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The Quick

Alone in the Dark COULD be a good game. It has an interesting story, with some good voice-actors, beautiful environments and lots of Lovecraft lore to tickle my fancy. But the bugs, forced tedious combat and clear content-cuts to the game just aren`t worth it for their asking price.

The Detailed

Story
The game is a slight (and I mean SLIGHT) re-telling of the original Alone in the Dark. However, in this version, Emily Hartwood's uncle didn`t commit suicide in his manor. This time, he is missing at a mental hospital that was helping him. Aside from some names, a few easter-eggs and the key/door progression, nothing else is similar between the two. This story is a whole new beast.
You play as either Emily Hartwood or Private Investigate Edward Carnby, who was hired by Emily to help find her uncle who went missing at Derceto Manor, a place where the wealthy can seek treatment for their problems.
You manage to convince the staff to let you investigate the manor, resulting in you diving deeper and deeper into the strange and unusual supernatural, with it blurring fantasy and reality.
The story for Emily was pretty interesting, with it having her face her own demons (both metaphorical and literal), but nearly everyone is an asshole to her, usually dismissing her or even giving thinly-veiled threats. Even Carnby is dismissive of her most of the game, and she is the freaking client!
But the game has you visiting various places with different themes, with some truly cool looking monsters to deal with, and with the lead-up to the final boss going freaking balls-to-the-wall crazy, which I loved. <3
As I said before, the story is pretty good, it just sucks that it is being bogged down by so many other issues.
Combat
Combat is REALLY bad in this game. And I don`t just mean it`s not fun either. I mean it is really broken.
Monsters on normal difficulty will take an entire pistol clip to kill a single one of them, assuming it counts the shots hitting them to begin with.
If they get too close to you, you will just aim your pistol in some random direction and fire there instead.
It takes 2 shotgun blasts to the chest to kill one of them as well... And I am still talking about the FIRST enemy types in the game.
Good luck trying to melee or even shoot those little beetle bastards when 2-3 of them are rushing you at once, while they can literally drop your health to minimum in a single headbutt.
Melee weapons break easily too, often right after killing a single enemy, which forces you to use your range weapons up close again.

The game "encourages" you to use stealth and use thrown items as decoys while you sneak around them, but that is also broken. Because while you are sneaking, the moment you pick up a brick to throw it, you automatically stand up, causing you to become detected.
Not to mention nearly all the monster infested areas are these long-narrow corridors with objects and corners you just get stuck on randomly, resulting in the enemy hitting you and pretty much stun-locking you.
Most of the time the monsters are scripted to spawn in on you, already being agitated, so you can`t run from them or hide. The game forces you to fight. They will also chase you indefinitely, unless you manage to get up a ladder or a door to close between you (which you can`t manually do)
There is a dodge function, but it only works half the time. Good chance you will just dodge into an object or the monster itself and get stuck.
Enemy damage is REALLY weird. Sometimes they will hit you for a small amount, and sometimes they will knock you down to barely alive, even if it is the same monster doing the same attack.
The whole system is just designed to bog down progress and force the player to keep back tracking to pick up melee items, just in order to progress. I nearly quit the damn game, it was so bad...
Puzzles
Puzzles are OK. It is 90% finding the lock-combination with the last 10% being "make a picture in the grid". Nothing at all like the original's fun puzzles. It usually devolves into "find clue 1 so you can get combination B. Now go to puzzle X and enter in Combination B using the notes from Clue 1". Was never really engaging.
The Characters
Yes, everyone knows the character models look kind of "meh". Voice-acting is pretty good though, although it becomes clear that they all were reading their lines alone in a booth, and never actually recorded dialogue between 2 real people.
They seemed to have given an honest try though. Models are still bad though.
Each character is unique and SEEMS to have a personality, but you don`t get to interact with ANY of them enough to actually start caring. There is one character called Ruth that Emily is apparently really attached to and wants to be best of friends, but there is no reason WHY Emily acts that way. You interact with Ruth maybe 3 times the entire story.
It feels like they cut A LOT of content, which really sucks, because I was actually really interested in the characters.
I WANTED to learn more about them. Why are they here? What is their connection to manor and the missing uncle? Are they good or are they bad? The first question barely gets glossed over in a literal document you find in the game (which is easy to miss).
The other 2 questions only get answered right at the VERY end of the chapter, and you are essentially just being told by the devs to "just roll with it".
They were doing a good job with the characters when they ARE in the game, but they barely are there, which makes it moot. You literally could take out every side-character from the game, and it wouldn`t have made a difference in the end.
Bugs/Errors
This game has a few bugs. I never crashed or T-Posed, but I had gotten permanently stuck between two chairs or on a strange object, requiring me to have to reload a save more than a few times.
Loading between areas has some REALLY bad stutter issues. Usually I don`t mind, but not when I am being pursued by a monster or trying to watch a cutscene.
You also get stuck on a lot of small objects littering the scene.
I wanted to edit the options menu, which resulted in the UI showing the options menu, but the game still thought I was on the main-menu which caused some pretty interesting errors.
Summary
Would give it a ~Meh review, if Steam would let me. I tried REALLY hard to love this game. And I mean REALLY hard, but I just cant recommend it. It feels VERY incomplete in a lot of aspects. If they halved the asking price, I would probably recommend it then, but currently, I cannot. There is a bit of a gem hidden in this game but there is just too many bugs and bad design choices to let it shine.
I played the game as Emily and beat it within 10 hours. (found all the hidden goodies)
The story is pretty interesting, with more than enough Lovecraftian vibes to it. Voice acting was good, but I really didn`t care (AKA never got a chance TO care) about the people themselves.
If you grab the game, I STRONGLY suggest playing it on Easy mode, just to save yourself the headache. The freaking combat... It is horrible. I mean...REALLY bad... It isn`t hard, just freaking tedious. I nearly quit playing it because how quickly weapons break, how much ammo is needed to kill a monster and how narrow the corridors are which makes fleeing nearly impossible since you get stuck on the smallest objects.
Also, don`t grab it for full price, until they fix the bugs and issues. I enjoyed the game, but it is not worth their current asking price.
I did nearly shit my pants the first time I pointed my gun at "The Dark Man". THAT is how you do a villian!
Now, if you excuse me, I`m gonna go play the original Alone in the Dark now. :)