The Forgotten Impact of Alone in the Dark

Resident Evil is famous for coining the term survival horror. But when you start looking at games which came out before Resi, you start seeing games which would retroactively qualify for being in that genre. We could even go all the way back to games on the 8-bit micros.

In my video about how Resident Evil was inspired by Alone in the Dark, I pointed out that a lot of the things Resi is remembered for – a spooky mansion, tank controls, fighting zombies; that kind of thing – actually originated in the first Alone in the Dark game from 1992. The more I thought about it, the more I’ve convinced myself that Alone in the Dark didn’t just inspire Resident Evil, but a whole load of horror games have their roots in AitD. And maybe even a few things outside the gaming space, too.

The origins of Survival Horror

Alone in the Dark is a beautiful layered lasagna of good ideas. It’s a supernatural detective story with Lovecraftian setting, liberally seasoned with tense survival horror gameplay. Lasagna talk aside, AitD has this great pulpy, early 20th-Century setting which sets off the Lovecraft vibes perfectly.

At the beginning, we’re only told that there’s been a suicide up at the old Merceno Mansion. Our lead characters each have their own motivation for investigating the murder. Edward Carnby, the private investigator, is sent to find an old piano in the loft for an antique dealer. Emily Hartwood, the niece of the fella who hanged himself, also wants to find the piano because she thinks it contains Uncle Jeremy’s suicide note. Whether you choose Ed or Emily, Alone starts with you walking up the path to the doors of Derceto. There’s a POV shot in the opening cutscene, where you can see your character being watched. Monstrous hands grip the window frame, your character blissfully unaware. If you’re paying attention, you will notice items of interest on the way past which will be useful once the game gets going. The game kicks off in the mansion’s loft and off you go.

The piano is your first clue, that’s why you’re here. What’s fantastic is the game gives you nothing, here. Your first clue is the letter inside the piano. Ultimately that’s it. That’s what you’re here for. Mission accomplished. But unless you knew in advance, you’re suddenly attacked by monsters and I guarantee you either die right away or end up hurt and scared, with no idea what to do. In order to get out, you have to go down. Things will get weirder and more frightening before this night is through.

It’s the simple setting that kills in this opening. One fact. One damp crumbly old mansion, which opens the door to unknowable cosmic terrors. that makes this a quintessential Lovecraft experience.

Who is HP Lovecraft?

I appreciate there’s plenty of you who will know, but every day there are thousands of us who learn something for the first time. So. Very quickly. Howard Philips Lovecraft was an American horror author, most active during the 1920s and 30s. Lovecraft’s brand of horror wasn’t really ghosts and spooks, but was more concerned with the burgeoning discoveries of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

A lot of Lovecraft’s fiction asserts that we’re on the cusp of lifting the lid off some secret knowledge. And that knowledge is not something which was ever intended for human eyes or minds. HP had a big impact on American horror culture. Stephen King’s early works read like Lovecraft fan fiction. Ancient evils and hidden dimensions with short stories like The Mist, Graveyard Shift and Crouch End. And his novels It and Salem’s Lot have that same ancient evils vibe. I’ve made this case before, but it was probably Stephen King’s influence that saw this kind of horror at the forefront in the 1980s and early 90s. Films like Evil Dead, From Beyond and In The Mouth of Madness owe a debt to King and Lovecraft before him.

Back to to Derceto

Created by Infogrames and helmed by Fred Raynal, the creator of one of my favourite DOS games, AitD isn’t even the first adventure game based on the works of H.P Lovecraft. But it might have been the first time cosmic horror meets gumshoe detective. Supernatural detective fiction predates Lovecraft by quite a bit, but merging these two genres [in a computer game] is something I think Alone in the Dark did for the first time, and now it’s a staple part of the survival horror genre. Pretty neat!

For a survival horror game, AitD has colourful, almost comical graphics. It’s a horror film but the lights are still on. In fairness, Infogrames are doing a lot for 1992. Dynamic lighting hadn’t been invented yet. There wasn’t a lot of dark tones available on the video processors of the time. So they’re going for as muted and as dark a palette as they could. One thing that Alone does really well is sound. The creaking floors, the ticking clocks. The sudden jolting piano tones which indicate a monster attack is imminent. AitD does everything it can to ramp up the anxiety. And sometimes it fakes you out. Playing the monster attack jingle when there’s no monsters around! You quickly learn you can never trust this game.

What’s in the next room? Do I have enough health? Ammo? You never know enough to make an informed decision. Puzzles feel tense and the game’s insta-death traps keep you feeling like you’re constantly out of your depth and always seconds away from dying (because you are). A few old adventure games had this, and insta-death traps even made their way into Resident Evil. This sense that any wrong turn will kill you keeps you on edge the whole time. Alone is purposefully unfair at times. Offering you a way out of the mansion, only for it to be a cruel fake out, killing you for trusting it. From that first moment with the monsters jumping out in the loft, the game is never on your side.

We can see the inspiration of a supernatural investigation, a murder in a spooky old mansion, and sinister undergoings in the mansion basement not just in Resident Evil but in games like Black Mirror, Eternal Darkness, Amnesia. You name it. Think of every game which involves taking your character down through decending levels, fending off spooky ghosts, zombies and demons, as their surroundings get more and more mad. That started here, in Alone in the Dark.

The unfolding story

AitD’s story is pretty minimal unless you’re willing to hunt down and read the old books and letters and diaries you find. Like the letter in the loft, it’s up to you to find and read the right books to figure out the history of the mansion (The ones which don’t kill you outright). This is kind of rad because on the surface you can go “cool, monsters”, but if you’re willing to spend more time exploring, you’re rewarded with a story of slow but steadily-unfurling horror. As you progress down through the house, reading more of the documents covering the history of the mansion and progressing deeper into the caverns of Hell, you learn the true story of what the mansion was built on.

A story of occult mysticism stretching back centuries and an ancient evil that dwells below the mansion waiting to be awakened. Like The Shining, and Lovecraft’s The Cult, the exploration unpacks more and more terror, deepening your relationship with the horror and with the game itself. It reminds me of those stories where the more the character learns, the more they wish they’d never found out anything at all.

Let’s talk about tank controls

One thing a lot of early 3D games from this era are remembered for is the wacky tank controls and the wonky combat. Alone in the Dark is the daddy of bad controls. The combat is so janky, you’re constantly fighting against controls as much as the monsters. It’s a genius stroke because it feels like your character isn’t equipped to fight. Which they’re not. Your characters aren’t heroes. They’re normies trapped in a nightmare. The janky controls make combat feel close and frightening.

At one point, you get a sword. It breaks the first time you use it. You get a gun. It runs out of bullets almost immediately. Every time you feel safe, the game is constantly fucking with you. Keeping you on edge. You might be thinking about how this inspired games like Silent Hill or maybe even Clock Tower. But I think even more modern games like Condemned and Dead Space utilise this kind of tense, anxious combat with tools that aren’t up to the job. There’s not even that many monsters in the whole game. Maybe a dozen or so zombies, a handful of ghosts? But they live in your head. And one mutant chicken turning up can put you into such a panic that you might as well turn the PC off at the wall and just go to bed.

Sure, Resi did bolster up the gunplay. Alone in the Dark has something like 12 bullets in the whole game. It really focuses on the idea that direct confrontation is rarely the best option. A lot of games since AitD have taken this template and removed combat altogether, or stressed stealth in other ways. Games like Alien Isolation where you have to hide or create distractions. I feel like this is a more modern, perhaps more sophisticated expression of “The combat is awful and terrifying and hiding is easier”. But I maintain that this all started in 1992, with Alone in the Dark.

The foreboding atmosphere

If you know what you’re doing or if you’re following a guide, and you don’t care about exploring the mansion, you can get through Alone in about two hours. But it isn’t really that kind of game. Progress isn’t exactly gruelling. It’s one of those “you do a little better each time” type deals. Fuck it, I’ll do it. I don’t have any video essayist credentials to lose. It’s the Soulsborne of DOS games.

Having to learn every lesson the hard way, you can be stuck in Derceto for weeks. Hell maybe even years. I’ll bet there are people out there who never completed this game. Their little Edward or Emily is still there. Like an episode of the Twilight Zone or X-Files. Stuck in a perpetual night. Limbo in Derceto.

If you do get to the end, you’ll find yourself in an ancient chamber deep below the mansion, confronted with an evil that won’t let you leave. Until it’s silenced forever. The finally suddenly becomes about fire, explosions, and escape back up, up, up through the layers of Hell as the place falls apart. Finally, you escape. The sun rises. A new day. The horror is finally over (or is it lol)

It sounds like Resident Evil doesn’t it?

The most obvious example of Alone’s influence is in Resident Evil. Both Tokuro Fujiwara and Shinji Mikami stated that without Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil would have been a massively different game. So let’s unpack that for a bit.

Is Resi the most influential franchise ever? Possibly. Resident Evil changed the game and continues to change the face of the modern horror game. When Resi does something, everyone copies it. My thesis goes: If a game was inspired by Resident Evil, it was in turn inspired by Alone in the Dark. Even if the creators didn’t know that at the time. When I interviewed Cryo’s Olivier Lebourg, I asked him if Cryo’s Hellboy game was inspired by AitD he was like “No, we were inspired by Resident Evil”.

But without AitD there would be no Resident Evil.

Without Alone in the Dark, there would be no Amnesia. No Evil Within. No Dark Souls. I’m not saying these games are directly inspired by AitD. I don’t know if we can draw a single, linear path from any given game through Resident Evil and then to AitD. But I’m saying that inspiration is a big complex web. And at the centre of that web sits Alone in the Dark.

If a game isn’t mechanicaly inspired by AitD. It might be aesthetically inspired. Maybe even emotionally. I’m just saying, If you’re creeping down corridors. That’s Alone in the Dark. If it’s in an old mansion, Alone in the Dark. If you’re fighting zombies or ghosts with limited resources, Alone in the Dark. If the story ends up being some bizarre cosmic headfuck. Alone in the Dark. Fuck is, Luigi’s Mansion is an Alone-in-the-Dark-like.

Now obviously I can just point at any modern game which uses Lovecrafty Eldritch horror as its setting and go “hurr that’s AitD”. But I don’t think that’s really what I’m talking about. The further away from Alone we get, the signal to noise ratio drops. Modern games don’t feel much like Alone at all. But every now and then, something will happen in a game and I’ll be like “Ooh this is like Alone in the Dark”. Sometimes it might literally be that my character is alone and in the dark. Or sometimes it’s a bit more esoteric. But I honestly struggle to play any modern horror game and not get just the tiniest whiff of that Alone in the Dark lasagna.

Alone in the Dark is still giving

After HP Lovecraft’s work entered the public domain in the late 2000s, the popularity of cosmic horror exploded. So a remake of AitD was only ever a matter of time. The reboot is written by Mikael Hedberg, former Frictional Games writer who also worked on Penumbra: Black Plague, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and SOMA. I’m not completely mad for thinking this is coming full circle. AitD > Resi > Amnesia > AitD.

We’re in a cyclical inspiration loop here, the student has become the master.

The Alone in the Dark series is one I consider to be, not just a forerunner to modern survival horror games, but one of the most influential horror series of all time. And it’s a series which is left out of the discourse quite a lot. Presumably because it was released on the DOS PC in the early 1990s (at least here in the West) and is relatively inaccessible to modern audiences. AitD combined the creeping dread of Lovecraftian cosmic horror with anxiety-inducing survival horror gameplay. And like a true lurking menace, Alone in the Dark continues to loom in the shadows, pulling the strings of modern horror games to this day.