Right, so picture this: it’s 1993, I’m fourteen, and I’m round at my mate Dave’s house in Stockport because he’s got something mental to show me on his dad’s PC. This was back when having a proper computer meant you were either loaded or worked in IT – Dave’s dad did something with databases for British Rail, which explained the massive beige tower humming away in their spare room like a diesel generator.
“You’ve got to see this game,” Dave kept saying, practically bouncing on his chair. “It’s proper scary, not like that rubbish Friday the 13th on the NES.” I was skeptical, honestly. We’d been through this before with games that were supposed to be terrifying but ended up being about as frightening as a wet Sunday in Blackpool.
But when he fired up Alone in the Dark, I knew immediately this was something different. The opening screen showed this bloke – Edward Carnby, private detective – standing in what looked like a Victorian mansion’s attic. Except the graphics were… wrong somehow. Not sprites like everything else we’d played, but these weird blocky 3D models that moved like stop-motion animation. Dave had gone for the detective; I would’ve picked the woman just to be contrary, but it was his computer so his rules.
The first thing that hit you was the camera system. Mental, it was. Instead of controlling the view yourself, the game decided where you looked from, switching between these fixed angles as you moved about. One minute you’re looking at Carnby from behind, the next you’re watching from across the room like you’re directing a film. Took some getting used to, and by getting used to I mean it never stopped being completely disorienting.
“The controls are a bit weird,” Dave warned, which turned out to be like saying the M25 is a bit busy during rush hour. Tank controls, they called them later, though at the time we just called them bloody awful. You didn’t move left or right directly – oh no, that would be too simple. You rotated your character left or right, then moved them forward or backward. Combined with those camera switches, it meant you were constantly getting confused about which direction was which.
I watched Dave attempt to walk down a simple corridor and somehow end up facing the wall three times. “This is rubbish,” I said, but he just grinned. “Wait for it,” he said. “Just wait.”
The mansion felt wrong from the start. Everything looked normal enough – well, normal for a creepy old house rendered in early 90s polygons – but there was this atmosphere hanging over everything. The sound design was incredible; you could hear floorboards creaking, wind howling outside, distant noises that could’ve been anything. Or nothing. That was the genius of it – half the scares were things you thought you heard.
Then the piano started playing by itself.
I’m not ashamed to admit I actually yelped. This purple zombie thing came crashing through the floorboards right where Dave had been standing, and I genuinely jumped back from the screen. Dave was in absolute stitches, of course. “Got you!” he said, like he’d personally programmed the bloody thing.
The combat was terrible, but deliberately terrible if that makes sense. You could throw a few punches, maybe kick things, pick up the occasional weapon, but you never felt like some action hero. Every fight was desperate and clumsy, which made avoiding enemies feel like the smart option rather than cowardice. This wasn’t Doom where you were tooled up and ready for anything – this was survival, pure and simple.
What really got under your skin was the inventory system. You could only carry a few items, which meant constantly deciding what to keep and what to leave behind. Oil for the lamps? Essential in dark areas. Extra weapon? Probably needed. Ancient book that might contain vital clues? Takes up space you might need for healing items. Every decision felt important because you never knew what was coming next.
The puzzles were proper head-scratchers too. There was this library sequence where the bookshelves moved and could crush you if you didn’t work out the right pattern. Dave got stuck there for the better part of an hour, swearing at the screen in increasingly creative ways until his mum shouted down to keep the noise down. No internet to look up solutions either – if you were stuck, you were stuck until you figured it out or bought a hint guide from WH Smith.
But it was the atmosphere that really set Alone in the Dark apart. The whole thing was drenched in this Lovecraftian dread – you know, cosmic horror, things man wasn’t meant to know, all that. The previous owner of the mansion had topped himself after discovering something nasty, and as you explored, you’d find diary entries and books that gradually revealed the horrible truth. Brilliant storytelling, actually – they didn’t just dump exposition on you, they made you piece it together yourself.
We played until about two in the morning, taking turns whenever one of us died or got too frustrated with the controls. The house was dead quiet except for the computer’s fan and the occasional creak from the heating system, which kept making us both jump because it sounded exactly like the game’s ambient noises. At one point we genuinely couldn’t tell if a sound was coming from the speakers or the house itself.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” Dave suggested around 2 AM, and I agreed perhaps a bit too quickly. The game had this way of getting into your head, making the familiar feel threatening. Walking home through the empty streets, I kept glancing over my shoulder, half-expecting to see shambling polygon monsters emerging from the shadows.
Years later, when Resident Evil came out, everyone was calling it revolutionary, but those of us who’d played Alone in the Dark knew better. Don’t get me wrong, Resi was brilliant – better graphics, smoother gameplay, proper production values – but it was clearly built on the foundation that Alone in the Dark had established. The fixed cameras, the limited inventory, the emphasis on atmosphere over action, the tank controls… it was all there in that French game from 1992.
I went back to finish Alone in the Dark over several more sessions at Dave’s. The ending took place in these underground caves beneath the mansion, proper Lovecraftian stuff with ancient rituals and cosmic horrors. The final boss was this tree monster that you couldn’t just fight – you had to perform specific actions with specific items to defeat it. When we finally managed it, the payoff was this brief cutscene of the mansion exploding while Carnby walked away. Anticlimactic? Maybe. But it fit perfectly with the game’s tone – you hadn’t won, you’d just survived.
Playing it again decades later through emulation, I was struck by how primitive it looked compared to modern games, but also how effective it still was. Those blocky characters and pre-rendered backgrounds that once seemed cutting-edge now looked like someone had built a haunted house out of Lego, but the core experience held up. The tension was still there, the vulnerability still genuine.
Modern horror games have all sorts of sophisticated tools – realistic graphics, dynamic lighting, AI that can hunt you intelligently – yet many of them fail to create the same sense of dread that Alone in the Dark managed with its technical limitations. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple, for understanding that true horror comes from what you can’t see rather than what you can, from what you can’t do rather than what you’re capable of.
Looking back, Alone in the Dark was my first experience with a game that wasn’t interested in making me feel powerful or accomplished. It wanted me to feel vulnerable, uncertain, afraid. It showed me that games could be more than entertainment – they could be genuine experiences that lingered long after you switched off the computer. When I think about the evolution of gaming over the past thirty-odd years, about how the medium has grown to explore every aspect of human emotion, I often trace it back to that night in Dave’s spare room, jumping at shadows and polygon zombies, discovering that being alone in the dark could be the most thrilling gaming experience of all.
John grew up swapping floppy disks and reading Amiga Power cover to cover. Now an IT manager in Manchester, he writes about the glory days of British computer gaming—Sensible Soccer, Speedball 2, and why the Amiga deserved more love than it ever got.
