Alone in the Dark (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Developer:

Infogrames

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Release Date:

1992 (CD version 1993)

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Systems:

DOS, PC-98, FM Towns, 3DO, Mac, Archimedes

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This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing the Guinness World Record holder for "First 3D survival-horror videogame": Alone in the Dark! I mean the original one, obviously. A sequel tried to steal its name in 2008, but the original proved too powerful and the PS3 release renamed it to Alone in the Dark: Inferno, so as far as I'm concerned this is the only true Alone in the Dark.

Well, except for the classic Uwe Boll movie I mean.

I know everyone that talks about Alone in the Dark also has to mention Resident Evil, but I think it's funny how the series both started off as critically-acclaimed genre pioneers and then suffered very different fates. Resident Evil has had seven million sequels and remakes, many of them pretty great, while the Alone in the Dark games have been racing to catch up to their own movie series down at the bottom of Metacritic. There's a bit of a disparity in how the two franchises are regarded these days, and it'd take a lot more than a terrible Netflix series to change that.

But I still remember how blown away I was when I saw the first Alone in the Dark previewed on the TV series Bad Influence! back when I was a tiny baby. It looked so much more advanced than anything I'd played on the Amiga, SNES or Mega Drive. I didn't know much about PC's at that point, but I was sold, I wanted one.

Then a few years later my family actually got a PC! I loaded up Alone in the Dark on it, pushed some furniture around, got killed by a monster, and turned it off to play Theme Hospital or Sam and Max or something instead. (I'm not a big fan of horror games to be honest). So I have played through first few rooms before, I'm very familiar with them, but otherwise I'm going into the game blind. I don't know what happens next or anything about the story.

Okay, I'm going to be playing the version I just bought off GOG (which I believe is just the 1993 DOS CD version), and I'm going to be writing about it in two parts. This first part is going to be a regular Super Adventures article where I stick with it for an hour and whine about how hard it is, but in the second part I am going to try to finish it. I want to see what this game actually is! So there will be moderate SPOILERS in the first part and hopefully some extreme spoilers in the second.

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I'd totally forgotten about this! The first thing you see in the game is the happy Infogrames armadillo turning into a creepy early 3D model and it's awesome. It looks like something you'd see in an N64 game, which shows just how ahead of its time this was, coming out in 1992.

Infogrames is a pretty notorious company these days, though you don't see the name mentioned all that much. That's because they bought the name 'Atari' and rebranded themselves in 2003. No more happy armadillo logo. The last thing I heard about them was that they're getting into the blockchain and they've just bought MobyGames. So that's a bit of a concern maybe.

The game didn't offer me any graphics or difficulty options at the start but I do get to choose who I want to play as. The guy on the right is Edward Carnby and he's the protagonist of the Alone in the Dark series, showing up in every game (kind of). He's also one of videogames' few ginger heroes, though that didn't stick.

He's not the main character here though, or at least he's not the one that's selected by default. If you select Emily Hartwood she'll tell you in a voice over how personally connected she is to the story and share her extra insight about the house and her uncle. Carnby on the other hand is just in it for the money and doesn't know anything.

Unfortunately I didn't really get to delve too deep into Emily's motivations or mission because when I pressed 'Return' to move to the next page of narration, it took me to the intro cutscene instead. I guess I was suppose to flip pages with the arrow keys.

I did get a bit of backstory in the newspaper that came with the game though. The lead story is about the suicide of artist called Jeremy Hartwood, who was Emily's uncle. It also features an article on H.P. Lovecraft and some "imaginary" adverts from the 20s. I always get the sense that half the fun of making faux-historical newspapers like this is coming up with the ads, judging by the amount of effort that goes into them.

The original release of the game came with a slightly different version of the magazine. One of the most obvious differences is that it was called the Mistery Examiner, with an 'i' instead of a 'y'.

The date on the cover suggests that the game takes place around 1924, which puts it between Clive Barker's Undying (1923) and Blood (1928). I'm spotting a bit of a theme there. The 20s is about Lovecraft and revolvers.

Okay here's the intro, complete with random frog jump scare. I've edited it down a bit to speed up the pace, because I didn't think anyone would want to watch a minute-long GIF, but I think you get the gist of it. Basically, someone's driving Emily up to her uncle's house in a beautiful classic car and the frog survives. Frogger was a lot easier back in in the 1920s.

Here's a shot of that creepy split-second close up just in case you wanted some nightmares. I mean, this is a horror game.

Emily's journey isn't over yet though, as she has to walk to the house. Derceto Manor looks looks like a proper horror videogame mansion; you could definitely imagine a Splatterhouse, Resident Evil or Day of the Tentacle game taking place there.

It's also obviously painted (in Deluxe Paint), not 3D rendered, which sets the game apart from most of its successors. And its predecessors. In fact I'm struggling to think of any games that did 3D characters over a 2D background before Alone in the Dark.

Hunter (Amiga)

I suppose Hunter's interiors were technically prerendered 2D, but it wasn't exactly trying to be cinematic with its camera angles. Also this was cutting edge 3D for home computers at the time and Alone in the Dark was released just one year later, so there's a bit of context for you. You can see how games used to be fond of filling a third of the screen up with a HUD as well.

There were some games that had full 3D all the time, or 3D environments filled with 2D characters (Ultima Underworld, Wolfenstein 3D). But the advantage of limiting the polygons to just the characters and the items was that the game was able to run fast on the lower spec PCs people had in Europe. Faster than than the graphically demanding 3D games coming out of America anyway.

I'm sure this is fine.

Aww, now the car's driving away too! I liked that car. At least this explains why they just stopped in the middle of the road.

Oh damn that 3D model is... retro. Though it's not like games like Hunter and Starfox were doing any better. These were cutting edge visuals in 1992! The game came out the year after Monkey Island 2 and a year before Doom to put it in context. Also I'm surprised by how much I like the music. I've never played the CD version before and this soundtrack really adds a lot to the game. In fact it's put me in a good mood.

Once Emily's in the house there's still a minute of walking to go, as she slowly makes her way up to the loft. I don't know why she's so eager to get up there, but she's seems absolutely focused.

The whole intro sequence is about 2 minutes and 20 seconds long in total and is mostly just setting up the mood and showing off the house, as we're not learning anything here. The amazing thing though, is that we're basically at the dawn of 3D cutscenes here, this is a pioneer that influenced the development of 3D games to come, AND THE INTRO IS ENTIRELY SKIPPABLE. You just tap a button and you're straight into the game. Alone in the Dark was showing games how to do it right in 1992.

Alright the game's dropped me off in the attic and handed control over to me. I still don't know what I'm doing up here though! Also there's no interface or HUD on screen, which is very unusual for the time.

Just out of curiosity I decided to check if the game's given me any graphics options yet, and it turns out that it has. There are two levels of detail and it starts off on the highest level by default. If you switch the detail to 'low' it turns stuff off like the transparency of the lamp and the texture on the wardrobe. Oh hey there's an obvious lamp right there in the foreground, I should probably grab that.

Resident Evil (Director's Cut)

Here's the start of Resident Evil for comparison. Both games feature real-time 3D characters superimposed onto backgrounds, neither of them have any kind of on screen information like health or ammo, but they look dramatically different. Suddenly these PSX graphics don't seem quite so primitive anymore.

Also see that save typewriter over on the left? Alone in the Dark doesn't have them. There's no need to search Derceto Manor for ink ribbons as you can save wherever you want, any time you want, as much as you want. Well okay there's only six save slots, but other than that you can go nuts.

Alright, I actually remember what to do in this first room, but I accidentally skipped the narration on the character select screen so I'm going see what happens if I screw everything up instead. Then I'll start a new game as Carnby and do it properly. Mostly what I'm going to do is stand here and wait as the music gets more and more tense.

Oh no, a a demon creature made of bits of cut up paper burst in through the window and attacked me! You can avoid this happening by pushing the wardrobe in front of the window, but now that he's here I'm going to have to resolve this with violence.

I've got three melee attacks, which I access by holding down the space bar and then pressing one of the arrow keys. You'd think that the hard bit would be getting Emily facing the right direction with the old-school tank controls, but the tricky part is the getting the timing right. There's a long delay on each attack, so getting them to connect at the right moment requires some practice and skill. Basically it's hitting me a lot more than I'm hitting it.

Fortunately I have more health so I still won! I started with 20 hit points and now I'm down to 13. That'll be enough to take on monster #2 I reckon.

Now I have to fight a zombie that pops up out of a trapdoor. It's nice of him to wait until I was done with the first creature, but my theory is that might be due to a limit of how many characters can be on screen at once.

You can prevent the zombie's appearance by pushing the chest onto the trapdoor (or just standing on it until it gets bored and gives up), but now that it's here we're going to have to fight. Fortunately this guy's a total pushover. I literally just held down the space bar and the 'up' key and waited for him to walk into my kicks; he couldn't touch me.

Once you've dealt with the invasion you're left alone for as long as you want, despite what the scary music wants you to believe. For some reason none of the monsters think to try entering the room through the door. I can't run around the mansion investigating stuff though, not with a third of my health gone. I need to start a new game and do it right this time.

Alright, now I'm playing as private investigator Edward Carnby, aka the Reptile (I've never heard anyone call him the Reptile). He has a powerful angular 3D moustache and a floating bow tie, and he has his own reasons for visiting Derceto Manor. Mostly someone's paying him to come here and check out the antiques, especially the piano in the loft.

I read all of Emily's character select narration as well, and it turns out that she also went straight to the loft to check the piano, because she knew that her uncle would've left a clue there in a secret compartment. So now things are making a bit more sense.

Okay the first thing I have to do is push that wardrobe by holding the space bar. But the space bar is also the button for fighting. In fact it's the button for everything. So I need to go to the menu and switch my mode.

It's just like Little Big Adventure, another game with 3D characters on 2D backgrounds developed by a French studio in the early 90s. (Incidentally they were both by the same creator, Frédérick Raynal). This also reminds me of the box of verbs in a point and click adventure game.

There's two things I've noticed here: first, every box has a picture frame around it, like on the character select screen at the start. It makes sense for the game to have a painting theme if the owner of the mansion was an artist, though I don't get why every frame is labelled 'In the Dark'. I wonder if the art was finished before they changed the name from 'In the Dark' to 'Alone in the Dark' and they figured it was close enough.

The second thing I've noticed, is that Carnby starts off with 20 hit points and no inventory items, just like Emily. His character select narration made me think he'd be bringing a revolver, but nope it seems like the two characters are absolutely identical. Same gear, same stats, same story.

Alright, the wardrobe is in front of the window and the chest is on top of the trapdoor. I can hear the echoey thuds of the monsters trying to get in, but they are denied. Now I'm free to go explore the loft and pick up all the loot... slowly. The two protagonists aren't in any hurry to get around, the intro makes that obvious, so I need to be a bit patient. I don't actually mind so much though as the sound of the floorboards creaking as they walk is awesome. Plus I can get them running, it just takes a bit of effort. All I need to do is double tap the 'up' button, but it usually takes a few tries before the game realises what I'm doing.

Hang on, do those shadows look a bit weird to you? They're definitely not all cast from the same light source. I can forgive them though as this was apparently all drawn by hand, without any assistance from ray tracing. I've read that they were originally hoping to use digitised photographs of a real mansion, but struggled to get the 3D environment to match the backgrounds. So instead they rendered wireframes of the rooms and then painted over them. It must have taken a bit of work considering how many camera angles there are in each room.

Hey, there was a gun inside the chest! Only 4 rounds, but that's better than just trying to kick the forces of darkness to death. Also I got an animation of it spinning around and I didn't even have to wait a second for it to load first. Nicely done, Alone in the Dark.

Any object left out in the open, like that oil lamp, can be picked up just by walking into them. To get the other objects I have to bring up the menu, switch to 'Open/Search', then press the space bar. I know I'm basically reading out the game manual right now, but the controls are weird enough that I think it's worth mentioning. They kind of work though, once you get used to them. I've played way more awkward games than this.

Speaking of the manual, I gave it a quick look because I was curious about whether it had a bit of a tutorial in it to lead you through the first few rooms. It does not. You're on your own.

I finally remembered to search the piano and found this note hidden in the side of it. Objective 1 complete! It doesn't exactly give me a second goal, but it sets up that there's a main villain to face and that Jeremy knew a lot about what's going on in this house. It's a good thing I went back and read the character select narration or else I might have missed this.

Incidentally the voice acting on this letter is hilarious. He's playing a desperate man driven half mad by supernatural forces beyond comprehension and it's still a little bit over the top perhaps.

I also found a bunch of other stuff, like a bow, fuel for my lamp, and a book about the mythological hero Perseus telling his men to polish their bronze shields to a mirror sheen so they can face Medusa. It's not a long book, just a few pages, in fact it has fewer words than this wall of text you're reading right now, but it didn't take me long before I started getting impatient and wondering what the point of it was.

Alright now I've got a new floor to explore, with five doors to open! I can tell that they can all be interacted with because they're all real-time 3D with weird looking textures on them. It's like a Looney Tunes cartoon, as when you see something in the background that's looks different to everything else, it's a dead giveaway that it's going to move. Speaking of that, look at that bit of floor in front of me. Carnby walked over it just fine in the intro, but I don't think it's wise to tempt fate a second time in this haunted house.

I mean I've saved the game, I'll lose zero progress if something horrible happens, but I think I'll pick one of these first two doors instead. Starting with the one on the... left.

Huh, the door closed by itself. Not sure whether I should be worried about that. The mansion's front door did the same thing now that I think about it. I've found another chest in here, but this one's locked so I'm going to have to remember that for when I find a key.

On the other side of the room I found... a key! Well that was straightforward enough. It doesn't have anything on it to hint at what it's for, it's just called 'key', but I'm hopeful it's going to get me my treasure.

The key worked! I opened the chest and found an old cavalry sabre. There doesn't seem to be anything else to do here, so I'll open the door and check the next room.

There was a surprise zombie behind the door!

I equipped my new sabre, hit him a few times, and that sorted him out. That's my first kill so far on this run and I haven't lost any health, so I'm doing well. I still haven't figured out why I've got so many melee attacks yet, but then I never figured that out in Street Fighter II either, so that's not necessarily the game's fault.

Hey Carnby's given the key a name now that he knows what it's used for. Though I'm never likely to use it again, so I don't really see the point of holding onto it. That empty oil can I used to refuel the lamp can go as well, along with the book and the letter.

One of the things I know about the game is I can only carry so many things at once, so I need to do a bit of a clear out every now and again. I mean I can carry a lot more than in a Resident Evil game, but I will eventually hit a limit if I'm not careful, which is a bit weird for an adventure game I reckon, even a spooky one. Dark Seed has many many flaws, but at least it didn't have an inventory limit.

The stuff gets placed on the floor, so I'm not losing any of it, I just need to remember where I put it and hope the game never seals any room off. Because any of this could be important later on for all I know. Maybe I'll find a puzzle where I need to insert all the keys into a giant robot, or use the empty oil can to carry... oil or something.

Alright now I'm in the room on the opposite side of the hallway, and the door stayed open this time. In fact I can look right through at all that stuff I left on the floor in the other room. That's one thing Resident Evil can't do! In fact that game makes going through every door into an event, with a bloody cutscene playing to hide the loading time. In this I can just run straight through the open door, no cutscene, no loading.

One thing the games have common is zombies roaming the corridors, like that one out there that's strolling right in through the open door. So there is a point in closing them.

I've been busy pressing space bar on every painted object in the background but I had to put it on hold for a moment so I could switch to sword mode and slice this dude up like I cut up his friend. There was a bit of a complication this time however: the sword broke. The blade just snapped right off and I had to beat him to death with the handle. Now I'm wondering if the sword handle improves my damage. Actually, better question, did I just break an object necessary to complete the game? I need to check a guide real quick before I save.

Okay it turns out that the old cavalry sabre is necessary to complete the game, but as long as I have all the pieces it's fine. That's a relief.

I was just thinking 'Hey there are a lot of windows here, should I be pushing something in front of them?' and then another one of those demons burst in! That fight I had in the loft taught me that I don't want to go up against these chicken dog demons with my fists, so I decided to sacrifice some of my precious rifle ammo and hope I could get Carnby facing the right direction when I pulled the trigger. Though by "pull the trigger" I mean "held the space bar down and pressed 'up'". (I've played so many games where you press 'up' to jump, but this has to be the first where you press 'up' to fire the gun).

Fortunately I got a direct hit with each shot and took it down in two hits (half my ammo). I love the recoil on this thing, it really looks powerful. And the way the enemies bubble away is perfect. I also like how it's obvious when you score a hit, thanks to the little spray of blood and the way they go flying.

I did try to shove the wardrobe against the window to see if it could be done, but it didn't budge. It seems that one in the loft was a one-off.

In the next room I found a locked dresser with a teddy bear on top, and a vase, but no key this time. I have to be honest, I accidentally glanced at how to solve this puzzle when I was checking a walkthrough to see if I'd ruined everything by wasting half my ammo on the third enemy in the game. It turns out that you have to throw the vase so that it smashes, and then pick the key up from out of the wreckage. On the one hand that's kind of logical, on the other hand I would've never figured that out myself. These no way to examine objects or get any kind of description, so there was no hint there was a key inside, and I typically try to avoid breaking my inventory items.

Inside the dresser I found two mirrors, and if I break either of these then I'll make the game unwinnable. I'm not even joking, it says in the walkthrough that if you get hurt while carrying them, they shatter. Can you see why I'm so paranoid?

The door led back out into the hallway, but I'm up on the top now, on the other side of the cracked floorboards, so I'm free to escape! There's still another door on the left I want to check out first though.

Incidentally, this map is pretty handy... so it's a shame I had to draw it myself. As far as I can tell the game doesn't have one, so it's up to you and your notepaper to keep track of Derceto Manor's layout. That's one improvement Resident Evil brought to the survival horror format.

The next room was a bathroom, so I searched it and found a first aid case. Then I opened the case and found a flask, with Jeremy Hartwood's initials on it. I'm not usually all that keen on drinking mysterious fluids I've found in unlabelled flasks, especially when it looks like aftershave. But it was in a first aid kit so it has to be good for me, right?

Carnby gulped the whole thing down in one go and it turned out to be a health potion. You'd think that'd be a bit of a waste, seeing as I haven't taken damage yet, but it actually added extra health. I was at 20 hitpoints, now I have 30. This visit to a haunted mansion's actually doing Carnby a lot of good.

Alright, I'm going to open the final door and leave this cursed corridor behind.

Oh fuck, there's a scorpion demon guarding the stairs. It's not actually doing anything, it's just standing there, but the music's getting tense and I'm getting a bit concerned. I tried going the other way, but there's a second scorpion demon guarding the other way down too. So I tried leaping over the railing, but Carnby doesn't have a jump option in his actions menu so that didn't work out.

I'm pretty sure that I have gotten downstairs in this game before, but I have zero memory of how to get past these guys. Oh, oh, I just thought of one way of getting down. I have a feeling it isn't going to work out well for me, but I feel like I have to try it once before I leave this floor just to see what happens.
 

Oh. It turns out that walking on the fragile floorboards is instant death. The end. I didn't even get a glimpse of the floor below!

Holy crap, that's a game over screen. It's the kind of image that makes me want to put Alone in the Dark 2 and 3 on right now so I can get Carnby killed in them too and see what their game over screens look like. I can't even tell what's going on here, but it looks like a dragon snake monster is dismayed to see evil soap bubbles pouring out of the front door of Derceto Manor and filling the sky. All I know is that the villain is huge and has a cape made of skulls.

These are presumably Lovecraftian monsters, some of them anyway, because this was almost the first game in Infogrames' Call of Cthulhu series, with the name licenced from Chaosium's Lovecraftian RPG. It seems that it kept the monsters but lost the explicit link when Chaosium discovered that the gameplay had nothing to do with their role playing game.

If only they'd waited until they'd seen the box art:

I mean this is the second edition Alone in the Dark cover I'm showing here, but the first one is pretty much a less dramatic version of the same thing. In fact the first three Alone in the Dark games all have someone standing there with a lantern. The first edition box also has 'Virtual Dreams' written across the top, but Infogrames dropped that idea and just made it the Alone in the Dark series in the end.

They did make two Call of Cthulhu games though, Shadow of the Comet and Prisoner of Ice, and they're not RPGs either, so I guess they worked something out with Chaosium in the end.

Wait, the two small mirrors! These scorpion demons don't much look like Medusa, but there are two of them, and that Golden Fleece book's only purpose was to make me think about using mirrors against enemies. Plus there's even a convenient little statue next to each which could hold a mirror. Did I figure this out?

The answer is...

...yes, I figured it out all by myself! The mirrors killed the monsters and opened up the stairs. That's two more items I've gotten rid of from my inventory and another floor completed.

Now I've got this new floor with all these doors to check, and I've never seen any of it before. In fact the first door I chose actually took me down another flight of stairs, so I've got two floors full of doors to explore! The game's really opened up now. Well, except for one door which slammed shut in front of me while laughing in my face. I thought that was pretty rude.

Alright, this seems like a pretty good place to stop playing... is what I'd usually say. But this time I'm going to stick with the game and try to finish the whole thing, so if you want to see how far I manage to get then click the button for part two!

Though if you're a survival horror fan and you haven't played the game before, maybe it'd be better to stop here. Because next time I am going to spoil as much of the plot as I can, and you might enjoy playing this one for yourself.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 2

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I've been playing a lot of games beginning with 'A' this year for some reason, not sure
how that happened. I'm at 42% 'A' games right now (and I've hit a 'W' rating of 17%).

Anyway, thanks for reading what I thought about the start of Alone in the Dark! You can leave a comment right now if you want, you don't have to wait until you've read part 2.