Pieces Interactive's Alone in the Dark is a modern reimagining of the survival horror pioneer that paved the way for games like Resident Evil and Dead Space, coming full circle as it draws inspiration from the genre's subsequent advancements. Explored from the perspective of two protagonists portrayed by Stranger Things star David Harbour and acclaimed actress Jodie Comer of Thirteen, Alone in the Dark is a gloomy and atmospheric Lovecraftian horror story shown through a jazzy film noir lens.

In an interview with Game Rant, creative director and writer Mikael Hedberg along with composer and sound designer Árni Bergur Zoëga went into detail about their various creative approaches to Alone in the Dark. They spoke about bringing back past characters from the franchise, bringing those characters to life through the script, expressing the diverse range of moods and textures in the game's soundtrack, and plenty more. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Alone In The Dark Is Bringing Back Classic Characters From the Series

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Q: Edward Carnby is a reference to John Carnby, a Cthulhu Mythos character from Clark Ashton Smith’s The Return of the Sorcerer. Is the remake faithful to other Lovecraftian homages seen in the original title?

Hedberg: Without spoiling anything. Yes, there are a bunch of Lovecraft references. If something was mentioned in the original game I have at least in some way tried to fit it into a text or on a couple occasions made it into something bigger.

Q: Edward Carnby is this really iconic character who shows up in every previous game. Do you feel your version of Carnby is a new take on the character or a preservation of his traditional personality/role?

Hedberg: Edward started out a private detective with a magnificent moustache and gradually became more of an action hero in the later games. Like with most of our elements, we went back to the original and had him pegged as a sort of scholarly detective. This was great, as we knew we didn’t want an action hero for our game, but when paired up with Emily he seemed a little uninteresting. Emily was this tormented character with a family connection to our story catalyst Jeremy Hartwood, so she came more naturally.

The question then was "Who was Edward to her?" Turns out she hires him to help her, and she certainly wouldn’t hire just anybody. He had to be at least a little capable. To avoid the action type he fell into the reluctant hero slot and suddenly we had gone all this way to kind of wind up with a classic noir detective. I think with as little we actually knew about Edward in the original game, I feel like our Edward is pretty close. Except for his majestic moustache, of course.

Q: On the other hand, Emily Hartwood is this character who was so crucial in the first game and then just...disappeared from all of the sequels. What was it like bringing her back?

Hedberg: To me, this felt really important. Not just because she was Jeremy’s niece and arguably the more connected protagonist in the original, but because I love playing games twice. and if I can get a slightly different character when replaying, I am sold. When we first started, actually even before I was attached to the project, an early version of Edward had been created. So it was looking like he would be the only protagonist. I remember kind of lobbying the idea of getting Emily’s character back into the game and eventually building a case for her inclusion before talking to our publishers.

However, it turned out to be like kicking in an open door. I basically said "I want Emily back," and everyone just gave a big thumbs up. I only wish everything was this easy.

Alone In The Dark Stars Acclaimed Actors David Harbour and Jodie Comer

Q: Were David Harbour and Jodie Comer the first choices for the leads? Why were they chosen for this project?

Hedberg: Sort of. I was asked to write a short list of people I thought would be good for the roles. And the list was very kindly handed back to me by the publisher, telling me "Please dream a little bigger." I had underestimated how much THQ Nordic believed in the game and was willing to invest. Since suddenly the sky was the limit I was able to ask for people like David and Jodie. Since Edward had become the noir detective type, David was just a perfect fit. It’s not a million miles away from Hopper in Stranger Things, so it was clear that it was going to work before even going into recording.

Emily was the trickier character as she needed to be the tormented client, but she also couldn’t be too weak. Especially with Harbour as Edward, Emily could easily have been this sad little girl in his shadow. But Jodie has such a presence and strength of character that even when her character is depressed, she retains a great sense of dignity and it always keeps her feeling sufficiently defiant.

I’m really happy with how both our protagonists turned out, but I’m even happier when looking at them as a duo and how great they fit together.

Q: What was it like working with actors David Harbour and Jodie Comer as the game’s protagonists?

Hedberg: I had a great time working with David and Jodie. They are both so talented and creative. I only wish we had more time together.

How Mikael Hedberg Approached Alone in the Dark's Script

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Q: How did your experience with other horror titles like Soma and Amnesia affect your approach to the Alone in the Dark script?

Hedberg: What excited me the most about Alone in the Dark was really allowing characters to interact more. It’s something that I remember lamenting when doing Amnesia and SOMA that they couldn’t really talk to each other much due to the added production cost, which means so much of the story becomes catching up with what has happened, rather than what is happening. So I was mostly happy about doing that for Alone in the Dark. But other than that, they are so different from each other, so it’s hard to compare.

Q: How did you prioritize preservation or modernization when writing the script for Alone in the Dark (2024)?

Hedberg: I just tried to do them both at the same time. They didn’t really feel at odds with each other. I guess that’s partly because the story is just pastiche, kind of unashamedly cliched. The way we preserve things in our game is just sort of repurposing them in some way that fits our story.

An analogy that I sometimes use is that if you imagine we found the original to be a statue, we smashed that statue and built a new one out of all the pieces. I think of it as being irreverent but in the most loving way.

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Mikael Hedberg Provides Some Extra Background on the Characters

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Q: Without going into spoilers, could you tell us a bit more about the presence called The Dark Man and the strange Hartwood family curse?

Hedberg: The Hartwood family suffers from debilitating melancholy, or depression as we would call it today. It gets worse and worse as they get older until they can’t take it anymore. This depression also comes with a sense of persecution and even being possessed. Jeremy Hartwood is convinced that he is haunted by a presence he calls The Dark Man and that it will eventually break him. Emily is younger than Jeremy and hasn’t really succumbed to the curse yet, but she is certainly worried and who knows what will happen to her in the (maybe near) future.

Q: In the Prologue, we get to play as Grace Saunders who’s sat painting in front of a manuscript titled Alone in the Dark that foreshadows what happens to Jeremy Hartwood. Avoiding story spoilers, why did you choose to introduce the game in this way and through the perspective of this character, a child?

Hedberg: Several reasons. The easy go-to answer is that for Alone in the Dark 2, there was a short promotional game made called Jack in the Dark where you played as Grace Saunders. Since we had already repurposed that character to be a patient at the asylum, it would almost be silly not to take the opportunity to play as her.

The other reason being that a large part of the experience is the house itself and if the prologue had been Edward or Emily they wouldn’t have gotten there yet. Also playing a child I think the player can allow themselves to be a little more absent-minded. You can walk around and kind of be taken in by whatever you see. Also playing with the innocence of her is fun. While she is a cute kid, Grace is definitely not alright. She is seemingly okay with a lot of things and used to a bit of insanity.

The opening shot of Grace also encapsulates the analogy that I mentioned before of the broken statue. Here we see Grace ripping up the pages for Alone in the Dark to make something new out of paper mâché.

Alone In The Dark's Doom Jazz Musical Score Is A Unique Blend of Moods and Textures

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Q: What themes were you and Jason Köhnen looking to achieve with the soundtrack for Alone in the Dark? The original reveal trailer, where the girl is hanging her dolls had a song that sounded like a nursery rhyme. Is that an original composition, or a folksong?

Zoëga: In the early stages of development we established our four core pillars for the music, namely Drama, Horror, Mystery, and Noir. Since we knew we were going for something quite different from the run-of-the-mill action game I made sure to experiment with a lot of musical styles in coordination with our creative director Mikael Hedberg. In the end, this has resulted in quite the wide spectrum of musical expression including but not limited to semi-humorous snappy lounge-jazz, melancholic tenderness, romantic beauty, raging chaotic horror, and old school film-noir. All of these expressions are warranted by the game's narrative, which is part of what makes the game so unique, so among the biggest challenges for me has been to tie all these different elements together into a coherent package while staying consistent with the game world and general themes.

Regarding themes (keeping it more generalized so as to avoid spoilers), I wanted the music to contain an underlying melancholy, while not being overtly emotionally dramatic. Our game takes place deep in the swamps of Louisiana, so I worked with a lot of earthy and often unstable textural sonic material to represent this. Wind instruments that struggle to produce sound, strings that mimic the cry of an animal, etc. Another theme, of course, is the 1930's noir setting where I used more stable and conventional instrumentation. These more stable elements however often sit atop a foundation of the more unstable nature elements, or at least you get the sensation that the chaos of nature is always just around the corner. I imagine it like a mansion struggling to stay afloat in the dank Louisiana bayou.

The music for the original reveal trailer was a jazzy rendition of the old folk song 'The House of the Rising Sun' that we worked on together with doom jazz legend Jason Köhnen. The lyrics were adapted by our writer/director to fit the game's narrative and were sung by Glory Joy Rose, the voice actress portraying the girl, Grace Saunders.

Q: Could you tell us more about the game’s original doom jazz soundtrack by Jason Köhnen and explain how the soundtrack enhances the horror experience?

Zoëga: We had toyed around with the idea of incorporating doom jazz into the soundtrack since the beginning of the project but it wasn't until roughly at the halfway point of the development cycle where we made the decision to really commit to it as one of the staples of our score. Since it's quite a particular genre of music we decided that commissioning some original songs from an established group or individual within the genre would only enhance the authenticity of the score. We were primarily looking for a really interesting main menu track to pique the player's interest when booting up the game. We then got into contact with Jason Köhnen who provided us with ample new material which I could then use in a variety of ways throughout the rest of the project. Working with Jason was a great pleasure and we definitely felt we got more than what we needed for the final parts of the soundtrack.

It was a great asset for me to have these high-quality and authentic doom jazz recordings to be able to pluck bits and pieces from and apply them in different settings. For example, a distant saxophone lick coupled with some wispy percussion can come in and accentuate an otherwise mostly orchestral movement to inject a noir element when needed. So without going into too much detail that's one of the textural ways I've tied the whole soundtrack together, by having our various musical styles touch and intermingle to create a more coherent macro-narrative.

As for what the soundtrack can contribute to the horror experience, I can only speak for myself. I think immersion is really important to draw you in, hopefully long enough to creep under your skin. I find dark/doom jazz to be very immersive and enveloping. In a sense it traps you in its mood, where we can then use different means to frighten the trapped player, so to speak. Apart from that; instruments struggling, heavy and dense waves of sonic textures undulating like the deep sea, unstable organic sonic textures, moments where it becomes hard to fully distinguish if what you're hearing is an instrument, a voice, or something else entirely. These are some of the things that inspire me as an artist, so a lovecraftian horror game definitely feels like home.

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Alone in the Dark (2024) Tag Page Cover Art

Alone in the Dark weaves a chilling tapestry of psychological horror and Southern Gothic charm, reimagining the iconic game that set the benchmark for the genre. We invite you to join us on a journey into madness, where each encounter could be your last. With each step you take closer to unravelling Derceto's mystery, the eyes that watch from the darkness grow hungrier. Every bullet means the difference between survival and an unthinkable end. The next door you unlock could lead to a nightmarish realm offering nothing but slashing claws, grasping tentacles, and frayed sanity. Journey to interbellum Louisiana, where an era of decadence hides a darker tale - of escape from past traumas and an intolerant society, into the waiting grasp of something darker, something that has patiently lurked for impossible eons. This is Alone in the Dark as you've never seen it - a skillfully-woven narrative of Southern Gothic elegance and eldritch madness that pays homage to its legendary origins while taking the next step forward in survival horror storytelling.

Survival Horror
Franchise
Alone in the Dark
Released
March 20, 2024
Developer(s)
Pieces Interactive
Publisher(s)
THQ Nordic