The Alone in the Dark series began life on PCs in 1992, and is widely credited with all but creating the 'survival horror' genre. However, over the years the market has not been kind to AitD, with the series never gaining the commercial success or critical acclaim the likes of Resident Evil or Silent Hill have enjoyed. After a failed attempt to revive the series with 2001 effort Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the series whimpered out and more or less disappeared from gaming's collective conscience.
That is until Eden Studios – developers of V-Rally, and more recently ambitious-but-flawed racing game Test Drive Unlimited – decided to reinvent the franchise for the discerning and demanding 2008 gamer. While the game has obviously been designed for the Xbox 360 and ported to other platforms as development has progressed, it is unclear whether the numerous flaws, irritating controls and poor design decisions which plague the PS2 version are the fault of Eden, or Hydravision, who handled this port.
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.
What’s annoying is people don’t understand how contractors work, either. All of this is uninformed knee-jerk reactions without any understanding of how employment works in this industry. There are key developers and staff that stay with a studio/publisher, but often times it’s a hire per project and then seeking new employment for a project. That’s how it’s always been…
That's a fair point too. I would say that in light of its tepid critical/commercial response and ongoing mass layoffs across the industry I think it's understandable for fans to worry about the longer-term implications. We'll see how it plays out in the future.
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.
Too bad too, it could have been a great game IMHO if they were to have fixed some of the camera issues, clumsy controls and the item menu... They could have at least had the game pause while selecting an item. I know it's not as realistic but then again, neither is the game...