Alone in the Dark (2024) Review

[ObsiEez]

About me:

 

Hey there everyone! As some of you may or may not know I recently became a writer for PowerPyx, so I decided to write reviews for the games I ended up getting early & worked on. This is my first real project on PowerPyx, so this is also my first real review & hopefully you guys end up finding the review informative or as a great space to discuss the game outside of just trophies.

 

Introduction:

 

Alone in the Dark 2024 is a reimagining of the original Alone in the Dark from 1992 that fails to capture the essence of the first game & what made beloved by so many. From being an extremely buggy game to just being an uninteresting game in general, there is very little overall to redeem the game.

 

Trophies:

 

The trophies are extremely straight forward with most of them being story related, with a few miscellaneous ones there as well. The list is your typical Survival Horror list which contains your no healing run, your speedrun, and collecting everything. You'll also need to get all 5 unique endings in the game as well.

 

There are a few buggy trophies to be found in the game, with the biggest being You Can't Keep Me Out! basically be unobtainable if you own the digital version as of Version 1.00.003. As of Version 1.00.005, this bug has been fixed, so the trophy can be earn like normal now.

 

Bugs:

 

I started the game towards the start of the March & while I did play the game early, it was way buggier than a game this close to launch should have been. I wrote it off thinking that it'd be fixed since every issue was reported back to the devs pretty quickly stating that a patch will be coming to address the issues. Day 1 patch drops & only fixed like 3 issues were reported out of like 20. Not to mention adding even more bugs to the regular game itself.

 

Some of the bugs I encounter I'll list below.

• There were instances of not being able to pick up certain items like melee weapons, ammo, or sometimes even key items. A simple save & reload would fix the issue, but it was the fact I had to keep doing it.
• Due to either bugs or even poor game design, I would soft lock myself quite frequently which would force me to load an older save. An example is in Chapter 4 where you're forced to go to a specific part of the game & all the doors are locked except the ones you need to go through. If you open one of those doors then enter the room and turn back around to go into the room you came from, the door would close and then lock, leaving you stuck in that room.
• Swapping weapons and aiming too quick sometimes broke the animations which would cause you to have the shotgun model on, but you're actually using the pistol for example.
• Hitboxes were extremely broken and sometimes led to you getting stuck if you dodged wrong or got pushed by an enemy. I had plenty of times I got stuck in a place I shouldn't have been able to get too because an enemy hit me past the hitbox.
• I died as I got onto a ladder to climb down, which forced me to get stuck at 0 HP. Even though I was dead, I could still move around freely, but I couldn't interact with anything. So I saved the game & reloaded, which for some reason put me under the map without the ability to move, which this forced me to reload an earlier save.
• Prior to the Day 1 patch, the lagniappes collectibles would sometimes delete themselves upon beating the game even though they were suppose to transfer between playthroughs since endings are linked them to. That glitch being present that far into development was unacceptable.
• In a similar vein to the previous point, 2 of the endings are unobtainable, even after the Day 1 patch. Putting the fact the related trophies are therefore unobtainable as well aside, this is absolutely unacceptable that a bug prevents someone from getting certain endings in the game completely & should have been of the upmost priority to fix.

 

Story & Characters:

 

The story is about Edward & Emily coming to Derceto in order to find Jeremy Hartwood who seems to have gone missing there. While the premise is interesting, it falls flat since very little actually happens in the story to hook you and make you interested in its conclusion, especially when every plot point feels rushed and ultimately meaningless. I can't personally speak on 2 of the endings, with them being unobtainable at the moment, but the 1 secret ending that is possible is basically just a goofy easter egg.

 

As for the characters, they're all extremely 1 dimensional and pretty uninteresting. They offer very little in terms of pushing the plot and you don't get to interact with them very often for them to really add much of any value to the overall experience. When they do show it, it's usually a few lines of unimportant dialogue that haphazardly explains why they're there to try & make the game feel more real, but falls extremely flat with how rigid the dialogue feels.

 

Audio Design:

 

Audio design is arguably one of, if not the most important part of a horror game as it can easily make or break your experience. Some of the best horror games to ever come out heavily rely on cleverly crafted audio design to instill players with certain types of emotions that will really set the tone of the moment. Alone in the Dark fails to do this as they barely focus on the audio design aspect and when they do, they make it unbearable to listen to since it feels like the audio levels of the game have been horribly mixed. In Chapter 3 there is a section where you're being chased and to sell home how adrenaline pumping it is, they blast extremely loud noises that even as a hard of hearing person, required me to take off my headphones every time I got to that section due to how loud it was, constantly peaking my audio levels in OBS.

 

Gameplay:

 

One of the biggest problem with the game falls onto how it plays. The movement feels extremely stiff and the dodge animation is absolutely awful, with your character model often clipping through objects since their model moves, but not their hitbox. The gunplay is also extremely stiff, which can make the very few sections where you actually get to fight enemies a pain to do. Everything about this game feels stiff, which can make playing it a chore.

 

The puzzles in the game, if you even want to call them that, are some of the most straight forward puzzles & they reuse the same puzzle concepts over & over again. A majority of the puzzles in the game is block puzzles where you just move blocks around to create images or to connect the blocks to an already existing piece, which gets extremely boring after doing it for like the 5th time.

 

The atmosphere of the game, which is one of the most important aspects when it comes to any game in the horror genre, is extremely lacking. How are you suppose to instill a sense of uneasiness in the player when the atmosphere is virtually non-existent? In Alone in the Dark, you know when you're safe & you know when you're not at all times. There is never a moment in the game where you feel a sense of dread like something bad is about to happen , because nothing bad ever happens. Coupled with the audio design problems from the previous section, this leads the player to just be completely detached from the game, which you really don't want from any game in the horror genre. The game also doesn't takes advantage of the PS5 controllers haptic feedback to further add to the atmosphere, which further bumps the games atmosphere.

 

Score & Final Thoughts:

 

Overall, the game is extremely mediocre and plummeted even further down in score due to its plethora of bugs. My final score would have to be 5/10, bumped down to a 3/10 due to all the bugs. If all the bugs eventually get fixed, it won't change the fact the game is still extremely mediocre & is an absolute disgrace to the legacy of the first Alone in the Dark. I do not recommend this game even to massive fans of the Survival Horror genre, & I especially don't recommend it to any fans of the original Alone in the Dark. Even on sale, just don't buy it as there are plenty of better Survival Horror games out there.

Edited March 28 by ObsiEez

[modest_undue1]

Looks like I'm not picking this up, thank you for saving me and my wallet 😁

 

[Pumpkin Head Cthulhu]

18 minutes ago, 1eudnu_tsedom said:

Looks like I'm not picking this up, thank you for saving me and my wallet 😁

 

i concur, gamefly it is eventually.

[Cybermonk39]

it is clear that the game is sorely lacking in know-how, a disjointed scenario which nevertheless starts well, a ton of bugs (collision, audio which cuts out and which remains the same even when reloading this save or an older one, hitbox, rigidity.. .

and of course the buggy trophies

 

[diskdocx]

IIRC the original wasn’t exactly a masterpiece. Seems like the remaster is authentic to the source material.

[ObsiEez]

1 hour ago, diskdocx said:

IIRC the original wasn’t exactly a masterpiece. Seems like the remaster is authentic to the source material.

It wasn't a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. But it was unique & did things no other games have done around that time. It paved the way for the Survival Horror genre. Without it, we wouldn't have had games like Silent Hill or Resident Evil which took huge inspiration from the original Alone in the Dark. This reimagining completely changes nearly every aspect of the original & distorts it in a way that it becomes unrecognizable.

[DividedByMankind]

7 hours ago, ObsiEez said:

About me:

 

Hey there everyone! As some of you may or may not know I recently became a writer for PowerPyx, so I decided to write reviews for the games I ended up getting early & worked on. This is my first real project on PowerPyx, so this is also my first real review & hopefully you guys end up finding the review informative or as a great space to discuss the game outside of just trophies.

 

Introduction:

 

Alone in the Dark 2024 is a reimagining of the original Alone in the Dark from 1992 that fails to capture the essence of the first game & what made beloved by so many. From being an extremely buggy game to just being an uninteresting game in general, there is very little overall to redeem the game.

 

Trophies:

 

The trophies are extremely straight forward with most of them being story related, with a few miscellaneous ones there as well. The list is your typical Survival Horror list which contains your no healing run, your speedrun, and collecting everything. You'll also need to get all 5 unique endings in the game as well.

 

Now well everything sounds alright at a glance, the fact that as of Version 1.00.003 (The Day 1 patch version) there are a total of 3 unobtainable trophies, which 2 of them being endings is absolutely unacceptable. Especially when the issues have been done for weeks. There was another unobtainable trophy before the Day 1 patch, but that one was fixed. People will just have to cross their fingers that they devs decide to fix these issues quickly, but the fact that something as big as endings being unobtainable wasn't fixed Day 1 doesn't instill me, or many other players with much hope.

 

Bugs:

 

I started the game towards the start of the March & while I did play the game early, it was way buggier than a game this close to launch should have been. I wrote it off thinking that it'd be fixed since every issue was reported back to the devs pretty quickly stating that a patch will be coming to address the issues. Day 1 patch drops & only fixed like 3 issues were reported out of like 20. Not to mention adding even more bugs to the regular game itself.

 

Some of the bugs I encounter I'll list below.

• There were instances of not being able to pick up certain items like melee weapons, ammo, or sometimes even key items. A simple save & reload would fix the issue, but it was the fact I had to keep doing it.
• Due to either bugs or even poor game design, I would soft lock myself quite frequently which would force me to load an older save. An example is in Chapter 4 where you're forced to go to a specific part of the game & all the doors are locked except the ones you need to go through. If you open one of those doors then enter the room and turn back around to go into the room you came from, the door would close and then lock, leaving you stuck in that room.
• Swapping weapons and aiming too quick sometimes broke the animations which would cause you to have the shotgun model on, but you're actually using the pistol for example.
• Hitboxes were extremely broken and sometimes led to you getting stuck if you dodged wrong or got pushed by an enemy. I had plenty of times I got stuck in a place I shouldn't have been able to get too because an enemy hit me past the hitbox.
• I died as I got onto a ladder to climb down, which forced me to get stuck at 0 HP. Even though I was dead, I could still move around freely, but I couldn't interact with anything. So I saved the game & reloaded, which for some reason put me under the map without the ability to move, which this forced me to reload an earlier save.
• Prior to the Day 1 patch, the lagniappes collectibles would sometimes delete themselves upon beating the game even though they were suppose to transfer between playthroughs since endings are linked them to. That glitch being present that far into development was unacceptable.
• In a similar vein to the previous point, 2 of the endings are unobtainable, even after the Day 1 patch. Putting the fact the related trophies are therefore unobtainable as well aside, this is absolutely unacceptable that a bug prevents someone from getting certain endings in the game completely & should have been of the upmost priority to fix.

 

Story & Characters:

 

The story is about Edward & Emily coming to Derceto in order to find Jeremy Hartwood who seems to have gone missing there. While the premise is interesting, it falls flat since very little actually happens in the story to hook you and make you interested in its conclusion, especially when every plot point feels rushed and ultimately meaningless. I can't personally speak on 2 of the endings, with them being unobtainable at the moment, but the 1 secret ending that is possible is basically just a goofy easter egg.

 

As for the characters, they're all extremely 1 dimensional and pretty uninteresting. They offer very little in terms of pushing the plot and you don't get to interact with them very often for them to really add much of any value to the overall experience. When they do show it, it's usually a few lines of unimportant dialogue that haphazardly explains why they're there to try & make the game feel more real, but falls extremely flat with how rigid the dialogue feels.

 

Audio Design:

 

Audio design is arguably one of, if not the most important part of a horror game as it can easily make or break your experience. Some of the best horror games to ever come out heavily rely on cleverly crafted audio design to instill players with certain types of emotions that will really set the tone of the moment. Alone in the Dark fails to do this as they barely focus on the audio design aspect and when they do, they make it unbearable to listen to since it feels like the audio levels of the game have been horribly mixed. In Chapter 3 there is a section where you're being chased and to sell home how adrenaline pumping it is, they blast extremely loud noises that even as a hard of hearing person, required me to take off my headphones every time I got to that section due to how loud it was, constantly peaking my audio levels in OBS.

 

Gameplay:

 

One of the biggest problem with the game falls onto how it plays. The movement feels extremely stiff and the dodge animation is absolutely awful, with your character model often clipping through objects since their model moves, but not their hitbox. The gunplay is also extremely stiff, which can make the very few sections where you actually get to fight enemies a pain to do. Everything about this game feels stiff, which can make playing it a chore.

 

The puzzles in the game, if you even want to call them that, are some of the most straight forward puzzles & they reuse the same puzzle concepts over & over again. A majority of the puzzles in the game is block puzzles where you just move blocks around to create images or to connect the blocks to an already existing piece, which gets extremely boring after doing it for like the 5th time.

 

The atmosphere of the game, which is one of the most important aspects when it comes to any game in the horror genre, is extremely lacking. How are you suppose to instill a sense of uneasiness in the player when the atmosphere is virtually non-existent? In Alone in the Dark, you know when you're safe & you know when you're not at all times. There is never a moment in the game where you feel a sense of dread like something bad is about to happen , because nothing bad ever happens. Coupled with the audio design problems from the previous section, this leads the player to just be completely detached from the game, which you really don't want from any game in the horror genre. The game also doesn't takes advantage of the PS5 controllers haptic feedback to further add to the atmosphere, which further bumps the games atmosphere.

 

Score & Final Thoughts:

 

Overall, the game is extremely mediocre and plummeted even further down in score due to its plethora of bugs. My final score would have to be 5/10, bumped down to a 3/10 due to all the bugs. If all the bugs eventually get fixed, it won't change the fact the game is still extremely mediocre & is an absolute disgrace to the legacy of the first Alone in the Dark. I do not recommend this game even to massive fans of the Survival Horror genre, & I especially don't recommend it to any fans of the original Alone in the Dark. Even on sale, just don't buy it as there are plenty of better Survival Horror games out there.

Worst review ever! And you still played it enough to do 92% of the trophies. Lol a big lol

 

 

Also dont listen to this ! Its a smaller studio that mind this game, which means the game will be a faulty game at launch.

 

That will eventually be fixed. 

 

Check YT gameplay and decide yourself if you like it or not. If your a big fan like me of survival horror games! You prob will have a blast with it.

Edited March 22 by DividedByMankind

[ObsiEez]

6 minutes ago, DividedByMankind said:

Worst review ever! And you still played it enough to do 92% of the trophies. Lol a big lol

I mean, I kind of had to since I was given the game early specifically to work on the guide for it. Besides, what kind of review would you trust that drops the game instantly instead of playing the entire way through?  Absolutely none

Edited March 22 by ObsiEez

[ObsiEez]

20 minutes ago, DividedByMankind said:

Also dont listen to this ! Its a smaller studio that mind this game, which means the game will be a faulty game at launch.

 

That will eventually be fixed. 

"Which means the game will be faulty at launch". There's being faulty, then there is having 2 endings, not trophies, actual endings to the game, being unobtainable. The studio knew about this issue since the start of the month as we reported it to them & even acknowledged them. There is absolutely 0 excuse as to why something as integral to the game as an ending should be unobtainable at launch & the fact you even want to defend it is the reason games launch in these poor states & get away with it.

 

This game was already delayed 3 months before it launched. There is 0 excuse to why it should be in this state.

Edited March 22 by ObsiEez

[Sarsky]

I loved this game, bugs suck but i had fun, gameplay has issues for sure but i felt like i had a blast every playthrough, and i loved survival horror games, ill say its 7/10 for me but i can understand why others may not like it.

 

A lot of flaws but its just such a fun game if your into genre, like characters and story telling and the puzzles are fun and not tedious.

[FireWalkLikeMe]

I've finished this game three times now while opening all doors/locks and without ever drinking from the flask (twice with Edward, once with Emily). Neither the Teetotaller nor You Can't Keep Me Out want to pop for me. Honestly, until there's a certified fully-working patch, I'm done with this game. Nevermind the trophy bugs, the game itself is quite broken. I agree that it's absolutely embarassing to release a game in this state.