This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

I failed my original goal to have 4 "spooky" games reviewed by Halloween by one day. I'm full of apologies, but no one was holding me to this goal and certainly no one really cares about being a day late, but here we are regardless. Today we are going to take a look at our 4th spooky game for the month "Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare." I specifically played this game on the Sega Dreamcast, but it had a nice wide release so I am sure everyone will start bargain bin hunting this game by the time they get to the end of my write-up, so without further delay here we go.

I hated this game... Sorry, I jumped the gun. This is my first experience with the Alone in the Dark series, which I know is probably very important when we talk about the survival horror genre, but has become an afterthought now, because Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Mario is Missing ate it's lunch in terms of making better versions of the same game. However, let's pretend you don't know what any of those things are and start at the beginning. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is a survival horror game where you explore a creepy mansion and the surrounding area, fighting monsters of the dark, and solving abstract puzzles as you fight for your life to stop the impending doom that is about to be befallen. While you will get multiple weapons during your playthrough, Ammo and Health kits are scare and you will have to make quick decisions to utilize the fight or flight response to all encounters. Attempt to fight every enemy and you will find yourself out of ammo or health kits at more important moments later on, but run from everything and you might miss some items that are tucked away in corners of rooms you need to explore.

When the game starts, you are given the choice of picking between two different characters. Each character has a "separate" story that will overlap at points, but ultimately has you achieving two different things. Aline is going to this island because she believes a scientist there is her real father. Aline's playthrough is supposedly more focused on puzzles. While Edward is going to the island to investigate the death of a good friend. His playthrough is supposedly more combat focused. Since I am all about that puzz life, I picked Aline. I was planning on doing both playthroughs, but ugh after one.

While those are some real fantastic personal plots, the overarching game plot is that a mad scientist is on this remote island looking to raise an army of shadow monsters to presumably rule the world or something. He needs to complete the process tonight, and if he does... well thats bad. For someone who normally cares a lot about story, I had a real hard time getting into this one. There is a lot of in-game documents to read from diaries to newspapers, to help flesh out the story, but it's not great.. and eventually I just started skipping all those pickups.

As for the gameplay, it follows the tank control commands of the game. Your directional keys are corresponding to the direction your character is facing, A separate button for holding your gun out, one for turning on and off the flashlight, a button to hold for running, and another for shooting. While it did take me a little while to settle back in to tank controls, overcoming those controls is the least of your worry when playing this game.

That issue for me was... everything else. Let's start with the camera. Similar to RE or other survival horror games, the camera is fixed in all rooms. Obviously this is done intentionally so you don't always know what is approaching you, or what you are approaching, but all this really accomplishes is for every camera cut you have to re-orient yourself on the controls. It also makes fighting enemies into a guessing game. Did my last shot connect? Did I kill them, stun them, or miss entirely? The best scenario is almost always to let them get on the same screen as you, or go to them so that you can make sure your attacks are doing something.

Speaking of combat, the auto aim is fairly generous which is a good thing, but even the same enemies seem to have a random assortment of hit points. Sometimes you can take out a devil dog in two shotgun blasts, other times it might be 3 or 4. I would chalk this up to placement of the shot, but I don't think this is a game about nuance, so its not about killing zombies with headshots like RE. I could be wrong, as I mainly did rely on the auto-aim but the nuance aiming controls seemed to just resort to auto-aim anyway, so I dont know. Which speaking of enemies, the most annoying thing of all is how the game can't make up its mind on a consistency of how the enemies behave to light. Early on in the game, you will meet enemies (or read in the manual) that light will make enemies turn into dust. In some rooms if you can find a lightswitch and turn it on, the enemies will instantly die, saving you ammo and prolonged fight. However the rules aren't universal, in some areas turning on a light does not impact the enemies at all, and I'm not just talking about stronger enemies, but the same hopping enemies that are early stages can sometimes die from light and sometimes they can ignore it completely. Do I maybe tank a hit to run to the lightswitch to save ammo? welp.. that didn't work this time so I took a hit and had to waste ammo to kill them. Which leads into..

Enemies respawn. I hate to keep comparing this to Resident Evil, but if my memory serves me correctly in the first RE, if you killed a zombie in room A, that zombie would not get up even if you left the room and came back to it after a save or after exploring more of the house. There was a safety in knowing that you could kill the enemies and then explore. Sure you were using more of your ammo, but it assured you some peace of mind if you had to keep travelling through that room. Alone in the Dark does not give you that relaxing time frame. If you kill an enemy in room A, leave and then come back to that room that enemy is back and walking around. Seeing as that in my Aline playthrough I would routinely have to go back and forth to solve puzzles or gather items, it meant I was doubling up ammo spend or health spent to deal with the same enemies over and over. It negated what I think the strongest part of the game is..

Exploration. I like exploring a giant spooky mansion and I like the scary vibes that exist and hunting and pecking for the few items i might need to solve puzzles. That's just a general vibe that I think the game does well, what it doesn't do well is how precise you need to be in order to interact with anything and how little there is to interact with. I don't know if some of the rooms were only used for one campaign, but I would wander into rooms that looked like they had at least part of a story to tell, only to click on every thing I could and be greeted with nothing in return. Sometimes these rooms would have enemies so it would end up being a negative sum to even enter those rooms, but it made it more preposterous that I couldn't find anything of value in them. When I would see that I am missing an item for a puzzle, I would then think to those rooms and convince myself I must have missed something because surely a room so busy had to have something.. Nope, it had nothing just enemies, and they were back and now I presumably fell into the same trap twice because of re-spawning enemies. Also don't get me wrong, this map is dense in this game. There is a lot to explore and get lost in, and should you decide to foolishly play this game without a walkthrough (like me), then you might as well make notes in a notebook so you can eliminate some back and forth. I also can't stress how frustrating it is to see something in the background that IS CLEARLY SOMETHING, but not be able to interact with it at all. For instance there are busts or bookcases that have scratch marks on the floor that in all other medium would signify that these can be pushed, pulled, or moved to reveal something, but no matter how many times you try from every angle, you can't interact with these objects.

There are some other minor nitpicks here: The save system uses an item that you can run out of if you are not careful. It is fairly generous but you won't be able to save after every room (if you are so inclined). The voice acting and dialogue are pretty atrocious, and while I didn't look too hard I did not see a Subtitle option to check either. The "puzzles" are surprisingly lite for me playing as the "puzzle" playthrough. Not that they are necessarily easy, but outside of the puzzle of navigating the map, there are like 3-4 puzzles I even remember needing to solve in the game. I don't have a comparison point to Edward's playthrough, but Aline's playthrough seemed just as much focused on combat as I would expect Edward's campaign is. Oh also, the last boss (for Aline's playthrough) is indestructible but also guarding a bridge you are supposed to cross. I don't know what the "real" solution is, but surely it can't be.. hope to glitch through him which is what I ended up doing. Why give me rocket launchers, grenade launchers, a lightning gun, etc.. if I can't even knock him back a little bit to get off the bridge.

Playing Alone in the Dark alongside Operation Darkness, really slowed down any video game playing I did for half the month of October. Alone isn't what I would call a "hard" game, but I would certainly call it an annoying game. Every aspect of that game is a chore, and while you could argue that is inherent to the genre (going slow, conserving items, solving puzzles, avoiding back tracking, etc.) it just is such a worse version then other games from the same genre. The only scare I got playing Alone in the Dark, was realizing how much more I had to keep playing after I would manage so little during a sitting. Things started to pick up once I was out of the mansion, but I can clearly say that this is not a game worth going back to. It doesn't have a strong opening 60 minutes, the story and characters aren't memorable, and the story is incredibly weak.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: Oh Heavens No!

Where does it rank: This game has made me take a break from jumping into another game right away. I left it for so long to start, because I figured it would be a quick finish, but every minute I played felt like an hour. It's not the worst game I have ever played, but it is very close. Maybe if I would have played as Edward could have made the game marginally better, but I'm certainly not going to go back and try it now. Literally everything this game is doing, RE did better.. there is no point to playing Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. I have this ranked as the 172nd Greatest Game of all Time out of 175 games. It sits between "Buildings have feelings too" (171) and "The Wardrobe" (173).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) TBD 2) Operation Darkness 3) TBD