Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (Game Boy Color) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Infogrames' 2001 survival horror adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy Color, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

Edward Carnby is back, and this time around, his friend Charles Fiske has been found dead under mysterious circumstances on a remote island off the New England coastline. Hearing the news, Carnby flies out to try to piece together what happened. As their plane approaches the island, he and his partner Aline find themselves under attack by a creature that downs their plane, and if they have any hope of escaping, they'll have to work together to figure out just what has happened here.

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare was the fourth game in the classic 3D horror adventure series that was largely responsible for the creation of the survival horror genre as we know it. The original, released in 1992, established the standard template that several games over the following decade would be based on: Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, Deep Fear - we all know the formula well: superimposed 3D character models atop static pre-rendered background images, fixed camera angles, tank controls, puzzles that require ridiculous combinations of random objects - all of these things were originally pioneered by the original AitD title in the early 90s.

If you're curious about the older titles, you can find my PS1 playthrough of AitD2 here:    • Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack's Re...  

The New Nightmare largely adhered to this same formula, though ironically enough, by the early 2000s it felt more like a Resident Evil clone than anything else. It was a good one, though - the original console versions were pretty highly regarded when they came out.

And then we have this port - a game that pushed the consoles of the time hard with its graphics - somehow smashed down enough to run on the Game Boy Color. And though obvious compromises had to be made, Alone in the the Dark: The New Nightmare is an absolute marvel to behold on the 8-bit handheld machine.

Though the FMV was all be cut down to still images and a few areas are missing, the game remains quite faithful to the original. The backgrounds are all fairly well detailed and colorful , even if they're heavily posterized, and they all light up appropriately with Edward's flashlight, and the 2D sprites do a good job of mimicking the 3D models of the bigger versions. The use of digitized sound is pretty effective as well in providing ambient effects. The whole production is insanely impressive, and really goes to show what can be done of hopelessly outclassed hardware with some real dedication and talent.

The gameplay is... well, it's what you would expect. You run around a huge mansion and its grounds looking for objects that "glint", opening doors with keys, interacting with a few people that need your help, and occasionally battling with an ornery monster or six. If you've ever seen the prototype of Resident Evil on the GBC, this is quite similar.

The battle system has changed quite a bit - instead of taking place on the normal exploration screen, battles switch the game to a top-down view where everything moves much more quickly and fluidly, resembling older Zelda games to some extent.

Sure, you could argue that the game's horror impact is hugely blunted by the static images, bleepy sound, and endless walls of text. But to hold that against it is to miss the point - it never was going to be able to compete with the likes of the Dreamcast version, but if you wanted an absorbing horror adventure with high production values in your pocket, AitD was the ticket.

*Recorded using LCD shaders Retroarch to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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