Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

aka: AITD:TNN, Alone in the Dark 4, Alone in the Dark: Koszmar Powraca
Moby ID: 4183
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Edward Carnby, private eye of the paranormal, is back.

Carnby's best friend, Charles Fiske, has been found dead near Shadow Island, a mysterious island near Maine. It is your duty to take up the investigation and find out the secrets of Shadow Island. But you're not going alone... your companion will be a redhead by the name of Aline Cedrac who has her own reasons for tagging along. Aside from being a woman and inexperienced in the world of danger, she is the only one with the knowledge for translating the ancient Abkhani tabloids which may hold the secrets behind Carnby's friend's death and the disappearance of Aline's father.

Upon arriving on the island, your plane has been shot down by the things unknown, and the heroes have no other choice but to jump with a parachute, thus separating them on the island.

Now you choose the character to play with, either as Edward Carnby or Aline Cedrac, as they explore the mysterious and gloomy island with all its secrets and parallel stories that contain different locations and tasks for different characters, thus adding the level of replayability in a different experience - Carnby's story is more action oriented while Cedrac has more puzzles to solve.

Just like in the predecessors you move your characters through pre-rendered backgrounds while the camera perspective switches around. You collect various items and books which are used to solve puzzles. Many situations can only be solved with violence which means you'll have to use guns to get rid of your foes. Aiming is manual and especially when playing Cedrac ammo is scarce. Saving a game uses up a save medallion which can be found during the game.

Spellings

  • Alone in the Dark 4: По ту сторону кошмара - Russian spelling
  • アローン・イン・ザ・ダーク新たなる悪夢 - Japanese spelling
  • 鬼屋魔影4 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
  • 鬼屋魔影4:惡夢之夜 - Taiwan spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

210 People (186 developers, 24 thanks) · View all

An Infogrames Production presented by
Thanks To
"Alone In The Dark" (written and produced by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Music produced and composed by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Drums, bass and keyboards performed by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Recorded and Mixed by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Guitars performed by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Vocal performed by)
"Alone In The Dark" (Assistant to Mr. Copeland)
Special Thanks
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 77% (based on 70 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.3 out of 5 (based on 119 ratings with 12 reviews)

Dreadful graphics and performance for a PS2 game

The Good
I have had the opportunity to play this game on Dreamcast as well as PlayStation 1 and even the Game Boy Color version. Alone in the Dark is one of the original Survival Horror franchises, released many years ago, and before even Resident Evil was a gleam in it's creators eye. The plot and storyline from this game was recently sacrileged in a disastrous Hollywood game-to-film by the notoriously inept director Uwe Boll.

The game itself is a very atmospheric yarn following one of two selectable characters, each with unique aspects, and a slightly different path depending on which one you chose. There are many different locations and subplots, including mansions, sewers, observatories, and a wide away of weapons including a lightning gun! You can spend hours puzzling away and musing over the expansive areas, which if you're familiar with Resident Evil, you will have no trouble finding yourself at home here with. In brief, all a Survival Horror game should be, but make sure you choose the Dreamcast version, which has better graphics and gameplay.

The Bad
The slowdowns between angle-changes is appalling (some are several seconds long), and the quality of graphics is diabolical, even by PS1 standards. The controls are also very unresponsive, sometimes the character moves randomly around the screen! This PS2 version appears to be a lame direct port of the PS1 rendition. All in all, the Dreamcast version has better graphics, better speed and better playability than both PS versions.

The Bottom Line
Alone In The Dark 4 is a great atmospheric Survival Horror game, but just don't play it on PS2 - get the Dreamcast version instead! If you like Resident Evil, you'll love this.

PlayStation 2 · by Matt Warne (24) · 2005

It's just like Resident Evil!

The Good
You can play Alone In The Dark as two characters: our hero Edward Carnby or the newcomer Aline Cedrac, an anthropologist, who looks oddly and much to Jill Valentine from the Resident Evil series. The stages are well designed. The song is creepy (in a good way).

The Bad
The changes of cameras out of time not allow you to see where the enemy is. The save system is a little annoying. And most of the times you don't know what to do. Basically if you do not like games like Resident Evil, I mean like Alone In The Dark better to pass away.

The Bottom Line
The game with Edward Carnby is a little more difficult, but relatively shorter. Carnby is the player who will spend most of the game looking for keys and killing monsters in tedious combats. With Aline you will need a lot of patience to solve the numerous puzzles, which is great if you like that kind of stuff.

Windows · by Perfil Falso (774) · 2012

Worse than the prequels, but still an okay game

The Good
My god I expected a lot out of this game. I'm a big fan of the Alone in the Dark series and when I heard the main guy behind the prequels also made this one I really thought this would be yet another super cool AitD game... but no, this world we live in is evil and all good games turn bad. It seems like the developers have played far too much Resident Evil when they made this game, it has far too many similarities.

But all in all, it's not that bad a game. The music's okay, the game is okay for playing through once with each character, but nothing more... and yeah, the graphics is more than okay too.

The Bad
Well, the game is basically Resident Evil only a lot better in comparison. It doesn't have any good storyline. The characters are dull and a big cliche. I was hoping to see once again the good old Edward Carnby in action, but it's just a different guy with the same name. Actually, they made a really silly addition to the storyline where they explained that every now and then a person called Edward Carnby is borned and is destined to rid the world of evil yaaaawn the last time I heard similar crap was when I playing Resident Evil. They should have called the main person something else so it wasn't an insult to the old cool Carnby.

There's also more things which seem to have taken from Resident Evil... the game is far more action oriented than the original AitD series, the puzzles are more rare and more simple in this game (though lightyears ahead of Resident Evil), the voice acting isn't exactly good, the storyline is crap (yeah, I mentioned this already, but it is really crap).

The game was released for quite a few machines, PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, GBC and PC. Not often you see that... just too bad that the PC port in particular has some really bad flaws. It seems to have inherited the classic console gripes, almost no options, an extremely silly save system and horrible controls. This is nothing but an insult to pc users. And yeah, one thing, the pc port has far too big machine requirements. The PS1 is a very weak machine, yet they actually bothered to port it to that machine, why not have graphical options in the pc version to make it so it plays like the PS1 version and have small requirements? It shouldn't be hard... but nooo, they didn't do it, and you need a ninja pc to play it. Actually, if you have a weak computer you're better of buying the PS1 version and play it in an emulator, which is a real shame.

The Bottom Line
All in all, it's a nice game. It just isn't as good as the other Alone in the Dark games. Fortunately it's a thousand times better than the Resident Evil series. As I said earlier, it's nice to play the game through once and nothing more, if you aren't rich you should buy something better though. And yeah, Resident Evil fans (yeah, that means you weirdos in the corner of the room!) should definately get this one and see how Resident Evil should have been made.

PlayStation · by Kate Jones (416) · 2001

[ View all 12 player reviews ]

Trivia

4X movie compression

The 4X movie compression technology is only used in the Dreamcast version of the game.

Comic Book

This game had a cross-promotional "prequel" comic book, featuring Carnby and Aline Cedrac investigating in Tibet, published by Image Comics in September of 2002. The story was written by Jean-Marc Lofficier, while the illustrations were by Matt Haley and Aleksi Briclot.

Edward Carnby

Edward Carnby is the name of the protagonist in all of the Alone in the Dark games, yet AitD4 is set in the year 2001 whereas the original 3 titles were set in the 1920's. Carnby is also visibly younger in the forth title. The explanation on the game's official website (see links) is that every 40 years a man is awarded with the name Edward Carnby and that man will be destined to fight the forces of evil and darkness.

Engine

Developed with Terminal Reality's Nocturne Engine.

References

The name of one of the characters in Alone in the Dark: TNN is De Certo. This is a reference to the name of the ominous mansion in the original Alone in the Dark title, which was also called Decerto.

Information also contributed by n-n, Pseudo_Intellectual Sciere and Scott Monster

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Matthew Bailey.

PlayStation 3, PSP added by Sciere. PlayStation 2 added by Xoleras.

Additional contributors: Macintrash, Unicorn Lynx, Sycada, JPaterson, Jeanne, JRK, Klaster_1, DreinIX, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Zhuzha.

Game added May 29, 2001. Last modified January 27, 2024.