Alone 2
At their heart, games ask us to get sucked into their worlds, to lose ourselves in their created reality, and to accept the premises that they put forth. They are, as I’ve said in other reviews , opportunities to simulate something beyond our ordinary and every day. It’s why I’m so fond of survival games and walking simulators. I enjoy the experience in getting lost in someone else’s story, and feeling the tension of trying to survive it.
Horror should do something similar. Fear is such a fundamental and universal emotion that summoning it should be trivial. We all know what it is to be afraid - it stands to reason that there must be a way to capture it. Yet somehow, horror games remain a crapshoot. I’ve played several in these series, with some evoking that sense of pervading dread that I’m craving, and others very much not . Every genre has the ability to fail, but horror seems to fail at an amazing rate. The question is why. What makes horror a uniquely difficult genre to pull off? Why does it fail so often?
Let’s talk about Alone.
I wanted to put a sarcastic Wonka meme here.
Alone is a short horror game. You play as Yeongchul, a man who comes home one night to find that his girlfriend has been murdered, and the murderer is after him next. Yeongchul must figure out who the murderer is, find some way to defend himself, and prepare to face the murderer. It is a very simple premise, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The gameplay itself is also very simple. This is an RPGMaker game, and as such, the controls are limited to movement and an interaction button. This also isn’t a problem, as the limited mechanics mean the player is forced to focus on the story and think logically about potential solutions to their problem.
Or you can play like me
On paper, there’s nothing that prevents this game from being a delightful little romp through the meadows of fear. Murderers are scary. Loss of a loved one is scary. There is a lot here to play with. Complex mechanics aren’t needed to tell a scary story, especially if that story is secretly an exploration of loss, stress, and the impact that our past can have on our conception of reality. Indeed, for a not insignificant chunk of the game, I wanted so badly to believe there was a decent story here that I was convinced either I or the girlfriend was the murderer. The idea that this was a game about a man facing the reality that he had done terrible things under the influence of stress and pressure and the failure to live up to the world’s expectations was a compelling one. That is not the story this game tells.
Instead, Alone tells a straightforward story about a mysterious murderer. Its gameplay elements do not revolve around this story. Indeed, in a twenty minute game, only about five minutes are actual gameplay, with the rest either being the player without any control, or the player tapping through speech bubbles. The actual gameplay consists of moving around a house, being given both too much and not enough information about the various objects within it, and then needing to pick a room to hide in. There is no true horror. There is barely a game. Instead, there are speech bubbles and allusions to horrific violence.
To be fair, it does have other horrifying elements.
Alone sets out to be a horror game, but it, like so many others, fails at that goal. There seems to be a prevailing theory that alluding to violence or the supernatural is enough to create the fear necessary for horror, but that isn’t the case. For a game to be a successful horror game, it must elicit that emotion in the player. If I’m not at least a little bit tense, the game can’t honestly say it’s succeeded.
A horror game succeeds when it creates a sufficient atmosphere and fills it with a compelling motivation to move through the world and its atmosphere. It doesn’t need to have an intricate story - Dead by Daylight is proof of that - but it has to have some reason for the player to need to engage with it. The player has to believe their character can’t just curl up in a corner and wait out the danger. There must be a sense of the danger, and there must be a reason to face it.
In Among the Sleep, gameplay mechanics, atmosphere, and the writing work together brilliantly to create a horrifying experience. Iron Lung has minimal mechanics, but its atmosphere and sense of motivation push the player forward, driving them into a terrifying unknown. Dead by Daylight focuses entirely on mechanics and atmosphere to great success. These elements of mechanics, atmosphere, and story aren’t required for every horror game, but some combination of them is.
So what does Alone have? Alone, to its credit, tries. It gives the player limitations, through its countdown and stamina and sanity metres. It tries to instill a sense of urgency, a motivation to move forward. However, it never gives the player the agency to truly engage with the world. Selecting this object or that one isn’t a carefully considered choice or something that reflects the moment. The choices are random. That randomness is all I was thinking about. I couldn’t place myself in a world whose rules I didn’t understand, or whose rules I wasn’t sure existed. If I can’t place myself in the world, there can’t truly be an atmosphere, and without that creeping sense of dread, there is no horror.
Alone lacks every element that a horror game needs, and in doing so, it fails as a horror game. Blood alone does not horror make. There must be fear. All I fear here is the realisation that the game expected me to play it multiple times to find multiple endings. I’ll pass.
Developer: Dake Craft
Genre: Horror
Year: 2021
Country: South Korea
Language: English
Play Time: 20 Minutes