Playing every PS1 game - Alone in the Dark, Alundra

Alone in the Dark: Jack is Back

This is a 1996 PlayStation port of Alone in the Dark 2, which was released for DOS in 1993. I’ve never played any of the AITD games; in particular the first, from which this game borrows a lot in terms of gameplay mechanics and structure. It’s never looked particularly good to me in honesty, though I always had the assumption the first game in the series was meant to be decent, yet ‘of its time’. So is the sequel any good?

No. My God, this is terrible. It barely even runs. Despite operating on pre-rendered backgrounds with some incredibly low-poly models (with a sprinkling of entry-level texture mapping) rendered on top, the game coughs and splutters its way to a chugging, low frame-rate, tedious mess.

“I paid how much for this game!?”

Whilst Resident Evil (which has a fair amount to borrow from AITD) had already been on shelves for six months before the release of Jack is Back and was able to rather easily cope with frequent switching of pre-rendered backgrounds and tank controls, Jack is Back can manage neither. Moving between camera angles frequently hangs the game for so long that it ends up showing a ‘Loading’ message to assure the player that the game hasn’t just crashed entirely.

Get used to it.

I thought AITD was supposed to be a horror game, but there is no horror to be found here beyond that any publisher got away with any of this. Enemies are zombies with tommy guns, and they seem to be stupidly numerous. Aiming is a lottery. Switching weapons requires chugging through menus. Everything is agonisingly slow.

Get used to this too.

I got about a dozen screens in, got stunlocked by a zombie with a shotgun, died, and quit (the most enjoyable part of the experience). Never again.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 1/10

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

In Mid-2001, the PS1 was on the downslope and consumers were heading toward PS2, but the grey box was still a big deal. Despite this, developing a multiplatform game in 2001 for PS1 and Dreamcast still seems a bit puzzling. It eventually made its way to PS2, but what it all meant was that this rebooted AITD (fourth in the series) ended up being a fifth-gen console game releasing on sixth-gen consoles.

The DC version certainly would have looked better.

In a true ‘the circle is now complete’ moment, AITD in its fourth entry went from being a game that inspired Resident Evil to one that copies comprehensively from it. The neo-gothic, kitschy horror theming has been disposed in favour of a more RE-coded dark and gruesome survival plod-a-thon, where you constantly check and re-check your map as you pick your way from safe room to safe room. In my opinion this is actually an improvement, but then again I’m also still getting over how bad Jack is Back was. There’s also a level of novelty to coming back to old fixed-camera-pre-rendered-background games that wasn’t there at the time - contemporary reviews were pretty middling, as the world got bored of the by then much-imitated Resident Evil formula.

You can usually switch the lights on in a room to better see what you’re doing.

The (very) long FMV intro prepares you for what is to come - hours of terrible voice acting (they really were copying RE) and an inebriated plotline. Also familiar to players of Resident Evil will be the choice between a Character A/Character B scenario at the beginning. The difference here is rather than the two scenarios overlapping horribly to the point where they might as well be two different retellings of a story (a la Resident Evil 2), they’re actually both quite internally consistent.

Your paths cross with your partner from time to time, but usually to just exchange some poorly-written banter.

This is actually a surprisingly good game. It’s scary, tense and difficult without being excessively so. Weapons are varied, but ammunition isn’t, and enemies are quite relentless (we’ll come back to these later).

It correctly identifies the essence of what made RE good - being stuck in a creepy building filled with monsters and slowly clearing it out room by locked room while the story unfolds around you - and applies it in its own way. It’s not all cynically lifted from its more successful cousin - there are some unique mechanics, in particular the usage of your torch (pointing mapped to the left stick) to not only spot items but also shoo away certain photosensitive enemies. Pressing R2 lets you radio your partner whenever you like for some (pretty bloody unhelpful) advice on what to do next.

The use of pre-rendered backgrounds which can be lit up with your torch gets the atmosphere spot on.

It’s not all good though. Playing the game, you’re reminded of the old 00s trauma of games clearly being created with sales of the ‘Official Guide’ in mind, with puzzles and set pieces with solutions so arcane that one would never expect to stumble across the answer through deduction alone. This is made all the more frustrating by the fact that enemies respawn on every revisit to a room or corridor (Or at least, almost every visit. Sometimes it seemed a bit random) and take lots of ammo to take down. Having a guide next to you is virtually a requirement, and having enemies respawn is a cheap move in any survival horror game if you ask me.

Playing as the female sidekick offers you a more puzzle-based scenario, with a Mr. X style enemy stalking you for stretches of it.

The bulk of the game for both characters is set in and around the spooky manor, and that is where everything all works. After these chapters, as you move toward the end of the game, it sort of runs out of ideas. No more keys, no more puzzles; the final segment is quite literally an exercise in running down a very long series of bare corridors while enemies respawn and chase you to the final boss.

Combat suffers from the familiar tank-control humdrum. Awkwardly dodge-and-shoot the enemy until it dies.

I definitely had way more fun with it than I expected, though, and I think now that horror games have long since moved on from a saturation of tank-control RE clones, it can be enjoyed more for what it is, without being looked at with a rather tired eye.

Kept my attention for: A week
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 7/10

Alundra

The PlayStation was indeed a driver of the 3D revolution where we saw Sonic swapped for Crash Bandicoot (and Final Fantasy revolutionised itself), but there was still a market for 2D Zelda-likes, albeit a small, very uncool one. So here’s Alundra. A spiritual sequel to Landstalker on the Mega Drive (which I’ve never played, so who knows how much is borrowed from it), where you play a pot-smashing, silent wandering elf on a loosely defined journey to save something or other. Sounds familiar.

In every clichéd RPG environment going, bashing up every clichéd RPG enemy going.

It looks pretty good. The localisation is a bit ropey, but everything is there for a responsive action-platformer-RPG-whatever you want to call it. I remember it being referred to somewhere (maybe Official PlayStation Magazine) as a ‘kid’s first RPG’ or whatever. Not quite. It’s simplistic but effective in being so.

Boss battles make you think.

The problem was I found it a bit of a dull grind. The loop is as follows: go to village, get tasked with urgent escapade in nearby -dangerous dungeon-, clear out long, dangerous, puzzle-focused dungeon, beat the boss, return to village, receive storyline exposition, return to step 1. Enemies respawn every time you come back to an area, so you’re incentivised to just run past them. You can hack away at bits of grass to reveal loose bits of cash (just go with it), and that respawns too, so you can effectively grind money by just going back and forth - but there isn’t really anything to spend it on beyond healing herbs.

Dialogue is cringey.

I probably got about a third of the way through. The puzzles can be quite difficult. Maybe it gets more interesting, I don’t know. But I gave it a fair whack.

Kept my attention for: A week
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Alundra 2: A New Legend Begins

Where Alundra was a spiritual successor to Landstalker, Alundra 2 is actually a spiritual successor to, er, Alundra.

It’s the same, but very different.

The sequel shares little in common with its predecessor, which makes the game’s title a misnomer due to the lack of an in-game character actually called Alundra. A few things are retained - hacking away at grass to earn money, respawning enemies, and the unique health point system - but plot, character and tone wise it’s a different game entirely.

They made the translation halfway normal, at least.

Most cutscenes are fully voice acted (aside from your own character, who remains strong and silent) and animated in 3D with some early-era videogame ‘cinematography’. It’s noticeably more clearly aimed at a younger audience than Alundra; it’s a bit like watching a Saturday morning anime dub cartoon.

Male-on-female comedy violence that would be utterly verboten in 2025.

Controls are weird. You use L1/R1 to rotate the camera, and your movement is strictly limited to eight directions based on whichever way the camera is facing. Combined with a lack of a lock-on system (and pokey hitboxes) it means your attacks will often frustratingly miss (and the enemy gets a shot in while your animation completes). It uses a mixture of a full-3D and 2D-isometric camera setup, meaning that whilst you can alternate between three levels of ‘zoom’ with the Select button, you can never really see much ahead of you (likely because the draw distance is pants). All this is a long way of saying it’s difficult to know which way you’re facing and which way you’re going. The game sportingly throws in a compass feature to help with this, but for whatever bizarre reason it needs to be toggled on and off, and overlays the whole screen while it’s on. Not useful.

It mixes things up with the odd minigame set piece. We really were in a post-FF7 world.

There’s something quaint about it all, though. It’s straightforward enough for you to easily pick up. It feels like the sort of game that some Youtuber will ‘discover’ and it will join the likes of Megaman Legends as one of those endlessly talked about ‘hidden gems’. Better than Alundra? It’s difficult to say as they’re so different, but I had more fun with it and might come back to it one day.

Kept my attention for: A week
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 7/10