Welcome to the madhouse, detective.
Alone in the Dark is a 2024 Survival Horror noir video game and the seventh mainline title in the series of the same name. It is developed by Pieces Interactive, published by THQ Nordic, and stars David Harbour and Jodie Comer. Mikael Hedberg (Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Soma) serves as the game's writer and director.
In a reboot of the original game, players follow hard-boiled private investigator Edward Carnby (Harbour) and young socialite Emily Hartwood (Comer) as they venture to a decrepit asylum, Derceto Manor, to find Emily's missing uncle, encountering unspeakable horrors in the process.
The game released March 20, 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. A free demo prologue, Grace in the Dark, was released in May 2023.
Previews: Announcement Teaser
Halloween Teaser Spotlight
Alone in the Dark contains examples of the following:
- Actionized Sequel: Downplayed since the game is still a slow paced survival horror but there's significantly more ammo and enemies laying around than the original game and the player eventually gets their hands on a Thompson which didn't happen until the action-focused second game.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Melee weapons only degrade if they actually hit the enemy, so hitting them against walls won't damage them, though they'll still take damage hitting dead enemies.
- Any location where the player has to break something with a melee weapon to continue will have a container with infinite melee weapons to prevent possibly getting stuck.
- Carnby's revolver and Emily's handgun will be given a full cylinder/magazine if the player dies with them empty.
- The game's first patch no longer lets you skip past the sections of cutscenes where you can choose your chosen character's bad ending, provided you've completed the steps to qualify for it.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Both of the bad endings are this as either the Dark Man seemingly completely seals off Derceto and takes Emily's soul or Carnby joins the cult and allows Grace to be sacrificed by hanging.
- Big Damn Heroes: Whoever you didn't pick at the start will show up with their handgun and a Molotov Cocktail to interrupt the Black Goat's ritual, saving Grace from being hanged and preemptively injuring the Black Goat with the Molotov. Can be Defied when playing as Carnby if you've completed the requirements for his bad ending.
- Bloodier and Gorier: While the series was no stranger to depicting dismembered bodies in New Nightmare and the 2008 game, this is the first game to feature dismemberment on enemies during combat as well as more convincing injuries for Edward/Emily after taking damage compared to the 2008 game.
- Booze-Based Buff: Just like the original, our protagonists heal their injuries by drinking alcohol.
- Children Are Innocent: In the demo prologue, Jeremy Haywood reasons that young Grace can be trusted because she is so innocent. Grace actually is part of the cult, but isn't involved in any machinations and has no reason not to do what Jeremy asks her to.
- Creepy Jazz Music: The soundtrack of the game, as shown off in the previews and prologue, is a jazzy score that is all at once relaxed, nostalgic, and mysterious. It also takes an intense feel in the announcement teaser as the characters are shown fighting monsters.
- Darker and Edgier: In addition to having more graphic on-screen deaths, this is also the only game in the series where a child is visibly killed on-screen with Grace being hanged in Carnby's bad ending, which is notable in stark contrast to Alone in the Dark 2 which never actually had her in any serious on-screen danger.
- Dark World: The character you select to play as ends up periodically being pulled into a nightmarish version of New Orleans inhabited by nightmarish monsters; this is apparently an alternate world composed of Jeremy Hartwood's memories created by his pact with the Dark Man. The character you didn't pick stays in the real world and doesn't witness anything supernatural until the very end of the game.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Zig Zagged, our protagonists are completely incapable of facing the Dark Man in direct combat and can only break the pact to free Jeremy and end up having to lobotomize him in the process, however the Black Goat afterwards once it's summoning ritual is interrupted is defeated by the chosen protagonist in direct combat.
- Deal with the Devil: Jeremy's pact with the Dark Man was this, allowing the Dark Man to take his soul for eternity but prevent the Black Goat from escaping Derceto. If you meet the requirements for Emily's bad ending, she can take the deal in Jeremy's place.
- Death of a Child: Averted in the good endings where Carnby and Emily save Grace but played straight in the One of a Thousand Young ending where you even see Grace die on-screen.
- Deep South: Most of the characters in the previews, prologue and the main game, save Carnby and Emily, speak with smooth Louisiana accents.
- Earn Your Bad Ending: Completing the A Goat Without Horns and Dying With Dignity Lagniappes sets unlocks these for each character and require a secret input to be done at a certain point in their normal endings:
- One of a Thousand Young obtained by collecting the A Goat Without Horns set then looking towards the tree when Emily interrupts the ritual, has Carnby embrace and join the cult, refusing to help Grace which results in her death then telling Emily to run mockingly with it cutting to Emily getting in the car, being surprised by Ruth in the passenger seat and driving off.
- Radical Acceptance which is triggered by collecting the Dying with Dignity set and then moving the movement controls down and then right when Emily is about to commit suicide will cause her to wake up inside the Dark Man's temple with a bunch of cultists as well as Grace and Ruth both wearing their paper mâché masks as Dr Grey asks her what she sees, she says she sees the Temple every time she closes her eyes and that she's "not afraid...not anymore."
- Enemy Rising Behind: The prologue demo ends with Grace delivering Jeremy's letter to the office for post... and never seeing the horrific figure emerging from the shadows behind her.
- Evil Is Hammy: Edward Carnby breaks out the ham when he joins the Horned Goat's cult in his bad ending:Carnby: No, Emily. I get it now! [The Horned Goat] needed me to break the pact. She needed me to bring her Grace! I did everything for her! I just realized I belong here! I'm one of her YOOOOUNG!
- Fantastically Indifferent: In the prologue demo, the 11-year-old Grace voices her discomfort about the appearance of the sculptures on the landing, but when they move on their own and the foyer is suddenly half-jungle, she merely wonders what Jeremy did this time. When a monster reaches out from the water toward her, she casually orders it to stay. While she is ultimately forced to run from the monsters, the moment she escapes them her casual demeanor immediately returns. At the end of the game, Grace is also totally onboard with being hanged until dead as a human sacrifice to the Black Goat.
- Foreshadowing: The note found a bible early on mentions how the author will have to make a sacrifice akin to those found in the Old Testament, as well as the store clerk offhandedly referencing the sacrifice as a "goat without horns". This references the attempted sacrifice of Claire, the Goat Without Horns, to Shub-Niggurath.
- Fantastic Noir: As shown in the spotlight preview, the game sees hard-boiled detective Carnby and his client Emily work to solve a noir-esque mystery with a jazz soundtrack... while occasionally battling monsters and dealing with Outer Gods.
- Guide Dang It!:
- A particularly evil example with the chapter 3 safe puzzle as the player finds a note in the room with a vague hint on the combination and while the solution is also technically in the room written down, it's in a dark cabinet near the floor so the player is unlikely to intentionally shine their flashlight down as they'll likely just assume it's just a generic container like many other lockers/cabinets in the game.
- Completing the "Hartwood Curse" item set requires you to enter the code into the Clerk Office safe early to find a collectable that isn't there when you open it later when you're supposed to.
- For two of the secret endings, you are required to use your movement controls at a certain point unprompted in each character's ending.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: In the finale Carnby will rescue Grace from being hanged with this in Emily's route, managing to hit the rope hanging her with his revolver directly one-handed.
- Ink-Suit Actor: As seen in the spotlight, Carnby and Emily's character models are closely based upon their respective actors, David Harbour and Jodie Comer.
- Joke Ending: By completing the "All The World's A Stage" Lagniappes set you'll get the option to give Grace "something to play with" before the final boss, doing so cuts to her playing with the toy talisman while Carnby and Emily leave a play that was the events of the game, with it suddenly turning out they're Grace's parents and then leaving while Carnby says the play left him "Alone in the Dark". Emily proceeds to say the play should have had a hedge maze and pirates, two of the most infamously derided parts of the second game.
- Major Character, Mainstream Accent: Both Carnby and Emily, the main protagonists, speak using a Midwestern accent whilst the rest Derceto's inhabitants speak using a Deep South accent. Grace subverts this in the joke ending where she adopts the same kind of accent as the protagonists.
- Murder by Inaction: Carnby did this to this universe's version of Ted Stryker after he kidnapped Grace, leaving him to drown in the car after they crashed off a bridge.
- My Greatest Failure: Both Carnby and Emily have to face their failures in chapter 4 in two exclusive areas, Carnby having to deal with getting Grace's father killed and leaving her with her neglectful mother and Emily having to deal with abandoning her husband in Derceto after he was injured in the war.
- Mythology Gag:
- At the beginning of the prologue demo, in which you play as Grace Saunders, one of the objects you can interact with in her room is a jack-in-the-box, referencing her first appearance in Jack in the Dark, a Self-Contained Demo about Grace being menaced by a jack-in-the-box, that similarly served to promote the then upcoming Alone in the Dark 2 and in the final game the jack-in-the-box returns as a collectable in a set with a picture of a boat called the "Flying Dutchman".
- Also in the beginning of the prologue demo, Grace is seen making a paper maché mask and has already painted a bit of red hair on the top. Examining it makes her voice her intentions to give the mask a "big mustahce" later, referencing Edward Carnby's red-headed mustachioed look from the original game. The book Grace tears pages off from to make the mask is a fictional novelization of the original game's story.
- Carnby is in debt to Obed Morton from New Nightmare.
- In the last scene of the prologue demo, Emily mentions to Carnby that she had a dream where Derceto Manor looked different and her uncle Jeremy had already committed suicide by the time they arrived. This is a reference to the original game where Jeremy indeed hung himself.
- You can find a movie script for "Slaughter Gulch" from the third game.
- The Pregzt Shipping Company is mentioned as a lead in the investigation.
- Prior to becoming a private mental institution, Derceto has the same backstory as the original game, having been built by a landowner named Elijah Pickford, who founded an Old One worshipping cult at the mansion, and was eventually killed and the mansion burned down by Union Captain Norton. However, in this continuity there's no indication that Elijah Pickford and Ezechial Pregzt are the same person.
- A late-game weapon is the Tommy Gun with the achievement for getting a kill with it called "Gangster" as a reference to the Zombie Gangsters from the second game.
- In Alone in the Dark 2 Carnby could optionally push Ted's corpse into a pit while Ted in this version is killed by Carnby pushing his car off a bridge.
- Late in the game, the perspective switches from the third-person perspective normally used to a fixed-perspective camera identical to those used in the first four games in the franchise.
- One of the enemy types digs through the ground, leaving fissures on the ground that are extremely similar to the fissures from the 2008 game.
- Just like the first game, the "Final Boss" is a giant tree. Only this time, it's an avatar of the Black Goat rather than Ezechiel Pregzt, and setting it on fire starts the fight instead of ending it.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Breaking the Pact between Jeremy and the Dark Man frees Jeremy from his curse, but opens the way for the other Derceto residents, who are all Shub-Niggurath cultists, to sacrifice Grace to the Black Goat. When Carnby and Emily interfere by preventing Grace from being sacrificed, this escalates things even further by summoning an avatar of the Black Goat itself into the world.
- Taken even further in Carnby's bad ending where he claims that him breaking the pact was the Black Goat's plan all along as he joins the cult and lets Grace be sacrificed resulting in The Bad Guy Wins.
- Parental Neglect: Grace's mother never actually cared about Carnby finding her in the past and was only concerned with the valuable painting that was stolen and sent her to Derceto instead of caring for her after her father's death.
- Only Known By His Nickname:
- When Jeremy is pressed on the identity of the Dark Man, he reveals it to be Nyarlathotep, only to ramble off his full Overly Long Name. Regardless of whether Carnby or Emily is the player character, both will agree it's better for Nyarlathotep to continue to be referenced as the Dark Man.
- Played with regarding Shub-Niggurath's in-game depiction. The current-day cultists only ever refer to their patron Outer God as the Black Goat until the final part of their ritual.
- Portal Door:
- In Grace's prologue, the bathroom door in the hall near Grace's room initially leads to a lush forest setting. When she approaches, it slams shut. Opening it again leads only to the bathroom. This can also happen to Carnby or Emily during the main game without warning, with more variety in where they get teleported to.
- When Carnby or Emily use the talisman, it transforms a door in the room indicated in its glass eye into one of these.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: If the player attempts to shoot the Dark Man, he'll force Edward or Emily to turn their gun on themselves.
- Revolvers Are Just Better: Carnby carries a revolver as his handgun as opposed to Emily's magazine-fed pistol.
- Second-Face Smoke: A first person variation. The announcement teaser ends with a woman taking a puff on her cigarette and blowing smoke into the camera.
- Sequel Hook: In Emily's ending, Jeremy tells her that she can't leave Grace behind and that she has to be taken to Hell's Kitchen, to the confusion of Emily while in Carnby's ending he says she's important and can't be left behind.
- Shows Damage: Both Edward Carnby and Emily Hartwood get bloody if they're injured.
- Spared by the Adaptation: While the events of the original game are set into motion by Jeremy Hartwood's suicide, in the reboot he didn't go through with killing himself and is instead committed to a mental institution, and plays a major role in the game. He even manages to live through the events of the game, and even remarks "This isn't how the story is supposed to go" concerning his own survival. An exasperated Carnby just gives him a sarcastic "You're welcome".
- Static Role, Exchangeable Character: Unlike Resident Evil 2 or Alone in the Dark: the New Nightmare, the events of the game are not occurring simultaneously for each character. The character you choose to play as finds Jeremy Hartwood's amulet and is thrust into the nightmare world, while the other player character remains in the real world investigating the more mundane aspects of the case and thinks the player character is tripping balls when they start talking about supernatural monsters.
- Stylistic Suck: Invoked with the "Derceto 1992" cosmetic DLC, which lets you change Carnby and Emily's appearances to exactly as they were in the original game: tens of polygons, static, abstract faces, and rendered at a massively-pixelated 320x240. Curiously, once the introductory cutscene is over and you've selected your character, the one you didn't choose will revert back to their modern appearance.
- Subtitles Are Superfluous: While most of the game has subtitles, the actual audio that accompanies any documents/items the player picks up isn't even when it goes far from the written text. (For instance, a document found early on mentions "A Goat without horns" without context on the text but the voice over makes it clear the writer overheard it as well as including an entirely unsubtitled conversation by the writer and a store clerk.)
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The announcement teaser opens with a young girl, Grace, singing "House of the Rising Sun" in a room where dolls are hanging from the ceiling by nooses... and then she sits on the bed and places a noose around her own neck.
