The new Alone in the Dark remake doesn’t do anything especially noteworthy, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s… cromulent.
I don’t know why this game exists, other than Resident Evil has made a comeback so this, the progenitor of the horror genre, needs to make a comeback too. That being said, it’s actually not a bad game. In fact it manages to hit all of the beats of a survival horror game, but that’s about it.
Alone in the Dark is both a remake and not a remake, because it follows the general story of the original game but throws in some details and ideas from games later in the the series. It has the over-the-shoulder camera view of games in the early 2000s and leans into the Alone in the Dark cult horror nonsense. Seeing David Harbour and Jodie Comer in this is kind of throws me off, too. They’re almost too realistic and out of place, but somehow that also adds to a bit of the campy weirdness. It’s basically a straight survival horror game displaced out of time.
It’s rough around the edges and it’s not doing anything particularly great, but I like the story and I like that it’s very true to what it aims to be. It’s the kind of game that I want to play right now, nestled between the open world of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and the soul-sucking of Balatro. But if we pine for the olden days of survival horror, then this will satisfy without making us overthink anything.
It’s fine.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on the April 2, 2024 episode of The SideQuest.
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