As a youth, conceptual horror was enough to scare me into insomnia. Violence was one thing - I could process that as fantasy - but lurking terror was too much. If someone said that they were going to watch a horror movie or tell a scary story, I would freak out. It was right around pubescence, when my capacity for abstraction was growing exponentially, that I developed a taste for fear. Like any other extreme emotion, fear can be delightfully narcotic. After watching It (yes, it scared me. You look at Tim Curry in a clown suit without shitting yourself, I dare you,) I was finally clued into what everyone else seemed to know: being scared is fun. It wasn’t until the late ‘90s, with early Resident Evil and Silent Hill entries, that I started getting my fix from videogames. So those games’ shared ancestor, Alone in the Dark, is an unknown quantity for me outside of reputation. The new Alone in the Dark from Atari, after a couple of years of development purgatory (not quite hell), is looking like it will live up to that reputation.
At first blush, it looks like average scary stuffs with dark, foggy environments. But it’s when the screens actually show off some specifics of the New York Central Park setting that it hits an unsettling stride. From Eurogamer’s preview, where these screens come from, the game might just be a diamond-in-the-rough during the slow summer season.
