Alone in the Dark Key

My first hour inside Derceto Manor had me genuinely hooked, which made the rest of the game's inconsistencies all the more frustrating to reconcile. This 2024 reimagining of the 1992 original is a third-person, over-the-shoulder survival horror set in 1930s Louisiana, written by Mikael Hedberg of SOMA and Amnesia: The Dark Descent fame, and it carries that lineage in its bones. You pick either Edward Carnby, played via motion capture by David Harbour, or Emily Hartwood, played by Jodie Comer, and spend the bulk of the campaign poking around a psychiatric manor looking for Emily's missing uncle while reality slowly turns inside out around you. Both runs clock in around ten to fifteen hours, and while the story is largely the same between them, each character gets unique late-game levels and different dialogue threads with the manor's unsettling residents. The gameplay splits fairly cleanly in two. Early hours lean on exploration and puzzle-solving inside Derceto itself, which is the game's strongest stretch. The manor is a genuinely well-designed hub, full of locked doors, hidden combinations, scattered journals called lagniappes, and collectibles that build out the lore. Later, the balance shifts toward combat set pieces against cosmic creatures in locations that range from Louisiana swamps to Egyptian ruins to blizzard-swept wastelands. These outside sequences are where the cracks widen. Combat lets you cycle between a pistol or revolver depending on your character, a shotgun, and a machine gun, with breakable melee items for close quarters. The gunplay has some weight to it, but enemy AI is unreliable and melee attacks feel slow and underpowered. Accessibility options let you tune hint density and difficulty, which is a genuine quality-of-life benefit, but no slider fixes the fundamental clunkiness of a fight going sideways. The puzzles sit in a similar middle ground. The Derceto-based ones reward exploration and attention to detail, but a heavy portion of the puzzle count boils down to finding a number in the environment and entering it into a padlock or safe, with picture-rearranging sequences filling out the rest. It is rarely challenging enough to feel satisfying, and it rarely fails badly enough to be infuriating. The story, meanwhile, is the most divisive element in the critical record and also the most interesting one. Hedberg's script takes the source material and builds a strange, Lovecraftian narrative around an ancient evil with roots deep in the characters' pasts. It is ambitious and occasionally compelling, but it loses coherence in the back half as timeline-hopping and cosmic revelations pile up without enough connective tissue. A secret ending, accessible only after completing both campaigns and hunting down a specific set of collectibles, adds a fourth-wall-breaking meta twist that will either delight or baffle depending on your appetite for that kind of thing. The presentation carries more weight than the mechanics. Sound design is atmospheric and often excellent, the Derceto manor itself is a highlight of environmental design, and the Southern Gothic 1930s aesthetic is committed and specific. Harbour and Comer's performances were a point of genuine disagreement among critics, with some finding chemistry and others finding woodenness, but the supporting cast of manor residents lands more consistently. Worth noting: Pieces Interactive was shut down by parent company Embracer Group in June 2024 after the game underperformed commercially. No post-launch content is coming, and patches have addressed most of the launch bugs that drew criticism. What you play now is the final, complete version. If you came into this expecting something on par with recent Resident Evil remakes or Alan Wake 2, you will be disappointed. If you want a shorter, moodier, AA-budget horror adventure that leans on story and atmosphere over action, and you can tolerate rough combat and breezy puzzles, there is a genuinely interesting game buried here.

Alex · Scout Team

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