Alone in the Dark Reboot from THQ Nordic and the writer of SOMA

[Rincewind]

Jason Köhnen will write the "doom jazz" music

This alone makes the soundtrack *slightly* interesting for me; I liked the first few Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble albums.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

 

[Great Deceiver]

Another game inspired by the REmakes eh. Those screens already look pretty dated and
it's coming from THQ Nordic and some no name dev, so expect some jank.

Horror is the kind of genre that needs a lot of polish, nothing worse than seeing an enemy bug out during a jumpscare.

Not really, Darkwood is far and away the best horror game of the last decade and it had a shoestring budget with primitive 2d graphics.

 

[kites]

- Jason Köhnen will write the "doom jazz" music;

man, i had completely forgotten about his music the last 15+ years..

kilimanjaro and other doom-jazz never scratched the itch like bohren did for me, but i will admit they are going for a somewhat different feeling on albums i've heard of theirs

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Do you think we'll play as Grace Saunders again, pranking the ghost pirates with Home Alone style traps? That to me is the essence of Alone in Dark 2

Furthermore, I can't accept any version of Edward Carnby that doesn't have a giant mustache, bad posture and a drinking problem.

 

[Don Peste]

Just look at the Hobby Consolas video. It's going to be trash, and the final nail in its coffin.
A The Devil Inside remake would have been interesting. I wonder who owns it. Ubi?

 

[toughasnails]

https://blog.playstation.com/2022/08/12/alone-in-the-dark-returns/

some new info

tl;dr

- all monsters were designed by Guy Davis, a production designer and illustrator who worked with Guillermo Del Toro on Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. He also did BPRD with Mike Mignola;
- Jason Köhnen will write the "doom jazz" music;
- the game's plot will incorporate bits and pieces of all three original games from the ninetees (so yeah, apparently you're gonna leave the mansion at some point, and will probably have to fight against zombified gangsters, ghost pirates and wild west cowboys lol).

I wonder if this is actually reviving some of the designs and plot ideas from the big horror game that Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to be "directing" for THQ before they went bust. From what little I remember being released about it, it seemed to have some deep south, redneck-exploitation theme going...

 

[Wunderbar]

https://blog.playstation.com/2022/08/12/alone-in-the-dark-returns/

some new info

tl;dr

- all monsters were designed by Guy Davis, a production designer and illustrator who worked with Guillermo Del Toro on Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. He also did BPRD with Mike Mignola;
- Jason Köhnen will write the "doom jazz" music;
- the game's plot will incorporate bits and pieces of all three original games from the ninetees (so yeah, apparently you're gonna leave the mansion at some point, and will probably have to fight against zombified gangsters, ghost pirates and wild west cowboys lol).

I wonder if this is actually reviving some of the designs and plot ideas from the big horror game that Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to be "directing" for THQ before they went bust. From what little I remember being released about it, it seemed to have some deep south, redneck-exploitation theme going...

if Del Toro is working on a videogame, then it's probably upcoming "Overdose" by Kojima.

 

[toughasnails]

I didn't mean to say that he is involved with this, I meant that since the people who worked with him in the past are involved and since the set up seems to be a bit similar this game might be reusing some scraps of his old cancelled THQ project
https://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012...tion-on-guillermo-del-toros-insane-video-game

 

[Wunderbar]

Do you think we'll play as Grace Saunders again, pranking the ghost pirates with Home Alone style traps?

actually yes.

https://www.gematsu.com/2022/08/alone-in-the-dark-reboot-announced-for-ps5-xbox-series-and-pc

"A playable teaser, dubbed “Grace in the Dark” and featuring its own original storyline, will be playable at Gamescom 2022 from August 24 to 28. A prologue to the main game, it will star Grace from Alone in the Dark 2. THQ Nordic has not said whether it plans to release this playable teaser outside of the event, but it is a completely separate story from the main game, so it will likely see a home release."

 

[Cyberarmy]

More like rebutchered? We'll see.

 

[vortex]

So you can play as male and female? Will there be character creation?

I didn't mean to say that he is involved with this, I meant that since the people who worked with him in the past are involved and since the set up seems to be a bit similar this game might be reusing some scraps of his old cancelled THQ project
https://www.polygon.com/gaming/2012...tion-on-guillermo-del-toros-insane-video-game

Get del Toro to work on Bloodborne 2.

 

[gerey]

Western developers have consistently failed to make good survival horror games. The best they've managed was pretentious walking sims.

The writer's previous gigs, SOMA and Amnesia, are really not that good. SOMA is babby's first transhumanism story and Amnesia is about as cliché as it gets, and both games were primitive in terms of gameplay, so whatever they're going to be doing will certainly be mechanically inferior to Resident Evil games and narratively inferior to Silent Hill.

I'm also not sure why they're digging up Alone in the Dark's corpse, many people that played the originals back in the day actually died of old age by now. I'm always puzzled with how obsessed devs/publishers seem to be with "name recognition", even when the "name" is related to an IP that hasn't been relevant for the past 20 years and ended in flames.

And yeah, the footage looks bad. The male character looks straight out Evil Within with all the animu belts, so I imagine he'll be carrying around a veritable arsenal on his back, and the I bet the female character is going to look like a 1920s Karen. She seems to have ordered the "obnoxious feminist" cosplay for this gig.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I feel like at this point people like the idea of what Alone in the Dark more than what it actually was. The original trilogy was all about throwing you in some strange location in which you really didn't know anything, before having to deal with some strange enemy right away. And pirates, for some reason. Very much the kind of thing that involved you piecing together the mystery on your own without twenty different characters saying "THIS MANSION IS CURSED!" before you ever encounter a single monster.
And of course, like all AitD games since The New Nightmare, this one is clearly aping other survival horror titles rather than trying something completely on its own. Even back in the days of the original title, before time rendered the 3d graphics into camp, the game wasn't grimdark. It didn't take itself so overly serious as this. It has a whiff of pretension about it, which is funny to me considering the games have desperately been trying to get out of that camp territory for so long and failing miserably.

 

[Fedora Master]

The series may be venerable but it was never actually good.

 

[Machocruz]

Already banalshitboring as shit with that tired over the shoulder perspective. Every game is the same game is the same game is the same game is

 

[toughasnails]

I'm also not sure why they're digging up Alone in the Dark's corpse, many people that played the originals back in the day actually died of old age by now. I'm always puzzled with how obsessed devs/publishers seem to be with "name recognition", even when the "name" is related to an IP that hasn't been relevant for the past 20 years and ended in flames.

A good argument can be made for AitD being the ur-text of PSX/PS2 era survival horror. It is enough to show the footage to younger gamer and they'll recognize a lot of trademarks of RE et al, prerendered backgrounds and fixed camera mixed with 3D models, mixture of combat and puzzle solving, even the details like rotating item models...
So there is some strength in carrying that name, you can sell your title as the revival of the game that "started it all" so to say.

 

[Tehdagah]

They really want to chase after RE2 Remake right? At this point I'm expecting The Evil Within 3 to look like it as well.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

To be expected they are taking a page out of Resident Evil
Alone in the Dark, was the main inspiration for RE
And considering the latter not only had more success, it is good the former should seriously examine what the latter did right

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

https://blog.playstation.com/2022/08/12/alone-in-the-dark-returns/

some new info

tl;dr

- all monsters were designed by Guy Davis, a production designer and illustrator who worked with Guillermo Del Toro on Pacific Rim, Crimson Peak and The Shape of Water. He also did BPRD with Mike Mignola;
- Jason Köhnen will write the "doom jazz" music;
- the game's plot will incorporate bits and pieces of all three original games from the ninetees (so yeah, apparently you're gonna leave the mansion at some point, and will probably have to fight against zombified gangsters, ghost pirates and wild west cowboys lol).

I wonder if this is actually reviving some of the designs and plot ideas from the big horror game that Guillermo Del Toro was supposed to be "directing" for THQ before they went bust. From what little I remember being released about it, it seemed to have some deep south, redneck-exploitation theme going...

I guess they would have the design docs for that.



That video does say Guillermo Del Toro did bring Guy Davis in. But it could have nothing to do with it. If you're doing some monster Lovecraftion thing, Guy Davis seems like a good guy to get; he was doing that kind of for years in Mike Mignola's BPRD Hellboy spinoff comic. Del Toro's name is probably just coming up because Davis has been doing design work for him since Pacific Rim.

The video talks about that game being large scale; (and also first person, which this is not) given there's screenshots of streets, and there seem to be a number of different locations from around the town the game takes place in, it does seem possible this could be a play on that game done as an Alone in the Dark game.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

To be expected they are taking a page out of Resident Evil
Alone in the Dark, was the main inspiration for RE
And considering the latter not only had more success, it is good the former should seriously examine what the latter did right

There is something kind of funny about how Alone in the Dark has continually failed to find success in the 26 years since Resident Evil. There's also something weird about how little Infogrames/Atari tried to do anything with Alone in the Dark since the first Resident Evil.

 

[toughasnails]

There is even a story about how Infogames and Capcom had an agreement that Capcom's people never explicitly mention Alone in the Dark, which is the real reason why it took Mikami some 20 years to admit that AitD influenced the form Resident Evil took in the end.

Capcom had an agreement with Infogrames (Alone in the Dark developer / editor) that was preventing Mikami to mention "the french game". For years, he claimed he never saw Alone in the Dark before designing Biohazard (Resident Evil). He finally said that without Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil would have been a First Person Shooter in full 3D.

Which is p retarded bc AitD would've benefited a LOT from that recognition.

 

[Tacgnol]

There is even a story about how Infogames and Capcom had an agreement that Capcom's people never explicitly mention Alone in the Dark, which is the real reason why it took Mikami some 20 years to admit that AitD influenced the form Resident Evil took in the end.

Capcom had an agreement with Infogrames (Alone in the Dark developer / editor) that was preventing Mikami to mention "the french game". For years, he claimed he never saw Alone in the Dark before designing Biohazard (Resident Evil). He finally said that without Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil would have been a First Person Shooter in full 3D.

Which is p retarded bc AitD would've benefited a LOT from that recognition.

I feel sorry for Mikami having to tell such an obvious lie over the years. Everyone with knowledge of the Alone series knew he was telling lies.

Sucks that it was companies that forced him to do so.

90s vidya company politics were weird.

 

[AndyS]

Even back in the days of the original title, before time rendered the 3d graphics into camp, the game wasn't grimdark. It didn't take itself so overly serious as this. It has a whiff of pretension about it, which is funny to me considering the games have desperately been trying to get out of that camp territory for so long and failing miserably.

You literally punch/kick the monsters to death with your gentlemanly pugilistic technique. As a kid it was one of the first things that stood out to me about the game.

 

[NoSoup4you]

They did it, they found the one reboot I would care about.

I don't expect the interesting adventure game stuff to come back, but I would accept something along the lines of RE7.