''Alone in the Dark 3'' is a 1995

survival horror Survival horror is a subgenre of survival of the players as the game tries to frighten them with either horror graphics or scary ambience. Although combat can be part of the gameplay, the player is made to feel less in control than in typical ac ...

video game developed and published by Infogrames Multimedia. It is the third installment of the '' Alone in the Dark'' video game series. The video game was released for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

in 1995. It was ported to the

PC-98 The , commonly shortened to PC-98 or , is a lineup of Japanese 16-bit and 32-bit personal computers manufactured by NEC from 1982 to 2000. The platform established NEC's dominance in the Japanese personal computer market, and, by 1999, more th ...

later that year. Versions for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

and

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

were also released in 1996 under the name of ''Alone in the Dark: Ghosts in Town''.

Plot

It's 1925 and after Edward Carnby's success in his previous two investigations, a journalist has nicknamed him the 'Supernatural Private Eye'. This time, he is called to investigate the disappearance of a film crew at a two-bit ghost town known by the name of Slaughter Gulch located in the

Mojave Desert The Mojave Desert ( ; mov, Hayikwiir Mat'aar; es, Desierto de Mojave) is a desert in the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains in the Southwestern United States. It is named for the indigenous Mojave people. It is located primarily ...

in California. Among the disappeared crew is Emily Hartwood, Jeremy Hartwood's niece from the original. Edward soon discovers that a

curse A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particula ...

has gripped the town, and an evil cowboy from the Badlands named Jed Stone is the villain who is responsible for the crew's disappearance. Lurking around town are many trigger-happy sharpshooters, deranged prospectors, and bloodthirsty lost souls whom Edward must ward off with both his strength and his wit.

Gameplay

The main

theme Theme or themes may refer to: * Theme (arts), the unifying subject or idea of the type of visual work * Theme (Byzantine district), an administrative district in the Byzantine Empire governed by a Strategos * Theme (computing), a custom graphical ...

of this game is the

Wild West The American frontier, also known as the Old West or the Wild West, encompasses the geography, history, folklore, and culture associated with the forward wave of American expansion in mainland North America that began with European colonial ...

, as Carnby is pitted against a town filled with "zombie cowboy outlaws" who attack him with revolvers and

lever-action The toggle-link action used in the iconic Winchester Model 1873 rifle, one of the most famous lever-action firearms Lever-action is a type of action for repeating firearms that uses a manually operated cocking handle located around the trigger g ...

rifles. More traditionally mindless, shambling zombies begin to appear about midway through the game. Towards the end of the game, the concept of radioactive

mutation In biology, a mutation is an alteration in the nucleic acid sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. Viral genomes contain either DNA or RNA. Mutations result from errors during DNA replication, DNA or viral repl ...

plays a significant role in the story, and the player ends up fighting monstrous creatures created from the radiation.

Release

This was the first game in the series not to be released on floppy disks. Rather, it was released as a CD-ROM game since the initial release, with full Red Book audio soundtrack and dialogue speech (in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Portuguese, depending on the country the game was released, and with the Mac version specifically featuring a different English dub) like the CD-ROM re-releases of the previous two games. It was also the first game in the series to be exclusively released for several computer formats and therefore it didn't receive any official console release unlike the previous two games. Outside of Europe, the game was distributed in North America by

Interplay Entertainment Interplay Entertainment Corp. is an American video game developer and Video game publisher, publisher based in Los Angeles. The company was founded in 1983 as Interplay Productions by developers Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, Troy Worrell, and Rebecca ...

. In Japan, a

version of the game was developed and released in 1995 by AMT Savan Corps, a merge of the company previously known as Arrow Micro-Techs Corp which published the previous games for Japanese computers. There was no FM-Towns version developed this time. In 1996, the Windows and Mac OS versions were also released in Japan by Electronic Arts Victor as ''Alone in the Dark 3: Ghosts in Town''. The official guide to the game (''Alone in the Dark 3: The Official Strategy Guide'', Prima Publishing, 1995; re-released by the author, 2019) was written by Steve Schwartz in cooperation with Infogrames. A

3DO Interactive Multiplayer The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, also referred to as simply 3DO, is a home video game console developed by The 3DO Company. Conceived by entrepreneur and Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, the 3DO was not a console manufactured by the company ...

version of ''Alone in the Dark 3'' was announced but never released.

Reception

References

External links