Alone in the Dark

Alone in the Dark's reputation as the prototype for survival horror games in general makes it easy to dismiss it for how clunky it feels and how dull the action is compared to Resident Evil et al. If you think of it outside the context of what would come later, though, it's pretty interesting - almost in a genre of its own. The extent to which the developers were trying to do something radically new is really apparent, and while their decisions were very hit-and-miss, they deserve a lot of credit for their willingness to experiment.

The combat is definitely the game's weakest point. It's really all over the place; often, you can't even tell where exactly you're aiming, and there's no lock-on system whatsoever. Different weapons, especially in the melee department, have your character wind up frustratingly slowly before striking, and trying to time these strikes relative to enemy attacks is the key to the whole thing. Most of them strike faster than you, though, and it's very easy to get stun locked even by the weakest, earliest enemies, since taking damage leads to recoil and adds even more time before you can strike back. Fortunately, there are clever ways to dodge and avoid quite a few enemies, and they walk more slowly than you can run, though it's worth noting that some of them, once triggered by your approach, can continue to pursue you through essentially the entire game world unless you manage to trap them in a room or dispose of them. In line with the Lovecraftian themes of the game, some of the enemies are bizarre and difficult to even describe, and you may not be able to kill them at all, or will have to find some sort of occult object to weaken them/finish them off. Movement in general is also clunky as h311; double-tapping a direction to run is really inconsistent, which can often make the difference between life and death.

There are a million different items to pick up, some of which do nothing or worse, but this is where things get interesting for me. Most of the gameplay aside from the crappy action involves playing around with strange objects trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with them. The inventory management is not limited by a set number of items nor their sizes but by weight, and you can't actually tell how much a given item weighs - only whether you've hit your capacity or not. You have to infer how much of a burden each is by how heavy it would probably be in real life. This mostly just creates irritating situations where you have to drop things before you can pick up something new you need, and god forbid you accidentally take one step forward after dropping something - you'll pick it right back up again. The better option is often to throw it across a room.

Speaking of which, in the style of early point-and-clicks, actions are separated into individual commands to open, close, push, etc, which have to be chosen from the pause menu, and sometimes you have to throw items instead of dropping or using them. I actually find this kind of refreshing in the way it slows down the action and makes you think more carefully about what you're doing. A number of scripted events make this a process of trial-and-error, because they can either block your progress or just plain kill you, which feels cheap at times, but hey - next time you enter that room you'll know where that monster is going to come out.

Overall, lots of counter-intuitive weirdness and nothing is explained to you. Couldn't get all the way through it the first time without a walkthrough - the actual gameplay and puzzling in Alone in the Dark is done like the storytelling in a Dark Souls game. All this being said, A+ for creativity, and it would be interesting to see some of these more obscure gameplay mechanics adapted in a contemporary context with the insights developers have gained over 30 years. I'm a little disappointed the reboot of the series in the 2000s took them all away and made it a conventional survival horror experience, which leaves less of an impression. Playing the original now almost feels like witnessing a strange attempt to experimentally re-invent survival horror by someone who didn't quite know what they were doing - like the video game equivalent of outsider music, which is actually pretty cool.