Alone in the Dark (PC)

 

Alone In The Dark (PC)

As you've probably noticed, I tend to steer clear of a lot of the more well-known horror games when doing the Gruesome Games lists, preferring to draw people's attention to the more obscure hidden gems or under-appreciated titles. Having said that, I had always planned to cover everything eventually...so it's probably about time we got to one of the most influential horror games ever!!

If for some reason you've never heard of Alone In The Dark, it's perhaps more famous these days as being the original 3D 'Survival Horror' game, and heavily influencing Capcom's Resident Evil series. Originally it was intended to use real photographs of an old 1920's mansion for the backgrounds of the game, but this proved tricky for the tech available at the time, so they used hand-drawn bitmaps in their place. This 'pre-rendered backgrounds with 3D polygons on top' setup was what Shinji Mikami would discover whilst developing the first Resident Evil, changing his mind from making that game a first person adventure, and thus we have Edward Carnby and pals to thank for the tank-controlled craziness and weird-angled-camera jump scares in Capcom's classic!

Ah yes...Edward Carnby! Not your typical game hero, with his auburn hair and middle aged moustache! Picking from either him or the owner of the mansion's niece, Emily Hartwood, you set off for the mansion on the hunt for an old piano....P.I. Edward hunting it for an antiques dealer, and Emily looking for a letter hidden within it that she suspects will shed light on her uncle's sudden suicide!

After making your way to the attic and finding this piano, the doors of the mansion slam shut, locking you inside...and all manner of strange, Lovecraftian horrors start emerging from behind doors and smashing through windows to try and capture you so that some ancient evil can possess your body and wreak havoc upon the world!

To stop them, you'll need to push things around to block openings, hunt for clues, solve puzzles and use weapons you find to keep them at bay until you can find an escape from the haunted halls and creepy caves you'll find yourself running through.

Playing the game these days, it can feel a bit clunky. With its tank controls and faffy menu-driven inventory systems, you'd best be prepared for some fiddling around to get things to work...but it's still a fun adventure once you get used to its mechanics! 

If you've played later survival horror games it won't take you long to get into the swing of things, but like I say, just be prepared for a slightly slower pace than you might be used to! Edward and Emily arent the fastest of movers, although there is a run function included. But that will most likely have you stumbling around missing turns and things when you really need to be moving accurately. And be sure to search everywhere for clues and things, which you sometimes might forget to do while wrestling with the menus! Take your time, and you'll be fine though...

I picked up a copy of this from GOG which is probably your best bet for a working version that'll run well on modern PCs...and it's well worth picking up, whether its just to see where it all started for 3D survival horror, or you really want another Lovecraft inspired horror nugget to wrap your tentacles around!

There are of course many sequels to Alone in the Dark, but we'll save those for another day!