I am afraid of a lot of things in video games. Sharks mostly, but there are other things too. However, nothing scared me as much as in 1992 Alone in the dark.
The classic from Infogrames is one of the most important horror games of all time. All of silent Hill to resident Evil is indebted to you Alone in the dark. Its mix of igamesnewsal characters with static backgrounds was quite common at the time, but using it for a horror game was something new and terrifying. For most games, limiting the camera while allowing 3D movement was just a visual fad of the time Alone in the dark it makes the horror take on a cinematic quality, with each room being designed and presented in such a way that it scares you to death.
This use of technological constraints extended to animation of your character. The game’s playable characters – Edward Carnaby and Emily Hartwood – are about as limited and depicted in 1992 as possible, all of them dangling limbs, jagged faces, and shuffling walks.
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However, their slow, deliberate pace helps add tension to the game that a faster, more fluid character would skip. And it also helps the wicked; The zombies and monsters you fight in this game are clumsy, hideous creatures whose igamesnewsal frames in abstraction look creepier than they were elaborated.
Was remarkable too Alone in the dark Art design. When we think of horror games, we tend to think in terms of horror stereotypes like ruins, rain, and darkness. Resident Evil 7, Basically.
but Alone in the dark had none of it. You might expect convention in the first few steps as you walk down the driveway to a clearly haunted and abandoned old mansion, but as soon as you step inside you notice two things. This game is set on fire, and this game is colorful.
Alone in the dark The color palette is perhaps the most defining feature of the game. Where almost every other horror game in existence has been content to work with black, gray, and a splash of red, AitDs Plains are awash with green, burgundy, pink, and blue tones. It’s beautiful, in a way that ’90s interior design historians and PC gamers will appreciate best.
But for me, it’s also the source of the game’s greatest horror.
There is a great passage in the Half-life 2 Art book where Ken Birdwell talks about the hiring of artist Ted Blackman, who had just shown Gabe Newell an illustration of a dog monster with a huge tail in his portfolio. “Well, I thought what scared our audience?” Recalls Birdwell Blackman. “A lot of them are 14 year old boys, they’ve seen all the big brutal monsters with guns for their hands – it won’t really do it – so I guess what are their really fears? So I decided on something that would cause a homophobic response ”.
Real horror is not a stereotype. It increases your existing fears and throws them back in your face. I hate sharks because they are representative of the deep unknown beneath the waves (at 15 I almost drowned in the ocean) and I was scared of it Alone in the dark because it reminded me of my aunt’s house.
As a child, I would sometimes drive for a few hours with my parents and spend the weekends with my aunt, who lived in that old farmhouse in an orchard in the middle of nowhere. It was a nice house and I had a lot of fun there during the day, but at night this place would scare me to death.
I was born and raised in the city, so the fact that we lived in a single family house on top of a big hill kind of freaked me out. Looking out the windows and seeing … nothing sounds downright calm to my grown-up self, but as a child I found the loneliness and darkness unsettling.
The worst thing was the wind. Up on a hill the wind could really howl at night, and since the place was surrounded by trees, there was that constant sound as the branches swayed and banged against the windows of the house.
I have this crucial reminder of having to go to the bathroom one night when I was probably between 6 and 7 years old and leaving the light and warmth of the living room to walk down the hallway. It was pitch black and all I can remember is freezing halfway down the corridor when branches clattered against glass.
Fast forward to 1992 and … oh.
Oh no.
Big. Here I have been trying to enjoy this revolutionary new video game and was trapped in a childhood nightmare. Only now were zombies in there too.
For all Alone in the dark Efforts to scare people through animation, sound and level design, the biggest impact on my heart rate was simply the accident that made the haunted house look like my aunt’s house. Great job, video games.
If you’ve never played the game before, it’s available on PC marketplaces (and app stores if you’re desperate). And while it may seem creaky by modern standards, that’s half the point, and apart from the game’s open world, I think the nonlinear design has aged really well.
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