Game:

Alone in the Dark (1992)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 5:33

9,133 views

136

August 25th, 1924: Jeremy Hartwood, painter, hanged himself in the loft of his reputedly cursed house, Derceto. Though no note was found and whatever his motive may have been remains unknown, the police declared it to be suicide and closed the case. A few days after learning of her uncle's death, Emily Hartwood travels to Derceto to investigate for herself. If Jeremy killed himself, as every sign says he did, he must have had a reason. When she reaches the house, it becomes immediately obvious that the neighbor's talk of curses and occult dealings was not idle gossip.

* * *

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of a game that revolutionized PC gaming in that it was one of the first PC games to use true 3D graphics and the first to use not only 3D wireframes or primitives, but recognizably human-shaped characters fully rendered in polygons. It created an entirely new genre - survival horror - and spawned not only its own series of sequels, but was the direct inspiration for series like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Today, Alone in the Dark has been largely forgotten, eclipsed by its successors, in no small part due to the hubris of Infogrames (its creator) and their mismanagement of the property.

I have a special fondness for Alone in the Dark (it was the first PC game I ever bought new) and it's for that reason I'm playing it. I like to think I'm fairly good at the game and I know a little about it and its development (gleaned from articles, interviews, and presentations here and there), so my commentary will be mostly informative.

Alone in the Dark is an adventure game emphasizing story and puzzle solving, but most of it is free-roaming and allows you to take set pieces in whatever order you like. Consequently, nearly all playthroughs of the game, even following the official walkthrough, sequence events in ways that shuffle the plot exposition and solve puzzles before finding the clues for solving them. I'll be playing the game in what I'm calling "story order", finding the clues first, solving the puzzles second, and uncovering the plot as it naturally progresses.

In direct opposition to that, in bonus videos, I'll do my best to sequence break those few roadblocks the game does throw up to prevent you from skipping over sections and we'll see just how many or few items are truly necessary to beat the game.

Structure-wise: The LP begins with a preface that largely repeats what's written here. After that, it will be divided into five chapters. Each chapter begins with a prologue that will show different but related games. Each chapter ends with an epilogue drawn from contemporary articles in gaming magazines that chronicle the development and release of the game. The playthough itself will be covered in the main part of the chapter. Deaths, dead-ends, and other interesting but not narratively appropriate segments will be relegated to the appendices. In an addendum at the end, we'll look at some things that didn't quite fit anywhere else and are best left until after the LP proper has finished.

Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD01274DE2CB2A5AF

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