Now We Know | Alone In The Dark | part 9 episode 1

Long before the Evil became Resident, the Hill fell Silent, and the Space turned Dead, there was another seminal survival horror classic that established a lot of the fright-heavy fundamentals that would stalk the shadowy hallways of the genre for decades to come. That game was 1992’s Alone in the Dark, which featured 3D graphics that were groundbreaking at the time, as well as a genre-defining emphasis on puzzle-solving, inventory management, and combat that involved just as much flight as fight. Now developer Pieces Interactive has reimagined the aging original in the form of a new Alone in the Dark - but although it features some surprising environments to explore and a fairly compelling supernatural mystery to unravel, its shallow combat and basic enemy design ensures that it’s not quite the triumphant haunted homecoming it could have been.
As was the case with the 1992 original, Alone in the Dark allows you to take control of either private investigator Edward Carnby or his client Emily Hartwood, an unlikely pair who travel together to a secluded estate in 1920s Louisiana called Derceto Manor in search of Emily’s missing uncle, Jeremy. Whereas the original 3D models of Edward and Emily featured polygon counts so low it looked like they’d been assembled from a spilt bag of coloured tortilla chips, here they’re played by David Harbour (Stranger Things) and Jodie Comer (Killing Eve), respectively. The two recognisable leads deliver credible performances amidst the incredible events that unfold around them, and Harbour in particular seems perfectly cast as a hardboiled detective who wouldn’t balk at a glass of bourbon for breakfast.
Derceto Manor has been reimagined as a psychiatric hospital of sorts this time around, and there’s an expanded cast of residents and members of staff to interact with over the course of the investigation, the bulk of whom are quirky, Southern Gothic types who seem as though they’ve stumbled right out of A Streetcar Named Desire. These interrogations grow increasingly unsettling as the missing-person mystery takes a twisted turn toward the paranormal, and it becomes harder to separate the actual setting from the abstract. What followed was an at times fanciful and often fascinating journey into darkness. I enjoyed piecing together Jeremy’s fate via scraps of evidence collected throughout Derceto, as well as determining exactly what sort of dark magic was poisoning the roots of the Hartwood family tree.