I haven't been playing video games much until recently. Been in a long transitional period and I either didn't have the time, or i was painting pictures or working on my next book or the games weren't anything to complain about. I've had the original Alone in the Dark for Windows for a while. I’ll be damned if I can get it to work on my Win7 with DOS Box or whatever. I do still have my Win98 computer which I theoretically keep for playing my old PC games. Haven’t hooked it up to try. Anyway, some time ago I stumbled upon Alone in the Dark in the Apple Store for iOS/tablet. It was like 99¢ or $1.99. Who the hell would want this, I thought. Is there really a significant market of massive nerds wanting to play this esoteric, clunky, old PC title on a touch screen? I bought it. It was on my horror game backlog and so cheap, might as well.
Alone in the Dark is credited with being the first 3D survival horror game. It allows you to play an adventure as one of two different characters like in AitD New Nightmare and of course one of those characters is the recurring protagonist, Edward Carnby who looks considerably less gritty but more dapper than his later incarnations and I’m fairly certain he may challenge you to fisticuffs if you disrespect his alma mater. I played the game a little, awkwardly duking it out with monsters in the attic that looked like life sized animate origami monstrosities and then I got stuck and stopped which is my problem with digital games. I just don’t possess the same drive to finish them. I picked the game up again like a year later, (now) and continued on.
Other similarities to New Nightmare include going to investigate at a haunted mansion and the backgrounds all being pre rendered images with a static view which I’m not really a fan of. Your control and view of your immediate environment suffers significantly as your character can be in and out of view and depicted in starkly different sizes and angles. There’s always the possibility that an enemy is directly in your path but hidden out of frame. These and your lack of depth perception can often make combat difficult.
The controls are sluggish and every time you wish to perform an action like attack or search you have to select it from a menu and then perform it. Edward is SO damn slow. The only character I’ve seen walk this slow is Nigel from Lost Crown and if you know who that is I love you. Edward can actually run but that presents its own problems which I’ll get to later. Edward’s sloth-like movements aren’t so bad since the majority of monsters you combat are just about as slow.
The game is non-linear so you’re just wandering around this NOT DARK house looking for items that will help you defeat enemies that are in the way or unlock doors or otherwise advance to new areas. One thing I found odd was all the junk you can accumulate in your inventory. There’s so much waste. When you get a first aid kit it’s not even a first aid kit. You open it up and there’s a flask inside and then you drink the flask and get health. Then in your inventory you have the empty kit box and the empty flask. So to make room in your inventory you have to toss them on the ground somewhere hopefully out of the way because they’re going to be there forever and if you walk over them it’s going to ask if you want to pick them up. Why can’t it just be a one part kit that is consumed when you use it? Also you’re presumably now walking around a poltergeist house wasted after chugging a whole flask.
There are three parts in the game where you need to use your lantern, which needs fuel and a lighter, to see. You’ll walk through a door and suddenly the entire screen will be black which always makes me think the game crashed again. I thought it was strange that you pull out the lamp and suddenly the room is illuminated homogeneously like every other room like the lantern is just a thing you hold that turns on the lightswitch. I know it’s an old game and I wasn’t expecting it to produce real time lighting effects but they could at least prerender the room darker. In fact they could do that for a lot of rooms because there was a distinct lack of spooky atmosphere. At the end of the game there is a segment where you go through a dark maze with your lantern. Just like the rooms all screens are uniformly illuminated while holding the lantern. The view is a bird’s eye almost top down view which essentially makes the maze something you’d find on a kid’s menu placemat. There are no enemies or items. It’s just you in a maze that you can completely see. What was the point, I thought. It would be one thing if it was a different view but there are no secrets. It’s just a matter of looking to see if the path goes through to the next screen and then walking there. It wasn’t until later when I watched Youtube footage from a PC playthrough that I saw what it was supposed to be, a little circle of illuminated area around the character with the rest of the screen masked off in black. What the hell? What else have I been missing on this shitty tablet port? Oh I remember, the music and sounds WEREN’T WORKING EITHER.
There are over a dozen different enemies in this game and only four of them can be killed with a gun. In fact a lot of them can’t even be killed at all. If you ever wonder if something or someone is an enemy. It is. So don’t touch it or you’ll probably die. That ghost sitting in the armchair? It’s going to be sitting there till the end of the game. Some of these things I understand but then there’s that pirate that I’m only allowed to kill with a sword and not the gun. Why? The enemies that can be killed with a gun aren’t worth the bullets and then the stronger ones are invincible or have to be killed with a special item. The worst of all is the rats in the cellar. You can’t kill them! They’re ordinary rats and you can’t kill them! You can attack them and they bleed and get knocked away but they don’t die. You just have to look around and accept that rats will probably be biting you.
There are some odd weapons you’ll find in the house including knives, swords and even a bow with only three arrows. For firearms there are two guns, a revolver and what the game claims is a rifle but it looks like a pump action shotgun and it uses “cartridges” that look like shotgun shells so I wasn’t too clear on that. It takes you two seconds to aim and fire it so make sure you’re far away from the enemy.
After you finish stuff in the house, you go underground into the caves and then shit gets real. If there was ever a game that shouldn’t expect you to be agile and accurate, this is it… and Ultima 8. Now I don’t know what this game is like as it was intended, (on PC,) but it sure as shit can’t be better with touch controls. There’s a directional pad in one corner of the screen and the action button in the other. It’s a walk, adjust, walk, adjust, walk, adjust affair typical of the early 3D Playstation games but worse because it lacks tactile feedback. When you go underground the first thing you have to do is run across a breakaway death bridge. It has no rails or ropes and the doorway at the end is smaller than the width of the bridge so you have to line that shit up on your best guess without seeing and gun it in one straight shot. If that wasn’t bad enough, getting into a run is actually difficult too. You’re supposed to double tap the forward arrow and hold but it works like 25% of the time. So if you get all that to align you immediately have to run down a tunnel while being chased by a graboid that will kill you on touch. The escape route from its path takes you directly into the most fucking agressive mole monster, (or whatever these are supposed to be,) in the game with no warning. And it’s right in the blind spot between views so you’ll probably have to kill it without being able to see it. Once it starts hitting you, you might as well reload the game because you can’t escape and you can’t get a hit in between its blows. It’s the action adventure equivalent of a marlboro hitting your party with bad breath.
A lot of annoying stuff down here including narrow breakaway catwalks, invincible enemies and respawning enemies but on the plus side I can apparently walk on water.
When I got to the boss of the game I didn’t even realize it was the boss of the game. It’s a tree growing on a tomb surrounded by water and one other enemy, oh and it shoots fireballs at you. I was annoyed by the stupid fireballs which were hard to dodge and make it difficult to explore. I found a hook which I used to unlock a door and then left. It wasn’t until looking at a walkthrough that I knew what that was all about. Can you imagine that? Has that EVER happened to you? You suddenly drop in on the final boss of the game and you’re like “Hey, I’m trying to explore a Lovecraftian cave system here. Can you maybe cut it out with that fireball shit? It’s making things kind of hard. Okay, I’m leaving now. Thanks for nothing. What was his problem?” You’re not supposed to be able to leave a boss chamber or screen in a video game until you defeat the boss! I thought that was standard. If I’d been locked in there I would have gathered that I needed to accomplish more there instead of continuing to wander around like a dumbass revisiting all of the places I’d been. I eventually had to consult a walkthrough and then a playthrough to figure out that you’re supposed to use the pendant on the stone marker beneath the tree and then light your lantern and throw it at the tree to burn it. Bitch, the tree was just shooting fireballs at me. Why would I try to burn it? Though I guess I did figure out I had to shoot an arrow at an arrow shooting painting. Maybe I’d know this shit if I’d read all of those stupid lore books I kept finding in the house. So I did what it said and nothing happened when I threw the lantern. I did it over a dozen times from different angles but it would not burn the tree. Eventually I said screw it, I’ve beaten it enough. I’m done. I watched the escape and the end sequence on Youtube. 
One interesting observation I made about this game is that it’s probably the game that invented the dragged away game over screen you get in later games like Silent Hill 3 and Haunting Ground.
It’s short. It’s unexpectedly more playable than I thought. It was the pioneer of a genre but in the end I’m left with one burning question: Did this game actually scare anyone when it came out? I don’t know. I tried to research it but I couldn’t find any accounts which would have to be either magazine scans or Johnny-come-lately online reviews from the internet’s precambrian era but those would have been on sites/servers that have all died off. The game’s very dated and I’m pretty jaded so it’s impossible for me to gauge its worth in this area. Not only that but I didn’t even get the full experience. It will remain a mystery...
