Five years before Resident Evil made the formula famous, Infogrames shipped Alone in the Dark: fixed camera angles, polygonal characters over pre-rendered rooms, scarce ammunition, and a mansion full of Lovecraftian dead things.

Frédérick Raynal's team solved the hardware problem of the early 90s elegantly - 3D characters could move through gorgeous static backgrounds - and in doing so wrote the visual grammar of the entire survival horror genre.

Playing it today

The tank controls take an hour to internalize, and the combat is clunky by design: you are a writer, not a soldier. What survives is the mood. The Derceto mansion drips atmosphere, and the story - a detective, an occult secret, an old house - plays like a playable horror paperback.

Legacy

The 2024 reboot by Pieces Interactive aimed to recapture this and stumbled; nothing has quite matched the original's confident austerity. For genre historians, it is mandatory. For everyone else, it is best played on a rainy evening with the lights off.

Verdict: the patient zero of survival horror, still infectious.