Mixed XBox-grade Visuals

Many pre-launch images of Alone in the Dark looked very good, but in reality the game is a massive jumble, a directionless pile of inconsistent bits and pieces, complete with XBox 360-style textures. Look at the hero's face and the texture is incredibly detailed, but don't you dare to go and look too closely at an irrelevant background piece, or you might notice that their texture resolution is something considerably worse. With care, you can pull out some astonishingly pretty images out of Alone in the Dark, but for every pretty and detailed model and texture there is one that is either poorly animated or skinned with a brown low-resolution smudge that claims to be a texture map. Overall the visuals are mostly passable, but the stiff animations and the highly implausible and poorly implemented events that keep happening around you destroy the immersion.

Performance is something you'd expect from a console port. The conversion from the Xbox 360 has been done with the quick and dirty method, with minimum extra effort. On the upside, that means the game looks fairly good even at minimum settings, but it also means that you need a quite beefy system to run the game.

Alone In the Dark at the lowest possible settings.

Medium adds dynamic shadows.

Maximum settings adds bit of fog, additional lighting effects and HDR.

There are some graphical options, and the visuals change ever so slightly by tweaking them. However, they are there mostly for show, and the only meaningful way to improve the performance on a weaker system is to drop down the resolution. Our two test systems ran the game at a costant 30fps+, while peaking at 60fps from time to time using a Radeon HD3870 and a GeForce 9800GTX. Unfortunately we had to skip the usual hardware testing using a low end system due to the hostile DRM system of the game that limited the installs to two systems. The presented YouGamers recommendations are our best estimates based on the observed performance, and when playing with the minimum system, expect to run the game at no higher than 1024x768 resolution.