Alone in the Dark (MS-DOS)

• Platforms: 3DO, FM-Towns, iOS, Mac OS, MS-DOS (Trial), PC-98

• Release: 1992

Father had a Compaq laptop he got through his job. It housed partly MS-DOS 6.x and partly Windows 3.x. In addition to being used extensively by me for school work and the like (it was actually not very common to submit computer-written texts in the early 90s), it also fulfilled a function in terms of interactive digital entertainment.

I already had Commodore 64 and Amiga in my possession, and also an NES and an SNES. Games for MS-DOS and Windows were something completely different, however, and around 1992 the 3D revolution began to kick off in earnest with Wolfenstein 3D.

Also, there were a bunch of multi-platform games that looked better in 256-color VGA compared to the Amiga’s often far fewer colors than that (just because AGA with a hell of a lot of colors became a thing with the Amiga 1200 didn’t mean that all VGA games was released for the Amiga with AGA support).

In the end, it even happened that a bunch of games simply took up too much space. Amiga owners weren’t very good at equipping their computers with hard drives, and when the Amiga’s DD floppies held about half of the HD disks games for MS-DOS and Windows were shipped via, lack of space started to become a problem.

I mean, Beneath a Steel Sky was on 15 freaking disks. Monkey Island 2: Le Chuck’s Revenge and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on 11 discs each, and this despite not being AGA versions.

Alone in the Dark had gotten away with about 8 disks, and it was released in 1992 when the Amigan was still pretty hot. However, it combined 3D with 2D in a way that had become a performance problem on the Amigos people mostly played on, and the Amiga 1200 with AGA only arrived in the second half of 1992 which meant that the user base for a period would be very small.

So, no Amiga version ever appeared.

Alone in the Dark thus became another one of those reasons why it felt important to have access to a computer with MS-DOS in order to have a chance to play it.

Because it really was something very special. Something I hadn’t seen at all before, something completely new and unique.

It wasn’t just to start the game, though.

The memory was not enough, it was said. And fiddling around with MS-DOS wasn’t quite like sitting and playing games on the Amiga, where most of the time everything just worked straight up and down.

No, in this particular case it was simply assumed that the computer didn’t have enough capacity to run the game until a friend’s older brother’s friend suggested trying a thing.

Apparently, a little change in the text files AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS could do wonders. Especially if HIMEM.SYS was not properly configured. As if it were some magic we were dealing with, after a moment of fiddling we saw a 2D belt turn into a 3D belt that rotated away from the screen leaving only the Infogrames logo and so the adventure began.

Since the genre as such didn’t really exist at this stage, we saw Alone in the Dark as a fairly classic adventure game with elements of action.

Jump, Fight, Open/Search, Close, Push.

Read, Drop, Throw, Use.

The control was of course a little special, as left and right only rotated the character, where up made the character move in the direction he was facing (and two hard-timed presses up to make him run). Hen because you could either play as Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood; Carnby a private investigator and Hartwood the daughter of the suicidal Jeremy Hartwood who owned the Derceto mansion in which the game takes place.

For some unfathomable reason I’ve always played as Emily, but the only thing that differentiates the experience between the two characters is the intro and their reason for visiting the mansion. Just about everything else is the same between the two characters, but if you look ahead, it is Edward who is the canon of the series.

As in any adventure game, you wander around, pick up items and use them in contexts where it seems appropriate to do so. However, you don’t have an infinitely large Guybrush Threepwood pocket to fall back on, but when the weight of the objects becomes too great, the character says stop.

However, it is perfectly possible to put anything down to pick it up again at a later stage and much of what you find serves no other function than to build up the game’s lore and can therefore be discarded as soon as you have taken part in the information offered ( usually via written letters and books).

That inspiration is taken from HP Lovecraft (Chtulhu) is hard to miss. At one stage Infrogrames even held a license for ditto, but as development progressed production drifted further and further away from Chtulhu to the point where it was shelved. However, it is still possible to see Chtulhu mentioned in one of the texts you can read, which feels a bit… funny.

As in any early Sierra game, dying is great, and you do die frequently, but with the option to save at any time, there’s never any reluctance to explore anything even if the consequence of what you do may result in that you die.

Puzzles are generally very logical and in several more cryptic cases hints are given via the books and letters you can find and read. Some puzzles you don’t need to worry about at all and some can be solved in several different ways.

Some may balk at the fact that it’s technically possible to crash in the game if you pass a late Point of no return and have missed picking up certain items, but it’s very obvious when this happens and you just have to look to save before (can have several save files) it is not a problem.

Also, it’s great to put yourself in really bad situations, say if you’ve used up the few health-restoring items you can find in the game and used up all the ammo for the pistol or rifle you can find, but even here it’s very easy to avoid such a situation scenario by not saving if you did something stupid or just wasted ammo unnecessarily.

One could argue that the layout feels dated, but I would rather say that it is a fully conscious design that could still be used today without feeling outdated. The context in which it is used is like completely decisive for whether it feels fair or unfair, frustrating or something that creates a little nerve in the experience.

Here the context is perfect (and with that you have to bear in mind that the game is over 30 years old and an extremely early step into an as yet undefined genre).

Furthermore, Alone in the Dark is a very short game.

The places you have to explore are relatively few, there are few puzzles that are difficult to solve and if you work your way calmly and methodically through the game, 4-5 hours should be what you should expect on a first playthrough. If you know what to do and skip the parts you don’t need to worry about, you can reach your goal within the hour without any problems.

Visually, Alone in the Dark works with two-dimensional backgrounds presented in tasteful but locked camera angles. However, the main characters, enemies and objects are superbly three-dimensional, albeit significantly less detailed than the environments they inhabit.

However, the low-res graphics make everything feel uniform, and the only time it actually becomes a problem as the game is presented is when one of the few battles the game contains takes place.

Whether you’re fighting with your hands, kicking with your feet, swinging around with a knife or sword, or shooting with a pistol or rifle, collision detection is very unreliable. Sometimes because it is difficult to see exactly in which direction you are aiming (especially in scenes where you are no more than a couple of pixels big) and sometimes because the interaction with the environment is simply not as precise as you would have liked.

However, given plenty of leeway for actual mistakes in combat, few health-restoring items notwithstanding, and with load and save constantly available, it’s less of an annoyance than something that makes Alone in the Dark unplayable.

Alone in the Dark works a lot with sound. Both with sound effects, such as creaking floors and doors as well as unpleasant sounds potentially from the monsters you are about to confront, and mood-setting musical pieces to indicate, for example, that danger is imminent.

The soundscape, the lore you can take part in and the aesthetic aspect all give a very special and grateful vibe that hardly even the sequels managed to recreate, but actually gameplay and the principles on which ditto rests would be repeated time and time again.

A few years later when Resident Evil became a thing it was very obvious to me how extremely much inspiration it took from Alone in the Dark, but at this stage it was a bit like PC gamers and console gamers lived in such different worlds overall that few seemed to notice to this.

Today, however, the situation is completely different and pointing out how much Alone in the Dark actually meant for the formation of survival horror as a genre in the three-dimensional era is hard to miss.

For my own part, it is a game that, in addition to having meant a great deal to me when it was new, is also fun to return to from time to time in order to both remember and time and time again see how well it holds up despite the fact that in many much was the first to do what it did.

Even took the opportunity recently to play it on a Compaq laptop, for maximum feeling.

So goddamn stupid.

However, it would have been extremely fun to see how it did on an Amiga when it was new. It was definitely possible to port it, as I myself at one point or another sat and played the Mac version via the Shapeshifter wrapper which via software made the Amigan become a full-fledged Mac.

But that’s a bit of a different story.