Detective Edward Carnby looks very different these days, and not only because he’s made of a lot more polygons. Gone are the professorial waistcoat and bow tie of his angular 1992 incarnation, replaced instead by the grubby suit of a life-bruised 1930s noir PI, complete with hipflask of brandy for when the stress of being unaccompanied with the lights out gets too much.
Carnby isn’t the only one who’s transformed in this reboot of Alone in the Dark, the classic survival horror avant la lettre, either. Veterans will find plenty of callbacks and familiar names as they poke around its Louisiana manor house – talk of the Pregzt Shipping Company might raise an eyebrow, for instance, as may the gnarled tree filling much of the conservatory. But like these, everything here is remixed, rewritten, relocated. Indeed, Decerto house is no longer empty but a ‘home for the mentally fatigued’, while player characters Carnby and Emily Hartwood now arrive together, since she’s hired him to help check on her uncle, a long-term resident who may be in danger.