3/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

A review of a PSOne survival horror game only has to answer one question: How is it different from Resident Evil? It is nigh on impossible to escape the shadow of that Jill sandwich-laden behemoth in the early days of Playstation. But Alone in the Dark makes a decent stab at it and is worthy of mention. The game follows a fairly familiar formula. You spend a good chunk of the game back-tracking through a single location. There are simple inventory puzzles to solve and every monster encounter forces you to question whether you should fight or run for it. Like the early Resident Evil games, you can also choose one of two characters to play as. In Resident Evil, the differences in these playthroughs were subtle. Cut-scenes and characters were different, but the story and moment-to-moment gameplay remained the same. This is not the case in Alone in the Dark, which is both a strength and a flaw. Playing as Edward Carnby (the trench coat-wearing 90s cool guy), your experience will be more action-oriented. Your progress through the game is a relatively swift rollercoaster, following set-pieces like breadcrumbs and blasting enemies at a regular pace. Playing as Aline Cedrac however, your progress is much slower and strategic. She's less comfortable with firearms than Edward, so she progresses in a more methodical, logic-based way. Having these two distinct playthroughs is great. It adds longevity without feeling artificial. The story beats are similar, but it's an entirely different experience. However, there is a small but crucial flaw in the way it's implemented: these differences are neither signposted, nor are they explained. It's clear that the developers expect players to play as Edward first. He is featured in the box art, and is also (allegedly) the protagonist from the previous games. His story is much better paced, with some effective jump scares and more forgiving gameplay. Aline's story, meanwhile, is clearly designed to flesh the story out a bit, once you've finished the campaign. There's much, much more exploration and backtracking involved, and any sense of horror is brought about via the atmosphere and your immersion within the world. These are all good things to have in a second playthrough, but are a complete pace-killer if it's your first. I chose Aline in my first playthrough and while it starts very strong, I quickly became frustrated with the lack of direction and unhelpful UI. In traditional survival horror style, all the backgrounds here are fixed and painted rather than rendered in 3D. I've always liked this style of direction in horror, but the graphics have aged poorly here. It makes important items difficult to spot, even when they are sitting in plain sight. They have a sparkle effect that helps them to stand out, but it's infrequent and not distinct enough to stand out as well as it should unless you're in total darkness. Your torch never runs out of batteries however, and it's beneficial for you to turn lights on whenever you can to weaken monsters. As a result, there's not much reason to be in complete darkness at any point. Worse still, these items are often found in the same rooms as respawning shadow monsters, which means you will either have to search while running, or clear the entire room everytime you want to check the cabinets. Edward's playthrough suffers from this problem as well, but with Aline's, it makes up the vast majority of the campaign and becomes repetitive fast. Once I realized I had made the wrong choice, I restarted as Edward and had a much better time. The grunt enemies are faster than in other horror games of the era, but your arsenal is also notably more impressive. As such, it's clear the game is nudging you towards combat rather than a more tactful approach. Once you realize you're unlikely to ever run out of ammo as Edward, the game becomes fairly straightforward (and less frightening, sadly). As with Aline, the opening of the game is the highlight, in which you are under-equipped and unsure of what to expect. There was even a jump-scare or two that performed their roles admirably. The longer you play however, the more rote it becomes. Monsters start to feel like indiscriminate blobs that you just need to blast through to progress, and the story doesn't do a huge amount to keep pushing you onwards. It's serviceable, but you can guess how it's all going to play out quite easily. And while the locations in the game are genuinely impressive for the era, they are not used as well as they could be. As Edward, you are rarely tasked with remembering details in previous rooms, or have to backtrack through a familiar area that has been given a frightening new twist (as seen in Resident Evil when the Hunters are introduced). It's even tempting to say the game doesn't have any bosses because the very few it does have don't distinguish themselves well from standard enemies. What the game does do well, and the reason it gets a pass, is atmosphere. Item and enemy placement might have been handled poorly, but a great job has been done with location and lighting. In Aline's campaign, the tone is set up beautifully when you discover a blind old woman sitting up in bed, surrounded by candles in the opening minutes (don't think too hard on the logic for that one). She's the one who sends you on your mission, which is kept deliberately vague and intriguing at first. Exploring the mansion for the first hour felt like some of the best gameplay survival horror has to offer. If the items had been clearly signposted, or if the number of monsters had been about halved, this campaign would easily outshine the other, and make for a truly memorable location. Admittedly, the spooky old manor house is standard fare for survival horror, but this feels like it predates the more notable examples. Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion might be exquisitely designed from a gameplay perspective, but it's no secret that, visually at least, it was far too bright and simplistic. Shadow Island is the flip side of the coin, dripping in a gloomy ambience, but inexpertly utilized. The same can be said of the lighting, which is technically impressive for the time, but was better utilized in games like Silent Hill. It's a neat touch that the monsters can actually be deterred by light, giving it an actual gameplay function. There's a few great moments when you are faced with two enemies in a dark, narrow hallway, with zero bullets, and frantically switching between both monsters to keep them both at bay. It can be wonderfully tense and there should really be more of this kind of thing. But I lament the fact that there is nothing that even comes close to that moment in Silent Hill 1, when your character enters a room and the camera flips to face you, causing the torch to blind the player to what else in the room. This is a perfect example of how that game, with less spectacle and technical prowess, did so much more. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is a game of impressive parts that doesn't quite come together to deliver the experience it promises. It has one campaign that starts well, but begins to feel mediocre as it picks up speed. And then you have another that starts even better, but hits a complete brick wall once the combat and puzzle solving starts conflicting with each other. There's plenty to enjoy, but the potential is left frustratingly out of reach.