Alone in the Dark: Illumination

My first instinct when loading this up was hope - four playable characters, a light-versus-darkness mechanic, Lovecraftian setting. On paper, there is something here. Then the first level started, the power was out, and I was running around collecting batteries to plug into a generator. Then the second level started. The power was out. I collected batteries. You see where this is going. Illumination is a third-person co-op shooter built for up to four players, drawing obvious inspiration from Left 4 Dead. You pick from the Hunter (Ted Carnby, with an AK-47, M4, and P90 plus an attached flamethrower), the Witch (magical lightning and electricity attacks), the Priest, or the Engineer, each with distinct weapons and unlockable skills. The central gimmick is that enemies are vulnerable to light sources - flashlights, environmental lamps, anything bright - which sounds like a clever mechanic until you realize the flashlight barely does the job and the only light that consistently matters comes from the scenery. The idea has a genuine ancestor in Alan Wake, and that comparison does Illumination no favors at all. The problems stack up fast. There is no voice acting - story beats are delivered as text blocks before each level, which kills any atmosphere the grimy industrial town of Lorwich, Virginia might have built. Enemy AI is broken: monsters noclip through walls, explosions happen in complete silence, and difficulty balancing is a coin flip between trivially empty and punishingly overcrowded. Solo play is particularly rough since the whole thing is clearly tuned for a group that no longer exists online. Server population is essentially zero, so unless you are dragging friends in manually, co-op is off the table. Graphically it sits somewhere below what you would expect from its 2015 release year, with bland environments that reviewers at the time compared unfavorably to early PS2 output. The lighting effects around electrical cables and fire are the one visual element that holds up, which is ironic given that light is supposedly the game's whole identity. The Lovecraft connections are surface-level at best - Cthulhu shows up, Night Gaunts get reimagined as generic poison-spitting demons, and the franchise name-drops Edward Carnby's lineage without earning any of that legacy. If you strip the name off entirely and judge it as a budget co-op horde shooter, it is still not a good game. It is repetitive, technically fragile, and bereft of the tension or escalation that makes that genre satisfying. The one honest thing that can be said in its defense: no microtransactions, and it is at least functional enough to finish. That is a low bar, and Illumination limbs under it rather than clearing it. Franchise fans will find nothing here that honors what made the 1992 original matter.

Alex · Scout Team

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