Alone in the Dark

And I say fantastic, but initially when that dodgy FMV entry intro started, I was like, oh my god, this is terrible.

awful voice acting and everything like that but then like once the game actually started proper and it was like this isometric style with the sort of pre-rendered backgrounds which was like unlike anything I'd ever played before I had very briefly seen Alone in the Dark on PC so I sort of like had seen something like that once but this was the first time I'd played anything like that and then the sort of whole thing with like the inventory management and sort of like limited ammunition didn't sink in initially so I was playing as Chris and I just kept dying like until I sort of thought, right, I need to like start from scratch here.

Went through and played as Jill and realized, you know, you've actually got to avoid some of the zombies.

You can't just go around like trying to kill everything because otherwise you just run out of ammo and like your knife is useless.

won't have seen that but but

we're we're streaming the whole thing this is exciting guys i just got jump scared okay number two the exciting number two alone in the dark 2008 versus siren what's the scary i haven't got your stones and fuck you anyway yeah it's it's the max pain game the alone in the dark that's what it is

I'm going to just say Siren just because Alone in the Dark is dumb.

It is very dumb, so I think I'm also going to say Siren.

This is also one that's

Siren is clearly the more scary

game.

I'm sorry, Alone in the Dark.

Now, and a lot of them are pretty much settled down after, like, after about five minutes, I was like, either I finish the game and there's not enough to cover, or I don't think that they will like to interact with this.

And in one case, it was like, this is a pretty neat demake of Alone in the Dark.

The problem is, if I'm trying to show a system to people for, like, the first time, they don't want to see demakes of existing games.

They want to see what the system does natively, you know?

I'm going to pick...

I'm going to pick Alone in the Dark.

Oh, that's a good one.

All

that's a good pick.

So, scientists.

Scientists is in Alone in the Dark.

Papa Scotch has Blood Rain 2.

For more discussion of that, see that episode, which I think came out on September 9th.

Anyway, on to the new series, which is about Alone in the Dark.

¶¶ Hello and welcome back to Dev Game Club, a weekly podcast in which two veteran game developers look at games from the past to discuss their relevance and impact today.

I'm Brett Douville and I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, a man whose few friends call him Carnby, but who others call the Reptile.

what they're all about.

But we will talk more about that.

Because we're going to be playing Alone in the Dark as our spooky Halloween October game this year.

And of course, we're starting, you know, basically three weeks into October, which, you know, is very on brand for us.

I mean, the PC, you're playing alone games.

It's still kind of pre-internet, so you're sitting alone playing scary games, like Alone in the Dark to start, Clock Tower.

Leisure Suit Larry goes looking for love.

It can be scary in its own ways.

But I'm actually really glad it's here.

My close out track is The Light Carrier Test from Alone in the Dark, released Jun- June 23rd, 2008.

It was composed by a friend of the show, Olivier Deriviere, featuring The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices, which is like the most Lovecraftian name for-

[laughs]

Yeah, me too.

This is, uh, an interesting selection here.

Um, and I'm not gonna go too deep into this 'cause as we've established, I've been talking too much, but the Alone in the Dark game series as a whole is heavily inspired by the Cthulhu mythos.

Um, the, uh, the creatures in it, like night gaunts, um, are, uh, are all from Lovecraft.

...

the developers, to my point earlier I just talked about from this not being the first game, they played Alone in the Dark, which is interestingly enough a game Tom and I discussed covering here.

I was like, "Should we do Alone in the Dark?"

Yeah.

And we decided not to-