Grade: A-
One thing video games are surprisingly good at is scaring the willies out of you. Claustrophobia, unease, jump-scares, anxious-making camera-angles… Gamers of my generation will not have forgotten the spooky crackle of the Geiger counter in Silent Hill; nor needing fresh trousers after that dog jumps through the window in the first Resident Evil.
The granddaddy of them all was Alone in the Dark — which, when it came out in 1992, essentially invented the survival horror genre. It sent you crawling through a spooky old mansion solving puzzles, fretting about your inventory and being jumped by sluggish monsters. Now a lavish and loving reboot stars B+-listers David Harbour and Jodie Comer. The former is grizzled PI Edward Carnby; the latter his employer Emily Hartwood.
It’s 1920s Louisiana, and the two have traveled to a backwoods loony-bin called Derceto in search of Emily’s uncle Jeremy after his letters caused her to worry about what we now call safeguarding issues. The vibe is Lovecraftian swamp gothic, with Comer delivering lines of languid fatalism (insanity is a family curse) in a Zelda Fitzgerald drawl. Everyone smokes indoors. It’s great.
New-gen computational resources are at the service of pleasingly retro gameplay. Explore, collect keys, solve puzzles, unravel mysteries, soak up the atmosphere. And (per Silent Hill) find yourself phased from time to time into a mapless realm of madness where lumbering abominations make you go eek. You never have enough bullets, and clever light work means you really do jump at your own shadow.
You can play as Edward or Emily, and if you want to see the whole thing you’ll need to do both. You probably will.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
