Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare Preview

Fear the dark!

Alone in the dark was one of the first horror games on PC. It appeared in 1993 to bring a pretty scary story (which made my sleep uneasy for a while) and a great combination of 2D and 3D graphics. As that apparently worked well the game got sequels in the form of several annual installments. Then, nothing happened for about five years during which games like Resident Evil, Sanitarium and Nocturne, appeared. And then, all of a sudden the original developers and Infogrames announced the fourth installment called: The New Nightmare to be published for PC, PlayStation, Dreamcast and Game Boy Color.

No way I'll sleep there!

FREEZE, you motherfucker!

It's time for a reunion with our occult detective Edward Carnby, this time on the Shadow Island off the coast of Maine in the middle of the winter, when he finds the body of his best friend Charles Fiske who was apparently on the track of some three ancients tablets, which are rumored to have the power to unlock enormous quantities of dangerous energy. What actually happened? Who is the murderer? Did Charles Fiske know too much? Was the murderer a human being at all? Carnby's got some trouble brewing...

To make things slightly less gloomy, our detective got a female companion (secondary playable character), a girl named Aline Cedrac, a somewhat mystic high-spirited adventurer and anthropologist which brings some more mystery to the game as her motives to be on the Shadow island remain in the shadows.

It seems that this installment has all the tendencies to justify its 'horror thriller' epithet with its interactivity and mysterious and scary atmosphere. The title gets more meaning as your wondering through aspects of good and evil, light and darkness becomes much more complex. Nothing will be black or white - good or bad. The creatures will tend to stick to the darkness and more frequently run away from your flashlight than they would from your gun. Unfortunately, the flashlight batteries wear off after a short time... Apart from Aline and Edward there will be some ten more characters, mostly island inhabitants, and it will take quite some time to get to know them and realize if they are truly friends or foes, if they are helping r hindering your efforts in unveiling the truth about the Shadow Island...

The principle of the game remains the same. Alone in the Dark is a mixture of action, interesting puzzles and a great story. The characters are 3D objects, but the background is pre-rendered. If you never played an Alone in the Dark game, you have probably seen something like that in Grim Fandango or the Longest Journey... The fact that this is the first installment of Alone in the Dark that uses 3D hardware acceleration only goes to prove how much the whole serial came afore its time. And this game will surely do good with dynamic lighting and volumetric shadows. As for the 2D graphics, there will be about 1300 detailed, pre-rendered backgrounds, which can be viewed from twice as much angles thanks to different camera settings.

I don't know if there is going to be a multiplayer mode and what that might look like. In my humble opinion, Alone in the Dark should be played according to its title.