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Alone In The Dark review: a neatly crafted reboot that seems afraid to step into the unknownBad manors
Bad manors
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
On the downside, however, the division between what you do in the house compared to the external sequences is a little too pronounced. For the most part, the monsters you inevitably encounter only exist in those faraway places. Occasionally, finding a key item or solving a puzzle in Decerto causes a small pocket of the dreamworld to erupt around you, and you have to despatch a few ghouls to restore normality. But otherwise the house itself is oddly safe, like aResident Evilgame in which someone has herded all the zombies below stairs, and no amount of creaky ambience can convince you otherwise.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
Exploring the house thus tends to boil down to the mechanics of the exercise – plenty of map reading, loads of matching keys with doors, and a smattering of puzzles. And while it’s all neatly arranged, there’s not much among these pieces to set either the pulse or the brain racing. On a few occasions, a ‘puzzle’ equates to picking up an item, such as a switch lever, and ferrying it a few yards to its home. More cerebral activities, meanwhile, tend to fall into two camps – deciphering short passcodes from clues or placing and rotating tiles to form a picture. Logical they may be, but it’s such standard fare that, when one puzzle has you fixing a literal boiler plate, you might conclude there’s elaborate self-parody afoot.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/THQ Nordic
It helps also that the latter stages of the game capitalise on groundwork laid in the more predictable first half. The locations you find yourself sucked into become that bit more intricate, with multi-part puzzles to wriggle through, and some combat situations that force you to move through the gears. Plus, each time you reemerge in Decerto, with everyone else none the wiser as to what you’ve been up to, the notion that the whole thing might be in your head starts to grip. True, there’s nothing especially original about a story that blurs the lines between madness and the paranormal, but it does inject doubt and paranoia into your investigation, which only makes you long to unravel the truth more. While spending time alone in the dark may not be as uncomfortable as it should be this time, then, with all the changes it may still be worth peering into the void, to see what returns your gaze.
