Private Investigator Edward Carnby. My immediate second choice would have been Emily Hartwood, the poor niece of the mansion’s late owner, who I always second-guessed for her super-creepy selection in uncles.
At the time, the game was revolutionary in its use of fixed camera angles and 3D polygonal graphics; no other game had made me feel uneasy in the way that it did. What made the original Resident Evil so memorable was, for me, the mansion and the weird goings-on within. Sure, the late-’90s CGI could be laughable at times, but the reason I see the whole thing as an ode to that which has come before is that there was some serious precedent on display in that game.
A memorable facet of Alone in the Dark is that it actually allows you to feel alone and vulnerable; it isn’t like the nonstop action games we’re used to where we hardly have time to think about what we’re doing. And that, to many players, spells out sheer terror, or at least the exhilarating feeling thereof. After all, this is a serious horror game with nearly every paranormal, sanity-draining facet of the Hollywood tradition taken into account. You have the trappings of a hit horror flick. You are Edward Carnby, the lone-penny-drinking, rumpled character with ties to the occult. And you, once you’ve been railroaded apocalyptically into the game, are pretty much feeling something like this.
Beyond just a gathering of “boo!” moments and impressive apparitions, the original Alone in the Dark told a tale, and it told it well. This was largely in part thanks to its narrative doing what improper narratives ought to do: Being atmo, i.e., existing in the margins, just beyond the corner of the player’s spotlight, not subjected to direct scrutiny. That was the way most, if not all, of the series’ narratives worked in Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood’s time; the player didn’t have anything to do with them. Not unless they pressed their pixelated Sherlock Holmes to work.
Unraveling the mysteries of Derceto Mansion was like solving an ominous puzzle. Each room told a story, albeit through eerie tableaux vivants that sometimes hung on the walls, or strange objects placed in ordinary locations. My heightened sense of awareness ensured that I didn’t miss a beat of the sinister environment; as the hours wore on, I found myself consumed by its allure. Who lives here? What happened to them? They’re questions that drove me to further my investigation.
In the video game Alone in the Dark, the main characters are Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood. They don’t interact with each other in the way a team of heroes might. Instead, they seem like two parallel protagonists who bring strong but quite different motivations to the story, not to mention two very different styles of play.
As Carnby, for example, I felt like a hard-boiled detective determined to solve a mystery when I actually seemed to be working my way into the heart of a horror story. He’s the kind of character I would expect to have been described as a male lead back when this game was first being developed.
Finding Jeremy Hartwood’s diary was a truly pivotal moment in the game. As I read his diary entries, which grew ever more frantic as they progressed. I began to feel a real sense of foreboding. Unlike the stoic and reserved Carnby, Hartwood was apparently a man of passion and dreams, and being effectively trapped inside Derceto Mansion seemed to push him to the brink of insanity. He was being overwhelmed by the dark forces within the same ones that I was now having to face.
The game’s ending, its climax, and the superb series of twists revealed at that point left me very satisfied when it was all said and done, but also haunted. Plenty of good horror games can make you jump; plenty of great ones can make you feel the hollowness of their world. But I think a good sign of a truly right classic in this genre is a game like this where the very end only serves to seal with a malevolent kiss how much you love the main character.
On the whole, I give this game about an 8.5 out of 10.
Not just a trailblazer in the domain of digital horror, Alone in the Dark also led the way in how games of its type were put together. One revolutionary aspect was its use of 3D graphics, something few other games were doing at the time, which created a much more immersive and realistic experience. Also, the game had many fixed camera angles, which were often a source of player frustration but nevertheless induced even greater tension because of the forced perspective. Games with cameras fixed on the player’s viewpoint make every new room and hallway, and every limited field of vision, potential jump-scare spots.
Another innovative aspect of Alone in the Dark was its combat system. In stark contrast to most action games of the time, it put a heavy emphasis on avoiding conflict. For the player, simply reaching the next room to maintain the narrative was far more important than tallying a body count, and the game itself gave you few resources with which to do the latter.
… Alone in the Dark spent most of its time making you vulnerable, first by giving you clumsy, awkward controls and then by making the average enemy encounter a sweat-drenched battle of attrition through tight spaces, most of them overcome in fighters’ stances.
Solving puzzles was the principal part of Alone in the Dark, and its puzzles were masterfully created to command my gray cells. There was a brilliant array, including interpreting old symbols etched into stone and revealing fleshy keys lodged in secret nooks. Many encounters relied on even more reptilian tactics. They would entrap players in their insidious designs, like a rickety staircase that would plunge to the basement when you thought you were climbing to the attic. They could also be maddening, in large part because of the vestigial commands we were forced to use on either the in-game keyboard or the equally maddening number pad.
Truly, a most unforgettable experience of my life has been attempting to find my way through a confusing labyrinth of mirrors. Any wrong move I made when going around its corner walls or a wrong twist in its long halls could, and often did, result in my death. It was something that provided a nerve-wracking potency all its own and was married in the second game of the Alone in the Dark series to a couple of great moments of “Aha!” that gave some unfathomable pleasure to crawling down into a maze that was a large part of the game’s plot.
The game brought with it the all-too-familiar notion of finite space, a restriction I’ve certainly and artlessly bumped into more times than I care to recall, in which it rather impertinently asked, “Are you sure this is the item you want to take up room in your backpack, sir? Because you don’t appear to have a lot of room left in it.”
The previous decisions I had made throughout my course of play history created an illusion of forward movement, but always with the nagging sense of a hangman waiting for me to make just one mistake.
The influence of Alone in the Dark on the gaming industry simply cannot be ignored, understated, or overvalued. It did essential groundwork in making survival horror the staple genre it has become, and the scarcely imaginable proceeds from that monumental title endure with great reason and potent payoff. Just about every admissible game in the generation that followed Alone in the Dark obviously owes titanic—almost inarguable—narrative and mechanical debts to the path that the good folks at Infogrames first blazed in 1992.
The game known as Resident Evil came out in 1996. It was a direct descendant of the inchoate but way-cool play mechanics introduced four years earlier in Alone in the Dark. It also built upon new elements, like pre-rendered backgrounds and a system of inventory management that had been introduced with Alone in the Dark. When a player dies, the game’s delicately structured thrills turn into the kind of ordeal where self-organization is rewarded with a strange, intense high. That’s when you know you’re playing a survival horror genre game.
The 1999 release of Silent Hill pushed the psychological horror genre that was first made popular by the game Alone in the Dark to even greater extremes. Once again, the player was given little to rely on in the way of sight and light, driving human imagination to see far too much in what those obfuscating effects did not actually keep covered within Silent Hill’s sinister narrative and overall chilling mood. And once again, premium was put on individual puzzle-solving and overall survival skills. But these were just two of many components contributing to the game’s standout psychological horror aesthetic.
Today’s horror games owe a lot to Alone in the Dark, and it isn’t hard to see why. Its influence is still keenly felt in how their narratives unfold, with exploratory gameplay and environmental storytelling forming a large part of the experience. Games in the mold of Amnesia or Outlast feel like they have “alone” and “dark” in their DNA, and resources you use in those games and recent ones, which were in that original experience, constantly restate the importance of the original game. This tale could be spun out further, but it doesn’t seem necessary. The 57-word version is Alone in the Dark was good.
Alone in the Dark had a foundational impact on me. It was the first game that fully immersed me in an experience of the senses, especially the sense of fear. But it also ensnared me with top-notch storytelling and graphics that keep you “on the edge of your seat.” Fear is a deep emotion, and I remember well the lead character’s (and mine since I was living vicariously through him at the time) trek through a haunted mansion. In a nutshell, the Alone in the Dark franchise provided me with an unforgettable, emotionally impactful experience that still colors my thinking to this day.
In the end, the fear you experience while playing Alone in the Dark isn’t just because it’s a title from the early ‘90s, it’s because of the game’s fresh, artistic vision that still resonates to this day. Alone in the Dark is not only a pioneer of the survival horror genre, which has gone through significant change in regard to gameplay and storytelling over the last 20 years – but the original game’s ideas and setup are still just as fresh today. That is, to me, an impressive accomplishment. And at the end of the day, after you watch this series, Alfred Hitchcock’s axioms still hold up: If a horror game isn’t scary, it’s pretty much failed to achieve its primary aim.
When we think about the various “eras” of video game history, the original Alone in the Dark clearly stands at the forefront of the survival horror genre. Developers Infogrames really did change the game by, well, developing a game that pushed the envelope in nearly every way. While Resident Evil would popularize that particular gameplay format so heavily, it really took influence from what Alone in the Dark had accomplished. And if I may not get too pretentious, what Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark did during the late ’90s pushed the horror genre forward in the way people like us could play on consoles.
