Here's a situation with which everyone who plays videogames will be familiar: you're playing as a heavily armed character, who has shot, punched, smashed and looted his way through wave after wave of monsters, zombies, henchmen or aliens - only to be foiled, despite your bulging muscles and impressive arsenal, by a plywood door. Kick it in? Shoot it? Blow it up? Nonsense - it's time to go and look for the four pieces of the sacred medallion that'll make it open!
The first defining moment of Eurogamer's early glimpse of Atari's upcoming resurrection of Alone In The Dark came when they ran into a dead-end and a locked wooden door. They waited patiently for the game's lovely next-gen graphics and great presentation to be let down by the inevitable locked-door puzzle.
Not this time.
Alone in the Dark developer Pieces Interactive has been hit with layoffs a month after its release, as per the latest information.
That genuinely, genuinely sucks. The reboot has clear flaws, but it really felt like a solid first step for this team to receive *greater* investment.
That's standard. Teams are together for a Project, after its done some..and sometimes most devs are fired until the next Project is in the works and people are needed again. Only the core members stay in the time between the hot phase of the game development.
VGChartz's Lee Mehr: "In one sense, it feels strange to even think Pieces Interactive had big shoes to fill with this series' legacy. Given what's come before, did it really? And yet, even when considering the last two flops over a two-decade span, there's still something about Alone in the Dark emblazoned on a title screen that carries a sense of revered history. In that respect, perhaps this reboot's best accomplishment is in honoring that spirit through its inventive world. It's also fair to emphasize knocks against its survival-horror design, some puzzle-solving, and so on; it certainly won't be considered a trendsetter like the 1992 classic. Still, the amount of goodwill wedded to its brighter qualities makes for something that dawdles the line between unfortunately-flawed and impressively-enticing."
The new Alone in the Dark remake doesn't do anything especially noteworthy, but that doesn't mean it's bad. It's just... cromulent.