Gaze upon the spooky ghost, and know true primordial fear! You play as the pair of eyes, by the way.
I'm joking, of course; though Haunted House isn't bad for an Atari 2600 game, all things considered.
The actual answer to the originator of 3D survival horror is 1992’s Alone in the Dark. Developed by French developer Infogrames, the game was revolutionary in several ways. It featured pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles, some boundary pushing 3D models, and combined aspects of puzzle solving and combatting various eldritch horrors as you explored a spooky old mansion; elements you may recognize as the cornerstone of the whole genre.
It had players pick from one of two playable characters; you could play as private eye Edward Carnby who's simply looking for a piano for an antique dealer in a rather strange set up, or Emily Hartwood, niece of an important story character who's investigating said character’s sudden suicide. The game's atmosphere and sound design are both utterly impeccable; the ancient Louisiana mansion you're trapped in feels oppressively isolated and incredibly dark, making the game's name truly accurate. It drew huge inspiration from the ‘cosmic horror’ stylings of H.P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, with the game even originally being set up as an adaptation of the beloved Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG by the long lived game company Chaosium. It's true; I cannot break free of covering tabletop game adaptations even when I try.
Edward Carnby’s fine red mustache alone pushed the boundaries of technical limitations. Just look at that beautiful thing.
The game was a massive success, and its status as a true boundary pushing masterpiece in the annals of video game history was recognized even then.
Why do I bring all this up? Well, ironically for a game that features the concept of a great family curse, the series itself suffers a terrible curse; it is often forgotten and overlooked for its competitors that it inspired, in a genre it more or less created. It was the hottest computer game of its time but going forward it slowly faded away into the dark as the Resident Evil’s and Silent Hill’s and the Countdown: Vampires’s debuted. Who knows exactly why this occurred, as the whole original trilogy of Alone in the Dark games are great experiences. In my opinion, I think a factor was definitely that the games were almost exclusively computer game releases save for the 3DO ports of the first two games; and as we all know, the 3DO doesn't count. The industry was definitely shifting to the home console market in terms of mass appeal, and I think it's telling that the games remembered over this granddaddy of horror games were all console games.
I think Infogrames picked up on this eventually, which leads into the game we’re covering in this article; 2001’s Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. This was the first game to debut primarily on home consoles, being the PlayStation and Dreamcast; it did also have a PlayStation 2 release a couple of months later, but only in Europe for some reason. It did also have a concurrent PC release, but clearly they switched up the series up to this point with the simultaneous console releases. There was even a Game Boy Colour version that sold well, and is surprisingly impressive on a technical level.
Why'd I choose to cover this Alone in the Dark game over the original three? Well, the game is also notable in a way that drew me to it; it’s essentially a Resident Evil clone. The irony is astounding, and fascinated me. It all came full circle, the curse of the franchise finally fully manifesting, with it copying something it inspired. Once I started to look deeper into it, I discovered some other fascinating things about The New Nightmare. What, you may ask? You'll have to read on to find out.
Before we get into it, I was playing the Dreamcast version for this review, which features some improved visual fidelity over the PlayStation version due to the obviously superior hardware. The PlayStation version isn’t a technical slouch by any means, however, so you’re good to go with either version in my opinion.
You may be asking yourself; “Octopus, why is this review coming out after Halloween? Wouldn't it have made more sense to have it come out in October?” And to that, I have one answer. It's a little known fact about Canadians that we actually celebrate Halloween in November. We keep it on the downlow, don't tell anyone. By skipping October, it gives us time to fully harvest our family’s ancestral maple syrup reserves that we subsist on for the coming winter, as we enter into a state of suspended animation for the next 5 and a half months of frozen hellscape.
Also, I was busy playing terrible licensed Marvel games and the Dark Alliance series, I'm sorry.
Enter The New Nightmare
The New Nightmare is a reboot of the whole franchise, conceptualized as being in modern times (2001 specifically, given that's when it came out) instead of the original games setting of the 1920's. It again sees two player characters, one man and one woman, investigate a spooky mansion having come there for different reasons. This time, it's not in ol’ Louisiana but on an island called, in a very apt title, ‘Shadow Island'. Yes, nothing ever sinister goes on there, I'm sure; no eldritch forces from beyond our world are ever channeled. The two characters are separated in the opening CG cutscene and you choose which one to play as from there. It doesn't take long for them to encounter the evil creatures of the island which shouldn't surprise them considering they're in a place called Shadow Island.I refer to the game as an ironic Resident Evil clone for a few reasons. The obvious one; take a look at this games inventory menu:
Look familiar?
That one should be obvious, it even features the same iconic heartbeat monitor health display as the Resident Evil series. It deviates a little bit, being that you don't have a set number of inventory slots to deal with, but it's obvious that some inspiration was taken. Another way it's clearly inspired is in the enemy choices. In the prior Alone in the Dark games, the enemies were primarily horrors of various forms or had a focus on more humanoid enemies in the last two such as nuclear mutated Hollywood cowboys in the third game (the trilogy got a little wild); in The New Nightmare, the enemies you encounter the most are undead dobermans and run of the mill lurching zombies. Again, I think its obvious where that inspiration came from. There are some other enemies, of course, but the zombies are by far the most plentiful.
Series regular Edward Carnby returns, unfortunately without his iconic red lip tickler. The other character is Aline Cedrac, a young university professor who's seeking three stone tablets and to find information about her unknown father.
Edward Carnby’s characteristic: double barreled gun. Aline’s? ‘Father unknown’. Just really rubbing it in her face, that silly single parent child.
In the original Alone in the Dark, both of the characters had an identical playing game. You'd go through the exact same rooms and encounter the same puzzles, and the characters themselves were identical save for their appearance. In The New Nightmare, Edward plays as a more action oriented character. He focuses more on blasting away enemies with his double barreled revolver, as Edward is a man of taste and culture. Aline, meanwhile, plays a more puzzle and exploration focused game and has generally less combat. She starts the game with nothing but a flashlight and a pair of tight jeans. Very tight jeans.
By Hastur, how does she even move in those?
I like this difference. It makes it so there’s something for both types of players out there. You still encounter some puzzles as Edward, and Aline does still get weapons eventually to blast away zombies and dogs, so it's not like you're entirely deprived of the other pillar of survival horror gameplay; just that the feel and focus is different.
While we're on the topic of praising The New Nightmare, the greatest thing this game delivered deserves some serious credit. Take a look at this screenshot;
Each character has a flashlight they can turn on and off and freely move around with the analog stick, but it's greatest ability; casting dynamic light. Sort of.
Your flashlight illuminates the background and objects it passes over entirely dynamically, which is incredibly impressive given that this is 2001 and potentially on a PlayStation 1. The way the developers did this was actually clever. Your flashlight does not actually produce light in the game engine save for the static effect directly on it to show it's on, as an actual dynamic light beam would be more or less impossible on the hardware. Instead, they worked around this by having every background and object have several different texture versions to represent varying levels of illumination on it; there is one for directly lit, another for partially lit, and so on. By figuring out where your flashlight is currently looking, the background loads in these different layers to create the illusion of a light beam. It's not perfect of course, and from some angles the fake ‘light’ doesn't behave as intended; but I think it still deserves some respect for its inventiveness and effect. It adds some serious atmosphere, and I found myself taking many screenshots over my time with the game just marveling at the lighting.
Another use of the flashlight is to keep some of the monsters at bay, as shining your flashlight on them will make them jump back and keep their distance from you as long as you keep shining the light at them. You can only really do it to one enemy at a time, and the enemies it affects frequently come in at least groups of two making it largely ineffectual. As it is, it was something I maybe accidentally did once or twice which made me go ‘huh, neat’ before I took out my weapon of choice and simply shot the enemy. It's a major missed opportunity to me, as making it a more fundamental mechanic could have made the game stand out more and give its actual gameplay some innovation. It could have been Remedy’s Alan Wake 9 years beforehand, but at least I can say they had the idea.
Enough about silly and clearly unimportant things such as atmosphere and feel, let's get into the actual gameplay of The New Nightmare. Since the two characters do have a different experience, I will split this section into two, one for each character then do a recap after we’ve gone through both to talk about the more general gameplay elements.
Edward Carnby: Multi-Barreled Blasting
As stated before, series veteran Edward Carnby’s game is focused more on action. He's still a private investigator, and the search for his missing partner is what brings him to Shadow Island. The man also has some style, as while he’s missing the exceptional mustache from earlier titles he now rocks a trench coat. What he also brings to the game is an earnest stupidity, as several of his lines of dialogue or descriptions of items don’t really paint him in the smartest light.
Edward, it’s a projector; you’re in 2001, man.
The largest chunk of his game is running around the mansion and playing the genre classic of ‘looking for the right key’, while blasting enemies in between. To that end, he uses his characterizing double barreled revolver.
Again, he’s a man of taste.
Over time your arsenal will grow with both conventional weapons such as a grenade launcher, a rocket launching pistol which is a hell of a look, a triple barreled shotgun as that's better than two barrels, and more unconventional tools such as a gas shooting plasma cannon and a late game lightning launching pistol.
The puzzles Edward does encounter are rather basic. Most can be solved by reading a correct file somewhere which gives you the answer, frequently a date mentioned or something similar, or simply looking around the specific room or area. There are a few specifically worth mentioning, however. In the mansions library, the main puzzle you need to solve in order to progress sees you have to activate 4 books on specific shelves scattered around the three story room. You find a file earlier in the game which gives you a diagram of the solution; the order of the books is based on making a three dimensional sort of diamond shape across the length of the library, and so you have to figure out where you start and what direction and alignment the map is showing you. It's a cool idea, and is Edward's best puzzle in terms of inventiveness and effort required.
This next puzzle I'm calling out for a different reason; it's just bad. In the spooky swamp, you'll come to an abandoned church with a sacrificial altar, as of course a place called Shadow Island has a sacrificial church. There's a panel of 9 images you can press on a wall nearby, and no real direction or clue is given. I assume you have to hit the correct images, which is true, but how you find out which images you need to hit is kind of a little silly. In a previous area of the swamp, you’ll find a blue circular lens. Its description reads ‘it looks like it can be fitted onto a cylindrical object’ and can be used to ‘see traces of blood’. I figured, okay, sacrificial altar; that seems a good place for the lens that can see traces of blood to be used at. There was nothing in the church to attach it to, so I ended up deducing that it probably could attach to my flashlight; which it did.
After attaching it to the flashlight, my light was now a faint blue and presumably can pick up blood traces so I began to shine it around at the altar. Here’s the thing; the light is now much fainter, and I could barely see any of the traces I was supposed to be seeing. They are scattered across most of the swamp area, and it just wasn't a particularly fun experience with this one. It's janky, and Edward's worst puzzle.
There are only 2 real boss encounters for Edward, being one encountered in the previously mentioned library and the final boss at the end of the game. The final boss isn’t anything out of the ordinary or special, but the library boss can go **** itself back into the far reaches of the shadow realm that I presume spawned it. He flies around, and shoots a lightning beam thing at you that you cannot in any way dodge or avoid. My pistol launched rockets bizarrely flew right through him. I died many times before I eventually caved, and for the first and only time, consulted the eldritch tomes of knowledge; aka the internet. It turns out, you can shoot him once when he’s flown up to you to make him vulnerable when he starts charging up his lightning attack. Right before he launches the attack, he is vulnerable to being shot. The only way to tell that he’s vulnerable when charging his attack is to wait for Edward’s ‘autoaim’ to kick in, where he’ll snap his gun towards the boss. It’s just terribly designed on every level. How are you supposed to have known this ahead of time? There’s so little feedback during the fight that I never would have figured this out during it. Even knowing this strategy it still took me a few tries to drop him, and numerous times I would just run out of ammo due to slightly mistiming the pattern as he’s a verifiable bullet sponge.
This goddamn flying bug pterodactyl thing; he’s the true nightmare in The New Nightmare.
Outside of that library boss, I found Edward’s game to be rather easy. I never died once other than that accursed library encounter, and I hardly ever even felt challenged by any of the enemies; by the end of the game, I had a dozen or so first aid kits stockpiled from never needing to use them. The main reason I think is that ammo was simply everywhere for Edward, and I never once felt like I couldn't waste the bullets on an enemy. I could be safely assured that no matter what I encountered around the next corner, that I had double the amount of bullets I need to kill it; also, this hypothetical enemy is probably a zombie.
Oh, look at that; it was another zombie.
Aline Cedrac; Tight Pant Problems
Aline’s game is more puzzle focused, and also sees more dialogue as she meets several more characters and converses like a civilized person. The puzzles she does encounter aren’t much harder than Edward’s, but there are a few more and she spends very little time doing simple key hunts like he does.She starts the game in the mansion's attic after getting separated from Edward without a weapon, and it takes maybe about a minute before you’ve encountered the shadowy monsters of the mansion. This first section, seeing you run around trying to get your bearings while running away from said enemies, was a tense introduction and one I particularly enjoyed. You get a lame single barreled revolver and the not-lame triple barreled shotgun pretty quick, but even with those I still found it better to run from fights as Aline for one simple reason; boxes of ammo weren’t lining every room, as it felt like with Edward.
I'm going to call out a couple specific puzzles again that I think deserve to be mentioned. Luckily, I never encountered anything like the ‘flashlight blood trace hunt’ like I had to endure with Edward, but there were one or two puzzles that were still on the ‘jank’ scale. Once you leave the mansion for the island grounds, she ends up in an old abandoned fort that’s a rather cool little area, and the setting for the rest of the game. One of the long form puzzles in this fort is finding and assembling a weapon descriptively called ‘the perforator’. You'll find its various parts and accessories around the fort in key areas, and there are smaller puzzles in order to build some of its pieces and assemble it. Some of the parts you assemble by using the ‘combine’ command in your inventory, and I was unable to combine two key pieces of it that I needed when I first obtained them. I'm not sure what the issue was, as after resorting to reloading my game and working my way back up to that point, they combined just fine. It was, I suppose, a temporary glitch, but from a cursory search online it was one that happened to a few people as well.
A defeated boss who leaves only a tiny little pool of blood after getting defeated? Oh yeah, I'm sure he'll stay dead. Never seeing this guy again.
As well, there is a puzzle in the library that Aline encounters that I'm sure I must have missed something with. There is a specific bookshelf in the library that she has to interact with, which reveals a book with a 4 digit code that must be entered onto it. When I originally came to the library, I had no idea the book was there and I wasn't even aware that there was something in the library I had to do in the first place. I went through every file I had looking for the code to no success, and figured ‘maybe this is something I'll be solving later’ so went back into the mansion, sure I'll find either something pointing me into the library or a clue to the code. There was no such thing, and after spending a good amount of time wandering fruitlessly I deduced that I probably had to solve that book puzzle. Without giving away the solution, I did eventually find it; it was a bit of a stretch, and wasn't so much of a clue I discovered that gave it away as much as me entering every 4 digit number I'd ever encountered or heard up to that point. The puzzle itself was sensical, it was just strange how it was encountered. I'm sure I must have missed something beforehand in a conversation with a character, otherwise I don't know; I guess that's just the way the puzzle was meant to be encountered.
She does also have decent puzzles too, don't worry. There was one in the inhabitants of the island's family crypt that had a pretty inventive use of your flashlight, seeing you have to use the manual flashlight aiming to highlight specific lights on a wall in a certain order. It was a cool idea, and was definitely better than simply finding the right item and using it on an object.
Another stand-out moment is definitely taking some inspiration from Resident Evil 3, and has a boss you’d encountered earlier reappear and chase you around the outside of the mansion and into a cemetery before screwing off. He even chases you through area transitions, following you between loading screens. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he suddenly called out “STARS!” is all I’m saying.
I would say Aline overall has the best feeling experience, and felt like a more traditional survival horror game than Edward did.
You can trust the spooky mirror pirate ghost, trust me. Why wouldn’t you trust him?
The New Nightmare; the Final Verdict
The worst thing about The New Nightmare, I think, is the blandness. It hits all the right notes of survival horror, but there's no flourish and the notes don't particularly standout. The game overall was very easy, both in terms of the physical survival aspect and the puzzles. I could still just run around most of the enemies without them really being able to do much about it. They were never particularly threatening outside of a few specific situations, such as the beginning of Aline’s game when you have no weapons. I call this out as to me an important piece of the survival horror experience is a sense of difficulty and frightening, impossible seeming obstacles. It's what the 'survival' part of the title refers to, after all. If you either have enough ammo to easily kill any enemy you encounter, or they are so non-threatening that you can just run past their slow attack animations, then there's no real sense of danger, or of survival. This is done usually with bullet sponge enemies, or with randomized health for every enemy. This game copied the zombies from Resident Evil, but left out the actual game design decisions that come with them.It's not all bland, though. The game has some really solid atmosphere, coming from a combination of its well made pre-rendered backgrounds, great sound design and its impressive flashlight technology. Walking through dingy hallwalls and up decrepit stairs, lit only by your ‘fake’ dynamic flashlight as things creak around you and lightning rumbles the house is a hell of a good look. Something else that stood out to me, though others opinion may differ on this, is the interactions and dialogue between Edward and Aline. Through-out the game, you are frequently called over walkie-talkie radio by the other character to tell you of something they just encountered or that they wanted to share. The writing here is definitely light hearted, and a little bit cheesy; the game avoids going too far into the cheese, though, and actually has some real characterization going on. Aline in particular starts out a little out of her element, and over the course of the conversations with Edward begins to become more confident and even drops some sass on the detective. I’m not trying to claim it’s true Shakespearian gold, just that it’s entertaining and breaks the sections of the game up nicely.
The games soundtrack and design is also top notch. It's ambient when it needs to be, letting only the sound of wind or ghastly moans occasionally break the silence. When a monster does appear, the combat music is perfectly chaotic and grinding sounding with some heavy drum beats; it definitely caught me by surprise the first few times, and deserves a mention.
The final irony of this game is this; it was trying to copy the success of contemporaries that the previous games in its series had themselves inspired, and it ends up being just an average gameplay copy of Resident Evil. It’s not unplayable, and there’s some things to be enjoyed in it; but there’s also much better survival horror games out there you could play instead, like the original Alone in the Dark trilogy which are all still phenomenal and has almost exactly the same vibe and feeling. But if you’re looking for something new to play in the survival horror field in this spooky Canadian Halloween (remember the beginning of the article, it’s in November- don’t tell anyone), maybe take a look at The New Nightmare.
I'd play it over Countdown: Vampires, at least.
Pros
- + Solid sound design.
- + Impeccable atmosphere.
- + Some technical marvels, such as the 'dynamic' flashlight.
Cons
- - Bland overall gameplay.
- - Lack of difficulty.
- - Lack of many memorable puzzles overall.
6.5
out of 10
Overall
Falling just short of genre competition (which the series itself created), Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare is a bland but still fascinating survival horror experience.
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