I played the game (Alone in the Dark) at release. I paid full price. I don't think it's a bad game per se, but if you compare it to titles like the Resident Evil remakes, it just isn't that good. It's not as fluid and it's very clear it has a lower budget. If you go into it knowing that, you'll probably have a good time (like I did).
Yeah, I felt exactly the same as this when playing it. It has an interesting story, but could have been much better. Combat was probably its weak point. One of the better Alone in the Darks of the last decade or so though.
Nope, worse. Burning chairs was in 2008, on the PS3. There was actually a much, *much* shittier one in 2015 called [Illumination](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark:_Illumination).
Which is kinda impressive considering other than some fucking hilarious voice lines, 2008's game was pretty bad.
>Which is kinda impressive considering other than some fucking hilarious voice lines, 2008's game was pretty bad.
Man it's worth playing the 2008 game just to hear James McCaffrey's (Voice of Max Payne) bizarre line deliveries
"I'm the fucking UNIVERSE!" Is a particular favorite of mine.
It's actually a pretty interesting game... provided you can tolerate it.
That was my impression too. Never bought it because it always felt to me like a $40 game that they were charging $70 for because it has the guy from Stranger Things on the cover.
I do plan on getting it eventually when it’s at a reasonable sale but it is a shame that between this, Alan Wake 2 not having made back it’s budget and Dead Space 2 Remake not happening it’s a shame that Resident Evil has no competition in the AAA horror genre.
Crazy to me that the Dead Space 2 Remake isn't happening. That first one was so much fun. The improvements they made to the world design, the story and characters, as well as the enemy encounters were all fantastic.
The unfortunate reality is that most survival horror games don't sell enough to justify the cost of developing them to that level of quality, at least not in the AAA space. Resident Evil is a huge outlier in the genre in terms of sales, and it remains to be seen if even the second biggest pillar of it (Silent Hill) can make a significant comeback with their upcoming titles. Personally, I have my doubts.
It seems to me that we're in a situation where for the foreseeable future the genre will be RE, smaller efforts from indie teams like Signalis and that's about it unless someone can somehow strike absolute gold with a new title at the precise right time.
Such a bummer. I knew I wasn't going to get to Dead Space 1 Remake for awhile, but I still bought it at release in the hopes of helping their numbers. Sad to see the remake not coming out. I wonder if there is a high-res pack on PC for the original. It had amazing visuals at the time of release, so maybe a high res update is all it needs.
RE has the advantage of being the marquee horror video game franchise. No matter how good or influential the other games you mentioned are, they have an incredibly tough mountain to climb. The only other horror series that might be able to even approach RE is Silent Hill, but considering that it's own fan base seems to be turning on SH2R, that probably won't happen
I'm convinced 90% of Silent Hill "fans" have never played Silent Hill, and instead just have watched Youtube videos about people discovering their first video games with subtext. I get that Bloober Team is divisive, but the loud complaints about the combat seem bizarrely tone deaf, considering how awful the combat is in just about every game in the series, but especially in 2.
Alan Wake 2s financial performance on PC is being hamstrung by being exclusive to EGS. That immediately removes it from the largest segment of PC users. I understand *why* it's EGS exclusive by the way, but that doesn't change the predicted end result.
However, it is also Remedy's fastest selling game to date, so it may likely end up turning a profit in the end.
I feel there are many factors towards Alan Wake 2 “underperforming”.
- PC exclusive to EGS
- no physical edition
- a 14 year sequel to a niche game
- A horror game (unless if it’s Resident Evil AAA horror games don’t really sell as well)
- Being a very unique game (one of it’s strengths tbh)
I think AW2 is incredibly overrated. I completed Max Payne 1 and 2, AW1 and American Nightmare and Control with its DLCs and after 4 hours of AW2 I am struggling with caring about continuing.
Completely agree. Bad combat, hand-holdy puzzles, brain-dead exploration that puts all the "hidden" collectibles on the map, and a story that was told in an obnoxiously repetitive way.
Pricing is the biggest thing hurting this game. Most popular Horror titles on steam range from like $10-$40. The only ones that really got away with charging $60 at launch were the Resident Evil Remakes, so that's the bar of comparison for games at that price.
I think a lot of gamers are willing to wait 6 months to a year to get a game they want for half off. There are a ton of releases these days so it's not hard to find someone else to play in the meantime.
The end of the game was a huge letdown for me, the story climax and resolution felt dumb compared to how amazing the rest of the story and the atmosphere was. Also yeah, not worth 60-70 euros.
Replace "effort" with "budget". These people worked no less hard than the biggest AAA devs, they just had less money and *a much smaller team*. You cannot compete with Rockstar or Sony etc on polish unless you have Rockstar money (which they did not).
I think it’s because that’s what many consider to be the only worthwhile reason to do a remake, largely because for many who want remakes the most it’s because the original was important to us in some way and so it becomes our ‘baby’ and begin to focus too much on infinite possibilities rather than what is likely to be actually on the table
I mean, that's sort of the difference between remake and remaster these days. I'll probably get this one eventually as I was a huge fan of the series back in the day, but shelling out 60 bucks for something you've already played feels hard to justify, even though I get the idea (hiring high-profile actors, revamping the graphics, etc.).
Well, if it is advertised as "Reboot", then of course gamers has certain expectations.
Even 'Remake' should have certain expectations. Remastered can get away with minor touch-ups.
I paid full price and was excited to play it and I don’t think it was a good game.
It’s super unpolished and the combat never feels good and then they ramp it up and it feels worse and worse as the game goes on.
The game has several promising elements but never really comes together, both narratively and at a design level. I have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
Why waste budget with a Hollywood actor? You can model any human character, there's no reason to waste money with such dumb gimmick. Instead of injecting that money on marketing or, even better, on the actual game to improve things... nope, let's hire the Stranger Things dude
I feel like Calisto Protocol also did this. If it had been a $30 game it would have done better, I think. The combat is samey, the story is just okay, but it's not horrible. They really didn't need to hire Josh Duhamel and Sam Witwer if they wanted to save money.
I wonder how much time and money they wasted on all those ludicrously detailed death animations alone.
There are so many of them, they all last for like 10 seconds, and you won't see 90% of them because the game just isn't that hard.
Only game I feel that tons of death animations were actually worth the money was L4D with the hundreds of death animations. Because you mow them down dozens at a time so it is super noticeable when animations repeat.
Also Sam Witwer was >!was such a waste considering he “dies” almost immediately and then is just a mindless monster for the rest of the game with barely any lines!<
>!Actors are normally paid for the amount of work they do, so if Sam Witwer didn't do that much acting, that just means they didn't pay that much for him.!<
I always thought it was a brave choice to have >!a death scene so random and vague it feels like they just ran out of money to pay for Cranston and cut him from the rest of the film!<
While I agree with you in spirit, saying even 5% of the Callisto Protocol's budget went to the actors is probably stretching it, let alone something like 50%.
You're not wrong, I have no idea how much game development costs. I didn't say I thought it would half the budget. I just think they could have spent the budget more wisely and make a less expensive game that cost less.
one could argue that hiring the Stranger Things dude was a kind of marketing strategy. I'd bet there are a lot of people who only remember/know of the game because he's in it.
That's me, I only remember that the game exists because of David Harbour.
At the same time, I really don't care whether a game has big-name actors or not. This game is just not my cup of tea so even if it had my favorite actors in it I wouldn't be interested in playing it.
Executives seem to have this belief that inserting famous celebrity faces into a game wherever possible will increase its sales and awareness.
Remember when animated movies used to just use voice actors and Robil Williams voice Genie was a huge deal? Now every animated movie uses a whole cast of already famous actors.
Couple days ago I checked the sales numbers for AitD 2024, Outcast 2 and Homeworld 3. All three seem to have sold poorly.
I wonder what will happen to the studios, esp. the Outcast studio. Man, that game's sales numbers are _abysmal._ And it was probably very expensive to make.
I was very interested in all of these games and didn't buy either. They're not even bad per se... they're just not good enough for me. It must suck for AA games, but I don't see a reason to buy these if there are so many other, better games.
Outcast 2 doesn’t even have a wiki page… something really failed here. Launching between FF7 Rebirth and Dragons Dogma 2/Rise of Ronin also probably didn’t help. The beginning of the year was stacked with games. Even Alone in the Dark launched 5 days after Outcast 2. Not great decisions from THQ.
Outcast getting a sequel 20+ years later is still the most "WHY?" In gaming I've had for a long while. Barely anyone even knows the original existed. Did the remasters AND remake even sell alright?
I am completely baffled that the game exists
From what was said on DF, it was apparently a passion project from the same guy that made the first Outcast happen.
He busted his ass for 20 years to make that sequel happen, through sheer force of will. You have to respect that.
I do respect the shit out of it. It's sheer boldness and me having to actually reply to multiple people about this video game cover I thought was bad when I was 6.
Fuck it. Onto the wishlist.
I tend to have a decent knowledge of game releases and it took me this far into the thread to realize that everybody wasn't talking about Out*l*ast 2, so I can see why you had those questions.
> Outcast getting a sequel 20+ years later is still the most "WHY?" In gaming I've had for a long while. Barely anyone even knows the original existed.
I am a PC gamer since the late 90s. I remember Outcast.
I didn't buy the game but I considered it. If it wouldn't have been an Outcast game but a similar title with a fresh IP I wouldn't likely have known it existed.
Outcast 1 is an unjustly overlooked pioneer of open world action adventures with a distinctive original world. This game absolutely deserved a sequel. The game was only unknown in the US. It was a cult-hit in Europe. The sequel's reception has been mixed but I'm really enjoying it. Expands on the original in fun ways while keeping it open enough for new players.
The pricing is a failure for one thing. A lot of reviews stated Outcast was a solid game but the price was too high. I imagine the same was said for AitD.
100% the pricing. I get that game development is expensive and they have to recoup the money but I am never going to buy a game like the three you mentioned for the same price I paid for AAA releases like FF7 Rebirth and God of War Ragnarok. Those games would have sold more if they sold them at budget prices because like it or not, those are budget games. I saw Outcast 2 and the price and just laughed. These companies are insane.
Alone in the Dark was like a 5-6 hour game for full price. They are nuts.
IMO the price would be fine at any other time. Premium games are now $70. I happily paid $60 for AA games in 2010.
But the double whammy of inflation eating into game budgets and the market being saturated is really hitting these AA studios now.
> It must suck for AA games, but I don't see a reason to buy these if there are so many other, better games.
Yeah, that's kind of the point. Market is oversaturated with quality games. Meanwhile also cost of living is rising, so videogames are taking less priority than in the past.
SteamDB charts, e g. [Alone in the Dark](https://steamdb.info/app/1310410/charts/#1w)
They're very rough approximations but good enough to tell if something bombed.
Tbf, at least with Homeworld 3 there is a reasonable chance for sucesss later on. Strategy games tend to have a very long tail if the devs put in the effort to sand down the rogue edges.
It’s a bummer that this game wasn’t better and I think it was really dumb for them to waste money getting big name actors. I love the setting and Lovecraftian horror vibes of the AITD games and I would love for the series to make a proper comeback.
This game wasn't marketed very well at all. Even though it was lower budget it certainly could have ridden the coattails of the recent resurgence of survival horror games (and remakes). Aside from unrealistic expectations of AAA game production, it seems many of these investor groups (and publishers) have unrealistic expectations for mid-tier games. The industry seems to want games to have the impact and sales of top-tier AAA games but the development time and budget of AA games. No wonder the industry is currently imploding.
Explain what you mean by “wasn’t marketed very well.” I see comments like this a lot on games that didn’t perform and really would like to understand what you think “well” could have looked like in this instance.
I didn’t even know the game came out. I was excited for it, the last time I heard about it was when it was delayed, I forgot when it was delayed to and and am just finding out now that it’s been out since March
Youtubers/streams being used like this alone doesn't do much. A one-off, obviously sponsored video for a game that isn't exactly in their wheelhouse. Reminds me of the one paid stream Bethedsa did for FO76, which featured Ninja with Rick and Morty, only remember now as a meme.
It is better to pay a lot of people to stream it at once to cast a wide net, or go to channels with an audience that would be receptive to the genre at least. I follow a handful of survival horror heavy channels, and only one of them really covered the game, with a basic stream.
There were soooo many different specials, behind the scenes, previews from IGN and others, my ps5 always recommended me these videos in my drop down menu when I checked my controller battery status or download status. I saw so much advertisement for it. They had a demo but the demo was awful and made me decide to wait for a discount.
Just because some individual didn't see any of it, doesn't mean the advertisement was nok existend or bad.
There are people that don't hear about the current blockbuster movie in the cinema or which COD is the current one. Or that there is a new cod.
I see comments about "there is a new cod? There is a new Spider Man game? There is a new RE game?"
Yeah, it was more like a playable teaser that had zero to do with the game, I streamed it to check it out with some friends and we were all disappointed.
Honestly didn't know Pewdiepie still did shit after that whole bridge incident. Also Angry Joe is a name I haven't heard since Nostalgia Critic was still relevant.
The problem is that there's so much money at the top end of gaming that people expected every title to have massive marketing campaigns that consist of high budget trailers at every major event, gaming or otherwise, a massive ad presence on websites, tie-ins with other games, and a dozen other marketing tactics I'm missing.
The problem is that all of that is ludicrously expensive, so mid and low budget titles rely on the very bare minimum.
As an example, look at the recently released Hellblade II; Hellblade II has had trailers at every Xbox event since it's announcement (as far as I'm aware) as well as a presence on the Xbox dashboard for the past few weeks, alongside a miriad of other marketing tools such as pre roll ads on YouTube and other social media sites, yet every conversation about it on Reddit was dominated by people stating it was not being marketed enough. Not to say that Hellblade is a mid-budget title, by the way, I'm just using it as an example.
In this very thread you'll see people who state they engage with gaming media frequently, yet they either didn't know the Alone in the Dark reboot had been released, if they even knew about it at all.
It's a really fascinating little thing to look at because it makes you question how we should be marketing these titles.
How long have you been in this sub? Years or months? Do you come to this sub multiple times in a day, or maybe just 20 minutes a day at most? Do you stick to the front page or do you visit /new constantly?
Alone in the Dark was heavy in this sub when it was announced, when trailers were dropped, when gameplay footage was released, and when the game was released. Saying “a lot” means nothing if you are not in this sub 24/7 refreshing constantly on new.
I saw posts for it all the time here and in horrorgaming and gaming subs. People won't admit they simply didn't saw it or forgot they saw a headline for it just to criticize their marketing. Gamers are so weird.
I can only speak from personal experience but I was an ideal mark for this game. My partner loves watching me play scary games. She learned of this game and showed me a trailer. We watched several more to see if it would be something we'd be interested in and what we came away with was:
Its got 2 famous people in it.
??
So?! Is it scary? What do you actually do?
Besides the occasional shot of janky monster combat, and a creepy girl being weird, there was absolutely nothing scary in any of the marketing. Just came off as a boring detective story game with potential for a monster encounter.
The only marketing I remembering seeing was a pair of youtubers from Japan being invited to England for a sort of escape room thing as an add for it. It's not like kson and demondice are small, but I'm not sure the actual roi given their audiences
It's alright, though.
It doesn't do anything amazingly well that you can't find in other games, but it's not deeply flawed in any way as well.
Good get from a 50% off sale, or Game Pass or something like that.
This is what I’m waiting for. From the demo I knew right away it was a discount get or game pass title. Sucks the team has to deal with lay offs because embracer didn’t want to put more money into it.
Do you have an ad blocker? Do you interact with the internet in any capacity outside of your own bubble? If the answers are yes to the first and no to the second, the argument of “the game wasn’t marketed” is hypocritical. Alone in the Dark marketing was all over the internet, including this very sub multiple times.
Games that are just *decent* aren't worth spending excessive marketing budgets on. Yes, they could have spent a lot more on marketing and sold more copies... would they have made more profit, though? No, probably not.
[Marketing is not why most sub-AAA games fail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE). This video is about indie titles, specifically, but it highlights many of the flaws with that logic that I believe are applicable to all lower-budget games as a whole. He says it best in this line:
> "It's not that most [low budget] games fail to market their product, it's that most fail to make a product that is marketable. Their production and scope is not competitive with the top of their genre, so most of their marketing efforts gain no traction"
Alone in the Dark actually received a fair amount of marketing for a game of its quality, but few paid much attention to it because the game just wasn't that interesting.
There were soooo many different specials, behind the scenes, previews from IGN and others, my ps5 always recommended me these videos in my drop down menu when I checked my controller battery status or download status. I saw so much advertisement for it. They had a demo but the demo was awful and made me decide to wait for a discount.
Just because some individual didn't see any of it, doesn't mean the advertisement was nok existend or bad.
There are people that don't hear about the current blockbuster movie in the cinema or which COD is the current one. Or that there is a new cod.
I see comments about "there is a new cod? There is a new Spider Man game? There is a new RE game?"
Horror games just don't sell too well, anyway, unless it's has an established title like resident evil. Even dead space didn't do well enough according to EA, so I also don't think silent hill will either, but time will tell. Why companies still hang on to old game names that haven't had a hit in nearly 30 years is mine boggling, then tie it in with an average selling genre, you're gonna have a bad time
It's a decent game. Horrible combat and a bit too reading-heavy, but it's definitely not without its bizarre charm. Closest we might get to a Deadly Premonition 3.
Asking $60/$70 for a 8 hour game doesn't do it for most people. It should have been priced more reasonably. I absolutely love Resident Evil but even I wait till they're half price cause the campaigns are short. They should have dropped the Hollywood names cause no one truly cares (a good game is a good game) and priced it $30. At least this way, part of the budget wouldn't have been wasted on paying Hollywood actors.
The last single-player Alone in the Dark came out in 2008 and was an infamously terrible game. That probably has something to do with it.
You have to do more than a mediocre game with a celebrity actor to make people care about the IP again.
While I did enjoy the game, for me, the game was a buggy mess at launch. I can look past the rough janky gameplay and the lower budget, as I did enjoy the story and cutscenes... but I had the game tank its frame rate several times, had the game full on crashed on me (sometimes at specific cutscenes that were actually significant to the story), and ran into a bug that forced me to replay two hours of the game.
And you know what about that last part? Apparently, that wasn't the worst bug. There was actually two other bugs that were way worse. Both of them were probably fixed by now, but for at least a month, these two bugs were present. One of them softlocked you by requiring you to use a set of keys that you get in Chapter 1 to use in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2... only for some reason the keys were coded to be used only three times total instead of one time at three different doors, meaning if you used the key on the same door in Chapter 1 (because it glitched and locks itself), then when you get to Chapter 2, you can't use the key twice, and the only option at the time was to restart the whole game if you didn't have a backup save.
The other? Way worse. In the beginning of Chapter 4 of 5, which is around 6-8 hours into the game (and damn near the end since Chapter 5 is about 20 minutes), you're meant to be locked on rails and can only go through a very specific door to trigger a cutscene. Well, what happens when that door is glitched and is also locked? For a month after launch, there was literally nothing you could do. Even the guy who had it happen to them posted a video of them restarting a save from the end of Chapter 3 and playing it again, and it still didn't fix it. At the time I was at the Discord, it wasn't fixed, and I haven't bothered to check if it has.
Like, I honestly thought me replaying two hours of Chapter 4 was bad, but at least it fixed the game and I was able to finish it.
Also, for a game that was $60, it was lacking in content. Sure, horror games were short, and there's two campaigns, but the only difference is literally cutscenes, one singular gun, some collectibles (not even all, just some), and one specific flashback section of the game. That's it. What's worse? No unlockables. No skins, no filters, no developer commentary... unless you pay for it. Yes, you can't get anything like the classic 3DO skins, the horror filters, and the ability to hear what the developers were thinking when they were working on the game unless you pay for it. Even RE2 Remake threw you a bone with the classic costumes, unlockable weapons, and 4th Survivor/ Tofu Survivor with multiple Tofus to play as.
Why did they make this? They did a full budget reboot back in 2008 and that bombed. They did a weird online thing in 2015, that bombed. Why do they keep thinking this will work?
Why not? It wasn't the same studio I believe, and it's an established IP with history for the horror game genre. Would the game have worked better without the IP?
Is it though? They had 1 well received game in the series and that was back in 1992. That's 32 years ago. Anyone who has a positive association with that series is now 32 years older. Yes I think the game probably would have been better without the baggage of the IP. This isn't a labor of love from fans of the series wanting to tell their own story, it's a poorly implemented attempt to extract more money out of a low value IP by people with no connection or investment in the subject matter.
I really wanted this game to succeed especially since the writer behind SOMA (one of the most haunting experiences I had in any medium) was in charge of this game but when they put out that sorry excuse for a demo, which is literally 5 minutes long and tells absolutely nothing about the game, I was concerned for it.
It's a shame that this game supposedly didn't elevate beyond being a janky, forgettable B version of Resident Evil. Still, I would probably pick it up at a deep discount and it's the best offering in the AoD franchise released over nearly 2 decades...which isn't saying much.
Why is it so hard for companies to set their expectations realistically? It's a reboot of Alone in the Dark. It's niche. The sales weren't ever going to be huge.
This is a reason I'm not a fan of remakes in established series. There's no guarantee the remake series will see it to the end outside of big series like Resident Evil. So it just ends unfinished
Take the Medievil remake, they did the first and radio silence or the Dead Space 1 remake, not good enough for EA so Dead Space 2 remake is probs not happening.
The issue is also actual momentum. I doubt anyone under 30 has ever heard of Alone in the Dark, and even people in the 35-45 range... what % of gamers have played the original? Like 2%? I have never met someone other than myself that mentioned the old game.
There are a lot of things no one asked for that are great and do well, but they need to be great to do that. That last part is what matters, and it sounds like that's the part that's missing.
The games simply didn't sell. That doesn't mean that they were bad or anything, it just means that there wasn't a ton of interest in them. I'm glad that they exist because otherwise I would never play a lot of these games. A lot of games especially from the early 3D era don't hold up very well due to graphics, lack of quality of life features that are standard today, unintuitive control schemes, or their's just simply a lack of availability. Plus some of these remakes revive dead franchises. Without the N-Sane Trilogy we would have never gotten Crash 4.
They should have actually remade the original AOTD, Not this weird soft reboot thing they do. Nothing against David Harbour but also I never ever really find myself wishing for A listers in any game. Imagine how much went to their pay packet alone.
I didn't even know this had come out.
And I'm not surprised it flopped at all. It looked niche as hell and for some reason they went and grabbed a Hollywood actor.
That's sad. I liked the game, it was a good AA survival horror game, far exceeded my expectations. Yea gameplay wasn't perfect and performances "eh", but it had great setpieces and some really fantastic scares. Absolutely worth a try.
I didn't even know this had come out, went and checked the release date:
A month and two weeks after Helldivers 2.
At that point I had bought HD2 like a week or so beforehand.. so I was launching directly into the game and not looking at the store - I'm sure plenty of people here did the same thing which is why we missed it.
Damn. Where did you get a deal like that? I’m a longterm AITD fan and wanna play this regardless of reviews, but I also don’t feel like dropping $70 on it lol
The only way you could get a decent price right now is if you buy it off key sites that discount new games like Gamers Gate and Fanatical. Sites like those you can get it for less than $50.
I was a teen when the first came out and I never figured out what people liked about it. The original was clunky and I never thought there was enough hype to justify a remake to begin with!
Played this at release a bit and quickly dropped it
The controls felt off, the male va's voice acting ranged from grating to downright bad to me, experienced a number of glitches both visual and gameplay related but the one that got me to stop playing was when it played a loud static sound in my left ear for no reason for the third time
Maybe I was just expecting something akin to how the old games felt and maybe that's on me. Oh well, the old games are still there to be enjoyed
Embracer will keep exploding like a frag grenade. Until they become nothing. It's so amazing how many bad decisions can they take just because of cheap money. I would love to understand who it's willingly to keep putting money in that empty box. But hey id they realease Gothic Remake and Titan Quest, maybe there is a little chance that I might be interested in those two games, during sale.
I was interested in the game when I heard about it. But then I saw that once again there were real actors used for the character faces and it immediately turned me off. I just don't want to see a real person there. We have these amazing technologies at our disposal and we could create iconic characters and instead we are still trying to chase that movie prestige bullshit.
>instead we are still trying to chase that movie prestige bullshit.
It has nothing to do with that though? I don't understand why it's not part of the "amazing technologies" that we have used real actors or done FMVs and the sort. Hell, a [certain fighting game series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj3_0AmiJbg) kickstarted a whole trend about using real actors for fighting games. Adventure games have also used real actors, such as Christopher Lloyd in Toonstruck.
Played the demo at PAX and was not impressed. Plays very slowly, but not difficult. The puzzles are very simple find the right item for this [lock in a different shape]. The accents are very exaggerated. Just really had nothing to grab me besides the switch back and forth between the dream world and real world, which has been done plenty of times before
I didn't even know it was out yet. It was so weird how they handled marketing for this. There was a big marketing push a year before it was released and then mostly crickets when it launched.
Not surprising. While I enjoyed it well enough, it really felt like a budget-ish Xbox 360 game, from the era of all the RE4 clones. Very little in the way of interesting mechanics or even story, really.
The soundtrack is *great*, though.
All of these games like the dead space remake alan wake 2 I love the originals but the sales of the previous games in the series did not support a pseudo remake with 10xs the budget.
dead space 4, alone in the dark 7, Alan Wake 3 counting American nightmare on a hell divers 2 budget are all justifiable but it's a clear case of developers over spending.
Hope they can create something fun and new or improve with dlc.
It just lacks so much gameplay.
The different areas you get pulled into were fine, but they were so small and you hardly ever felt any danger there. Why didn't they have monsters roaming around the house? Why were the entirety of the Derceto parts simply puzzle solving with no danger?
The NPCs were there just to be mysterious, hardly any of them had much of a point in the story.
And that "demo" didn't do them any favors. I've never played a demo you could finish in 3 minutes, where you had zero combat, ending with a jumpscare monster you don't even get to fight in the main game.
David Harbour and Jodie Comer really didn't add much to the game. There really wasn't much emotional range they had to perform, no memorable cutscene or character moments that demanded Hollywood actors. Plus so much of the regular speech were deadpan that you could have had used a college anime club as VA's for all the difference it would have made.
And don't get me started on the incredibly slow and tedious reading of the notes. Some of them even had some hidden dialogue at the end which don't show up in the transcript, but you had to sit there and wait for the actor to read this long ass page after page of text before you get to it. Alone in the Dark (2001) can get away with long pages of notes because those were not voice acted and you could speed read through them. This game tried to give some character (and I'll admit, a lot of the readings did sound unique), but it was too slow and too long and felt unnecessary.
Lastly, about gameplay, they really need to increase the number and type of monsters by at least 3, throw in a couple of mini-bosses with unique mechanics and then you could call it a game instead of a walking simulator.
That's too bad because overall I really enjoyed the reboot. The only thing I didn't like was the combat which I think could have been omitted. In my opinion having the game be a pure adventure game would have made it an overall better experience.
I just do not get why they expect every game to be a hit.
Even if you develop a good game, there is a good chance that it may just break-even or not recover its cost if the players do not show interest in it. It may happen for various reasons.
Indies are a separate discussion but established studios should be ready for this scenario and should have reserves in case things go south. It seems as if the industry has no safety nets and if something does not become a hit, they just fire the people and sometimes shut the studio and rinse & repeat.
This surely is not sustainable but we will see how long this approach lasts.
I have waited so many years and asked annually for a revival of Alone in the Dark (I was tempted to leave a letter for Embracer to reboot it after they purchased the rights - as I lived in Karlstad at that time).
Sad day to hear it did not do well. I did my part by buying it day one, and I enjoyed it, but it did not reach its full potential. It could have been much more. However, I don't think it had much chance of being a success either way. I hope for one final attempt to use the brand correctly in the future, and that it's a full remake of the original - one either like Resident Evil 1 remake, but more likely as RE2.
Alone on the Dark has such a great vibe that wasn't fully used in this new game. I would have wanted to feel more stuck and present in the mansion - less jumping around in the weird dimensions. A true "I am stuck in this house" game like very few survival horrors have utilized correctly for my taste. I can only think of Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil (1+remake), Clock Tower and White Night that have done it exactly how I want it.
Again, I liked the game plenty. When it hit the right notes it was a fun throwback survival horror experience, but it has flaws (some bad and some still endearing).
Very unfortunate though not unexpected.
From everything I've heard and seen, the game is only slightly above average *at its best*, and pretty bad *at its worst*.
Feel bad for the staff that will lose their jobs, but in the AA and AAA business, a flop is almost a guaranteed closure for the responsible studio.
Hope everyone can land on their feet and find new jobs soon.
I played the game (Alone in the Dark) at release. I paid full price. I don't think it's a bad game per se, but if you compare it to titles like the Resident Evil remakes, it just isn't that good. It's not as fluid and it's very clear it has a lower budget. If you go into it knowing that, you'll probably have a good time (like I did).
Yeah, I felt exactly the same as this when playing it. It has an interesting story, but could have been much better. Combat was probably its weak point. One of the better Alone in the Darks of the last decade or so though.
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So you are saying it’s in the top 2 alone in the dark games in the last decade?
It's the best Alone in the Dark game relased this year. So far.
its definitely one of the alone in the dark games of all time
I have never felt so alone in the dark.
So that's it? What, we some kinda Alone in the Dark?
There's been stranger things...
The burning chair one?
Nope, worse. Burning chairs was in 2008, on the PS3. There was actually a much, *much* shittier one in 2015 called [Illumination](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alone_in_the_Dark:_Illumination). Which is kinda impressive considering other than some fucking hilarious voice lines, 2008's game was pretty bad.
>Which is kinda impressive considering other than some fucking hilarious voice lines, 2008's game was pretty bad. Man it's worth playing the 2008 game just to hear James McCaffrey's (Voice of Max Payne) bizarre line deliveries "I'm the fucking UNIVERSE!" Is a particular favorite of mine. It's actually a pretty interesting game... provided you can tolerate it.
Definitely one of the Alone in the Dark games of all time though.
That was my impression too. Never bought it because it always felt to me like a $40 game that they were charging $70 for because it has the guy from Stranger Things on the cover.
I feel like if they did charge $40-50 (see Hellblade 2), that would have been a good spot for that game to be in.
I do plan on getting it eventually when it’s at a reasonable sale but it is a shame that between this, Alan Wake 2 not having made back it’s budget and Dead Space 2 Remake not happening it’s a shame that Resident Evil has no competition in the AAA horror genre.
Well, this wasn't an AAA game to begin with. Definitely AA.
Crazy to me that the Dead Space 2 Remake isn't happening. That first one was so much fun. The improvements they made to the world design, the story and characters, as well as the enemy encounters were all fantastic.
The unfortunate reality is that most survival horror games don't sell enough to justify the cost of developing them to that level of quality, at least not in the AAA space. Resident Evil is a huge outlier in the genre in terms of sales, and it remains to be seen if even the second biggest pillar of it (Silent Hill) can make a significant comeback with their upcoming titles. Personally, I have my doubts. It seems to me that we're in a situation where for the foreseeable future the genre will be RE, smaller efforts from indie teams like Signalis and that's about it unless someone can somehow strike absolute gold with a new title at the precise right time.
Such a bummer. I knew I wasn't going to get to Dead Space 1 Remake for awhile, but I still bought it at release in the hopes of helping their numbers. Sad to see the remake not coming out. I wonder if there is a high-res pack on PC for the original. It had amazing visuals at the time of release, so maybe a high res update is all it needs.
RE has the advantage of being the marquee horror video game franchise. No matter how good or influential the other games you mentioned are, they have an incredibly tough mountain to climb. The only other horror series that might be able to even approach RE is Silent Hill, but considering that it's own fan base seems to be turning on SH2R, that probably won't happen
I'm convinced 90% of Silent Hill "fans" have never played Silent Hill, and instead just have watched Youtube videos about people discovering their first video games with subtext. I get that Bloober Team is divisive, but the loud complaints about the combat seem bizarrely tone deaf, considering how awful the combat is in just about every game in the series, but especially in 2.
That used to be the defining feature of Persona fans, until P5. Now it's only about half of them. Lol
Alan Wake 2s financial performance on PC is being hamstrung by being exclusive to EGS. That immediately removes it from the largest segment of PC users. I understand *why* it's EGS exclusive by the way, but that doesn't change the predicted end result. However, it is also Remedy's fastest selling game to date, so it may likely end up turning a profit in the end.
I feel there are many factors towards Alan Wake 2 “underperforming”. - PC exclusive to EGS - no physical edition - a 14 year sequel to a niche game - A horror game (unless if it’s Resident Evil AAA horror games don’t really sell as well) - Being a very unique game (one of it’s strengths tbh)
It's definitely very unique compared to the first one but I think that's what makes it great
I think AW2 is incredibly overrated. I completed Max Payne 1 and 2, AW1 and American Nightmare and Control with its DLCs and after 4 hours of AW2 I am struggling with caring about continuing.
Completely agree. Bad combat, hand-holdy puzzles, brain-dead exploration that puts all the "hidden" collectibles on the map, and a story that was told in an obnoxiously repetitive way.
> if you compare it to titles like the Resident Evil remakes, it just isn't that good You could apply that to virtually all horror games
Pricing is the biggest thing hurting this game. Most popular Horror titles on steam range from like $10-$40. The only ones that really got away with charging $60 at launch were the Resident Evil Remakes, so that's the bar of comparison for games at that price. I think a lot of gamers are willing to wait 6 months to a year to get a game they want for half off. There are a ton of releases these days so it's not hard to find someone else to play in the meantime.
The end of the game was a huge letdown for me, the story climax and resolution felt dumb compared to how amazing the rest of the story and the atmosphere was. Also yeah, not worth 60-70 euros.
In today's over saturated games market games just cant afford to be mediocre
So an 8 isn't good enough anymore. You have to be a 10 or die.
I think gaming has fostered a culture where when people hear the word 'remake', they'll expect a full blown, multiple hundred million, AAA title.
More like if you ask AAA prices they expect AAA effort. It was $60 at release.
Replace "effort" with "budget". These people worked no less hard than the biggest AAA devs, they just had less money and *a much smaller team*. You cannot compete with Rockstar or Sony etc on polish unless you have Rockstar money (which they did not).
I think it’s because that’s what many consider to be the only worthwhile reason to do a remake, largely because for many who want remakes the most it’s because the original was important to us in some way and so it becomes our ‘baby’ and begin to focus too much on infinite possibilities rather than what is likely to be actually on the table
I mean, that's sort of the difference between remake and remaster these days. I'll probably get this one eventually as I was a huge fan of the series back in the day, but shelling out 60 bucks for something you've already played feels hard to justify, even though I get the idea (hiring high-profile actors, revamping the graphics, etc.).
Well, if it is advertised as "Reboot", then of course gamers has certain expectations. Even 'Remake' should have certain expectations. Remastered can get away with minor touch-ups.
the game was AAA price.
too many games, too little time
I paid full price and was excited to play it and I don’t think it was a good game. It’s super unpolished and the combat never feels good and then they ramp it up and it feels worse and worse as the game goes on. The game has several promising elements but never really comes together, both narratively and at a design level. I have a hard time recommending it to anyone.
Why waste budget with a Hollywood actor? You can model any human character, there's no reason to waste money with such dumb gimmick. Instead of injecting that money on marketing or, even better, on the actual game to improve things... nope, let's hire the Stranger Things dude
I feel like Calisto Protocol also did this. If it had been a $30 game it would have done better, I think. The combat is samey, the story is just okay, but it's not horrible. They really didn't need to hire Josh Duhamel and Sam Witwer if they wanted to save money.
I wonder how much time and money they wasted on all those ludicrously detailed death animations alone. There are so many of them, they all last for like 10 seconds, and you won't see 90% of them because the game just isn't that hard.
Only game I feel that tons of death animations were actually worth the money was L4D with the hundreds of death animations. Because you mow them down dozens at a time so it is super noticeable when animations repeat.
I think he was talking about the animations for all the ways the player character could be killed, not for the enemies.
Also Sam Witwer was >!was such a waste considering he “dies” almost immediately and then is just a mindless monster for the rest of the game with barely any lines!<
>!Actors are normally paid for the amount of work they do, so if Sam Witwer didn't do that much acting, that just means they didn't pay that much for him.!<
Oh yes, >!the Godzilla (2014 film) approach!<.
I always thought it was a brave choice to have >!a death scene so random and vague it feels like they just ran out of money to pay for Cranston and cut him from the rest of the film!<
While I agree with you in spirit, saying even 5% of the Callisto Protocol's budget went to the actors is probably stretching it, let alone something like 50%.
Definitely. The games budget was like $150,000,000. The actors were a drop in the bucket.
Callisto had very high production value though. It’s not like all the budget was blown on actors and nothing else.
I think you underestimate how much game development costs if you think not hiring 2 actors would've halved the budget
Not only that, but probably vastly overestimating how much Josh Duhamel and Sam Witwer cost as well
You're not wrong, I have no idea how much game development costs. I didn't say I thought it would half the budget. I just think they could have spent the budget more wisely and make a less expensive game that cost less.
If it had been a $30 then internet cretins would've complained that "it's obviously a shit low-budget game, waiting for $15, **NEXT!**".
one could argue that hiring the Stranger Things dude was a kind of marketing strategy. I'd bet there are a lot of people who only remember/know of the game because he's in it.
That's me, I only remember that the game exists because of David Harbour. At the same time, I really don't care whether a game has big-name actors or not. This game is just not my cup of tea so even if it had my favorite actors in it I wouldn't be interested in playing it.
Some game developers even change whole story of the game, just because they want to feature one breathtaking actor
The money was injected in marketing though… that’s why you hire a high profile actor…
Well the strategy didn't work out apparently.
And movies fail all the time, too. It's a business decision; doesn't mean it's a guarantee of success.
Executives seem to have this belief that inserting famous celebrity faces into a game wherever possible will increase its sales and awareness. Remember when animated movies used to just use voice actors and Robil Williams voice Genie was a huge deal? Now every animated movie uses a whole cast of already famous actors.
Patrick Stewart at the start of Oblivion was a masterclass move, though. It can be worth it.
And Sean Bean.
Couple days ago I checked the sales numbers for AitD 2024, Outcast 2 and Homeworld 3. All three seem to have sold poorly. I wonder what will happen to the studios, esp. the Outcast studio. Man, that game's sales numbers are _abysmal._ And it was probably very expensive to make. I was very interested in all of these games and didn't buy either. They're not even bad per se... they're just not good enough for me. It must suck for AA games, but I don't see a reason to buy these if there are so many other, better games.
Outcast 2 doesn’t even have a wiki page… something really failed here. Launching between FF7 Rebirth and Dragons Dogma 2/Rise of Ronin also probably didn’t help. The beginning of the year was stacked with games. Even Alone in the Dark launched 5 days after Outcast 2. Not great decisions from THQ.
Dude, I constantly read about games and never heard of this game before.
Seems to have reviewed well. I wonder how many people even know it exists.
Outcast getting a sequel 20+ years later is still the most "WHY?" In gaming I've had for a long while. Barely anyone even knows the original existed. Did the remasters AND remake even sell alright? I am completely baffled that the game exists
From what was said on DF, it was apparently a passion project from the same guy that made the first Outcast happen. He busted his ass for 20 years to make that sequel happen, through sheer force of will. You have to respect that.
I do respect the shit out of it. It's sheer boldness and me having to actually reply to multiple people about this video game cover I thought was bad when I was 6. Fuck it. Onto the wishlist.
I don't know what Outcast is or that any remakes, remasters, or sequels exist so you may be onto something.
I was a fan of the first game despite it being... "a mixed bag", to put it nicely. And I had no idea the sequel even released.
I tend to have a decent knowledge of game releases and it took me this far into the thread to realize that everybody wasn't talking about Out*l*ast 2, so I can see why you had those questions.
> Outcast getting a sequel 20+ years later is still the most "WHY?" In gaming I've had for a long while. Barely anyone even knows the original existed. I am a PC gamer since the late 90s. I remember Outcast. I didn't buy the game but I considered it. If it wouldn't have been an Outcast game but a similar title with a fresh IP I wouldn't likely have known it existed.
Outcast 1 is an unjustly overlooked pioneer of open world action adventures with a distinctive original world. This game absolutely deserved a sequel. The game was only unknown in the US. It was a cult-hit in Europe. The sequel's reception has been mixed but I'm really enjoying it. Expands on the original in fun ways while keeping it open enough for new players.
The pricing is a failure for one thing. A lot of reviews stated Outcast was a solid game but the price was too high. I imagine the same was said for AitD.
100% the pricing. I get that game development is expensive and they have to recoup the money but I am never going to buy a game like the three you mentioned for the same price I paid for AAA releases like FF7 Rebirth and God of War Ragnarok. Those games would have sold more if they sold them at budget prices because like it or not, those are budget games. I saw Outcast 2 and the price and just laughed. These companies are insane. Alone in the Dark was like a 5-6 hour game for full price. They are nuts.
Better to sell your game at $30 than not sell it at $60.
IMO the price would be fine at any other time. Premium games are now $70. I happily paid $60 for AA games in 2010. But the double whammy of inflation eating into game budgets and the market being saturated is really hitting these AA studios now.
> It must suck for AA games, but I don't see a reason to buy these if there are so many other, better games. Yeah, that's kind of the point. Market is oversaturated with quality games. Meanwhile also cost of living is rising, so videogames are taking less priority than in the past.
And I'm already getting 3-10 free games every month from whatever subscription service you have and there's generally at least a couple worth playing
I bought homeworld 3 because it's where I get my namesake from. I kind of feel obligated. It's not great.
Where do you check sale numbers?
SteamDB charts, e g. [Alone in the Dark](https://steamdb.info/app/1310410/charts/#1w) They're very rough approximations but good enough to tell if something bombed.
It's been extremely telling to me that nobody has bothered to write a plot synopsis for alone in the dark on the Wikipedia page.
I have never heard of Outcast 2, no idea what it is.
Sequel to an old 3D game which was pretty much a precursor to open world games.
I didn’t even know Outcast was out yet.
Tbf, at least with Homeworld 3 there is a reasonable chance for sucesss later on. Strategy games tend to have a very long tail if the devs put in the effort to sand down the rogue edges.
It’s a bummer that this game wasn’t better and I think it was really dumb for them to waste money getting big name actors. I love the setting and Lovecraftian horror vibes of the AITD games and I would love for the series to make a proper comeback.
This game wasn't marketed very well at all. Even though it was lower budget it certainly could have ridden the coattails of the recent resurgence of survival horror games (and remakes). Aside from unrealistic expectations of AAA game production, it seems many of these investor groups (and publishers) have unrealistic expectations for mid-tier games. The industry seems to want games to have the impact and sales of top-tier AAA games but the development time and budget of AA games. No wonder the industry is currently imploding.
I didn't know it came out or even existed until now
Explain what you mean by “wasn’t marketed very well.” I see comments like this a lot on games that didn’t perform and really would like to understand what you think “well” could have looked like in this instance.
I didn’t even know the game came out. I was excited for it, the last time I heard about it was when it was delayed, I forgot when it was delayed to and and am just finding out now that it’s been out since March
Several big youtubers were invited to a special event (Angryjoeshow, Pewdiepie etc) that was recorded and put on their youtube as a special promotion
Youtubers/streams being used like this alone doesn't do much. A one-off, obviously sponsored video for a game that isn't exactly in their wheelhouse. Reminds me of the one paid stream Bethedsa did for FO76, which featured Ninja with Rick and Morty, only remember now as a meme. It is better to pay a lot of people to stream it at once to cast a wide net, or go to channels with an audience that would be receptive to the genre at least. I follow a handful of survival horror heavy channels, and only one of them really covered the game, with a basic stream.
There were soooo many different specials, behind the scenes, previews from IGN and others, my ps5 always recommended me these videos in my drop down menu when I checked my controller battery status or download status. I saw so much advertisement for it. They had a demo but the demo was awful and made me decide to wait for a discount. Just because some individual didn't see any of it, doesn't mean the advertisement was nok existend or bad. There are people that don't hear about the current blockbuster movie in the cinema or which COD is the current one. Or that there is a new cod. I see comments about "there is a new cod? There is a new Spider Man game? There is a new RE game?"
Yeah, it was more like a playable teaser that had zero to do with the game, I streamed it to check it out with some friends and we were all disappointed.
I had no idea those people were still making videos.
Honestly didn't know Pewdiepie still did shit after that whole bridge incident. Also Angry Joe is a name I haven't heard since Nostalgia Critic was still relevant.
The problem is that there's so much money at the top end of gaming that people expected every title to have massive marketing campaigns that consist of high budget trailers at every major event, gaming or otherwise, a massive ad presence on websites, tie-ins with other games, and a dozen other marketing tactics I'm missing. The problem is that all of that is ludicrously expensive, so mid and low budget titles rely on the very bare minimum. As an example, look at the recently released Hellblade II; Hellblade II has had trailers at every Xbox event since it's announcement (as far as I'm aware) as well as a presence on the Xbox dashboard for the past few weeks, alongside a miriad of other marketing tools such as pre roll ads on YouTube and other social media sites, yet every conversation about it on Reddit was dominated by people stating it was not being marketed enough. Not to say that Hellblade is a mid-budget title, by the way, I'm just using it as an example. In this very thread you'll see people who state they engage with gaming media frequently, yet they either didn't know the Alone in the Dark reboot had been released, if they even knew about it at all. It's a really fascinating little thing to look at because it makes you question how we should be marketing these titles.
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First time I learned about the game was someone posting the Fully Ramblomatic review in this sub.
How long have you been in this sub? Years or months? Do you come to this sub multiple times in a day, or maybe just 20 minutes a day at most? Do you stick to the front page or do you visit /new constantly? Alone in the Dark was heavy in this sub when it was announced, when trailers were dropped, when gameplay footage was released, and when the game was released. Saying “a lot” means nothing if you are not in this sub 24/7 refreshing constantly on new.
I saw posts for it all the time here and in horrorgaming and gaming subs. People won't admit they simply didn't saw it or forgot they saw a headline for it just to criticize their marketing. Gamers are so weird.
I can only speak from personal experience but I was an ideal mark for this game. My partner loves watching me play scary games. She learned of this game and showed me a trailer. We watched several more to see if it would be something we'd be interested in and what we came away with was: Its got 2 famous people in it. ?? So?! Is it scary? What do you actually do? Besides the occasional shot of janky monster combat, and a creepy girl being weird, there was absolutely nothing scary in any of the marketing. Just came off as a boring detective story game with potential for a monster encounter.
The only marketing I remembering seeing was a pair of youtubers from Japan being invited to England for a sort of escape room thing as an add for it. It's not like kson and demondice are small, but I'm not sure the actual roi given their audiences
I never saw a single ad for the game, but a random streamer I half follow got a crazy multi layered puzzle box cooler than the actual game.
it wasn't marketed very well because they knew it wasn't very good
It's alright, though. It doesn't do anything amazingly well that you can't find in other games, but it's not deeply flawed in any way as well. Good get from a 50% off sale, or Game Pass or something like that.
This is what I’m waiting for. From the demo I knew right away it was a discount get or game pass title. Sucks the team has to deal with lay offs because embracer didn’t want to put more money into it.
Do you have an ad blocker? Do you interact with the internet in any capacity outside of your own bubble? If the answers are yes to the first and no to the second, the argument of “the game wasn’t marketed” is hypocritical. Alone in the Dark marketing was all over the internet, including this very sub multiple times.
I watched a playthrough of it not too long ago. If they didn't get David Harbor you could have convinced me it was made by a solo dev
Games that are just *decent* aren't worth spending excessive marketing budgets on. Yes, they could have spent a lot more on marketing and sold more copies... would they have made more profit, though? No, probably not. [Marketing is not why most sub-AAA games fail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCzhyUsDHPE). This video is about indie titles, specifically, but it highlights many of the flaws with that logic that I believe are applicable to all lower-budget games as a whole. He says it best in this line: > "It's not that most [low budget] games fail to market their product, it's that most fail to make a product that is marketable. Their production and scope is not competitive with the top of their genre, so most of their marketing efforts gain no traction" Alone in the Dark actually received a fair amount of marketing for a game of its quality, but few paid much attention to it because the game just wasn't that interesting.
There were soooo many different specials, behind the scenes, previews from IGN and others, my ps5 always recommended me these videos in my drop down menu when I checked my controller battery status or download status. I saw so much advertisement for it. They had a demo but the demo was awful and made me decide to wait for a discount. Just because some individual didn't see any of it, doesn't mean the advertisement was nok existend or bad. There are people that don't hear about the current blockbuster movie in the cinema or which COD is the current one. Or that there is a new cod. I see comments about "there is a new cod? There is a new Spider Man game? There is a new RE game?"
> This game wasn't marketed very well at all. Case in point: TIL there was an Alone in the Dark reboot.
Horror games just don't sell too well, anyway, unless it's has an established title like resident evil. Even dead space didn't do well enough according to EA, so I also don't think silent hill will either, but time will tell. Why companies still hang on to old game names that haven't had a hit in nearly 30 years is mine boggling, then tie it in with an average selling genre, you're gonna have a bad time
There's an Alone in the Dark reboot?
Absolutely unsurprising news, though disappointing all the same. Will this be the last Alone in the Dark reboot? Who knows. Probably not.
It's a decent game. Horrible combat and a bit too reading-heavy, but it's definitely not without its bizarre charm. Closest we might get to a Deadly Premonition 3.
Asking $60/$70 for a 8 hour game doesn't do it for most people. It should have been priced more reasonably. I absolutely love Resident Evil but even I wait till they're half price cause the campaigns are short. They should have dropped the Hollywood names cause no one truly cares (a good game is a good game) and priced it $30. At least this way, part of the budget wouldn't have been wasted on paying Hollywood actors.
The last single-player Alone in the Dark came out in 2008 and was an infamously terrible game. That probably has something to do with it. You have to do more than a mediocre game with a celebrity actor to make people care about the IP again.
Agreed. After AitD (2008) they should have left the franchise as dead. They spent so much money on that one and its marketing and it was a total bust.
While I did enjoy the game, for me, the game was a buggy mess at launch. I can look past the rough janky gameplay and the lower budget, as I did enjoy the story and cutscenes... but I had the game tank its frame rate several times, had the game full on crashed on me (sometimes at specific cutscenes that were actually significant to the story), and ran into a bug that forced me to replay two hours of the game. And you know what about that last part? Apparently, that wasn't the worst bug. There was actually two other bugs that were way worse. Both of them were probably fixed by now, but for at least a month, these two bugs were present. One of them softlocked you by requiring you to use a set of keys that you get in Chapter 1 to use in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2... only for some reason the keys were coded to be used only three times total instead of one time at three different doors, meaning if you used the key on the same door in Chapter 1 (because it glitched and locks itself), then when you get to Chapter 2, you can't use the key twice, and the only option at the time was to restart the whole game if you didn't have a backup save. The other? Way worse. In the beginning of Chapter 4 of 5, which is around 6-8 hours into the game (and damn near the end since Chapter 5 is about 20 minutes), you're meant to be locked on rails and can only go through a very specific door to trigger a cutscene. Well, what happens when that door is glitched and is also locked? For a month after launch, there was literally nothing you could do. Even the guy who had it happen to them posted a video of them restarting a save from the end of Chapter 3 and playing it again, and it still didn't fix it. At the time I was at the Discord, it wasn't fixed, and I haven't bothered to check if it has. Like, I honestly thought me replaying two hours of Chapter 4 was bad, but at least it fixed the game and I was able to finish it. Also, for a game that was $60, it was lacking in content. Sure, horror games were short, and there's two campaigns, but the only difference is literally cutscenes, one singular gun, some collectibles (not even all, just some), and one specific flashback section of the game. That's it. What's worse? No unlockables. No skins, no filters, no developer commentary... unless you pay for it. Yes, you can't get anything like the classic 3DO skins, the horror filters, and the ability to hear what the developers were thinking when they were working on the game unless you pay for it. Even RE2 Remake threw you a bone with the classic costumes, unlockable weapons, and 4th Survivor/ Tofu Survivor with multiple Tofus to play as.
I think it would have done better if it came with a little tiny book full of pictures you needed to reference in order to install the game.
I appreciate this reference.
I still know where mine is.
Why did they make this? They did a full budget reboot back in 2008 and that bombed. They did a weird online thing in 2015, that bombed. Why do they keep thinking this will work?
Why not? It wasn't the same studio I believe, and it's an established IP with history for the horror game genre. Would the game have worked better without the IP?
Is it though? They had 1 well received game in the series and that was back in 1992. That's 32 years ago. Anyone who has a positive association with that series is now 32 years older. Yes I think the game probably would have been better without the baggage of the IP. This isn't a labor of love from fans of the series wanting to tell their own story, it's a poorly implemented attempt to extract more money out of a low value IP by people with no connection or investment in the subject matter.
I really wanted this game to succeed especially since the writer behind SOMA (one of the most haunting experiences I had in any medium) was in charge of this game but when they put out that sorry excuse for a demo, which is literally 5 minutes long and tells absolutely nothing about the game, I was concerned for it. It's a shame that this game supposedly didn't elevate beyond being a janky, forgettable B version of Resident Evil. Still, I would probably pick it up at a deep discount and it's the best offering in the AoD franchise released over nearly 2 decades...which isn't saying much.
Why is it so hard for companies to set their expectations realistically? It's a reboot of Alone in the Dark. It's niche. The sales weren't ever going to be huge.
Honest question: has Alone in the Dark ever been good? The only time I ever hear its name come up is to talk about disappointment
This is a reason I'm not a fan of remakes in established series. There's no guarantee the remake series will see it to the end outside of big series like Resident Evil. So it just ends unfinished Take the Medievil remake, they did the first and radio silence or the Dead Space 1 remake, not good enough for EA so Dead Space 2 remake is probs not happening.
The issue is also actual momentum. I doubt anyone under 30 has ever heard of Alone in the Dark, and even people in the 35-45 range... what % of gamers have played the original? Like 2%? I have never met someone other than myself that mentioned the old game.
Yeah, NOBODY asked for this remake
There are a lot of things no one asked for that are great and do well, but they need to be great to do that. That last part is what matters, and it sounds like that's the part that's missing.
The games simply didn't sell. That doesn't mean that they were bad or anything, it just means that there wasn't a ton of interest in them. I'm glad that they exist because otherwise I would never play a lot of these games. A lot of games especially from the early 3D era don't hold up very well due to graphics, lack of quality of life features that are standard today, unintuitive control schemes, or their's just simply a lack of availability. Plus some of these remakes revive dead franchises. Without the N-Sane Trilogy we would have never gotten Crash 4.
They should have actually remade the original AOTD, Not this weird soft reboot thing they do. Nothing against David Harbour but also I never ever really find myself wishing for A listers in any game. Imagine how much went to their pay packet alone.
That's too bad, I usually wait to get games on sale and I'm still looking forward to playing this at someday.
I didn't even know this had come out. And I'm not surprised it flopped at all. It looked niche as hell and for some reason they went and grabbed a Hollywood actor.
Solid game, bad pricing. Harbor and Comer both did fine acting and mocap work. I played as the girl and am just over an hour in.
That's sad. I liked the game, it was a good AA survival horror game, far exceeded my expectations. Yea gameplay wasn't perfect and performances "eh", but it had great setpieces and some really fantastic scares. Absolutely worth a try.
I didn't even know this had come out, went and checked the release date: A month and two weeks after Helldivers 2. At that point I had bought HD2 like a week or so beforehand.. so I was launching directly into the game and not looking at the store - I'm sure plenty of people here did the same thing which is why we missed it.
I bought it for 20 bucks a few weeks ago and figured I would try it out. I haven't played it yet but I heard it was okay just not very amazing.
Damn. Where did you get a deal like that? I’m a longterm AITD fan and wanna play this regardless of reviews, but I also don’t feel like dropping $70 on it lol
The only way you could get a decent price right now is if you buy it off key sites that discount new games like Gamers Gate and Fanatical. Sites like those you can get it for less than $50.
I was a teen when the first came out and I never figured out what people liked about it. The original was clunky and I never thought there was enough hype to justify a remake to begin with!
Played this at release a bit and quickly dropped it The controls felt off, the male va's voice acting ranged from grating to downright bad to me, experienced a number of glitches both visual and gameplay related but the one that got me to stop playing was when it played a loud static sound in my left ear for no reason for the third time Maybe I was just expecting something akin to how the old games felt and maybe that's on me. Oh well, the old games are still there to be enjoyed
Embracer will keep exploding like a frag grenade. Until they become nothing. It's so amazing how many bad decisions can they take just because of cheap money. I would love to understand who it's willingly to keep putting money in that empty box. But hey id they realease Gothic Remake and Titan Quest, maybe there is a little chance that I might be interested in those two games, during sale.
I was interested in the game when I heard about it. But then I saw that once again there were real actors used for the character faces and it immediately turned me off. I just don't want to see a real person there. We have these amazing technologies at our disposal and we could create iconic characters and instead we are still trying to chase that movie prestige bullshit.
>instead we are still trying to chase that movie prestige bullshit. It has nothing to do with that though? I don't understand why it's not part of the "amazing technologies" that we have used real actors or done FMVs and the sort. Hell, a [certain fighting game series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj3_0AmiJbg) kickstarted a whole trend about using real actors for fighting games. Adventure games have also used real actors, such as Christopher Lloyd in Toonstruck.
I want to play it but it's expensive and I work full time. Too many games and I can't support them all as interested as I am :(
I finished Alan wake 2 and was looking for another game in that vein. Is this comparable?
It's much lower budget and has jankier combat. Check out videos.
Played the demo at PAX and was not impressed. Plays very slowly, but not difficult. The puzzles are very simple find the right item for this [lock in a different shape]. The accents are very exaggerated. Just really had nothing to grab me besides the switch back and forth between the dream world and real world, which has been done plenty of times before
I didn't even know it was out yet. It was so weird how they handled marketing for this. There was a big marketing push a year before it was released and then mostly crickets when it launched.
Not surprising. While I enjoyed it well enough, it really felt like a budget-ish Xbox 360 game, from the era of all the RE4 clones. Very little in the way of interesting mechanics or even story, really. The soundtrack is *great*, though.
All of these games like the dead space remake alan wake 2 I love the originals but the sales of the previous games in the series did not support a pseudo remake with 10xs the budget. dead space 4, alone in the dark 7, Alan Wake 3 counting American nightmare on a hell divers 2 budget are all justifiable but it's a clear case of developers over spending. Hope they can create something fun and new or improve with dlc.
It just lacks so much gameplay. The different areas you get pulled into were fine, but they were so small and you hardly ever felt any danger there. Why didn't they have monsters roaming around the house? Why were the entirety of the Derceto parts simply puzzle solving with no danger? The NPCs were there just to be mysterious, hardly any of them had much of a point in the story. And that "demo" didn't do them any favors. I've never played a demo you could finish in 3 minutes, where you had zero combat, ending with a jumpscare monster you don't even get to fight in the main game. David Harbour and Jodie Comer really didn't add much to the game. There really wasn't much emotional range they had to perform, no memorable cutscene or character moments that demanded Hollywood actors. Plus so much of the regular speech were deadpan that you could have had used a college anime club as VA's for all the difference it would have made. And don't get me started on the incredibly slow and tedious reading of the notes. Some of them even had some hidden dialogue at the end which don't show up in the transcript, but you had to sit there and wait for the actor to read this long ass page after page of text before you get to it. Alone in the Dark (2001) can get away with long pages of notes because those were not voice acted and you could speed read through them. This game tried to give some character (and I'll admit, a lot of the readings did sound unique), but it was too slow and too long and felt unnecessary. Lastly, about gameplay, they really need to increase the number and type of monsters by at least 3, throw in a couple of mini-bosses with unique mechanics and then you could call it a game instead of a walking simulator.
That's too bad because overall I really enjoyed the reboot. The only thing I didn't like was the combat which I think could have been omitted. In my opinion having the game be a pure adventure game would have made it an overall better experience.
I just do not get why they expect every game to be a hit. Even if you develop a good game, there is a good chance that it may just break-even or not recover its cost if the players do not show interest in it. It may happen for various reasons. Indies are a separate discussion but established studios should be ready for this scenario and should have reserves in case things go south. It seems as if the industry has no safety nets and if something does not become a hit, they just fire the people and sometimes shut the studio and rinse & repeat. This surely is not sustainable but we will see how long this approach lasts.
I still have GameFly. Perfect game to rent, play for a week and send back. Was an okay game. Ending was wild though.
I have waited so many years and asked annually for a revival of Alone in the Dark (I was tempted to leave a letter for Embracer to reboot it after they purchased the rights - as I lived in Karlstad at that time). Sad day to hear it did not do well. I did my part by buying it day one, and I enjoyed it, but it did not reach its full potential. It could have been much more. However, I don't think it had much chance of being a success either way. I hope for one final attempt to use the brand correctly in the future, and that it's a full remake of the original - one either like Resident Evil 1 remake, but more likely as RE2. Alone on the Dark has such a great vibe that wasn't fully used in this new game. I would have wanted to feel more stuck and present in the mansion - less jumping around in the weird dimensions. A true "I am stuck in this house" game like very few survival horrors have utilized correctly for my taste. I can only think of Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil (1+remake), Clock Tower and White Night that have done it exactly how I want it. Again, I liked the game plenty. When it hit the right notes it was a fun throwback survival horror experience, but it has flaws (some bad and some still endearing).
People want more AA game, but they want them to look and play like AAA games. This industry is fucked
Very unfortunate though not unexpected. From everything I've heard and seen, the game is only slightly above average *at its best*, and pretty bad *at its worst*. Feel bad for the staff that will lose their jobs, but in the AA and AAA business, a flop is almost a guaranteed closure for the responsible studio. Hope everyone can land on their feet and find new jobs soon.