Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (2001). Play online

Summary

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare on Game Boy Color managed to capture the haunted mood of its console siblings despite the cartridge’s strict limits. Pocket Studios stripped away the FMV cut‑scenes and trimmed many areas, but they kept the pre‑rendered backdrops and the little 3D silhouettes that wander them, and the player walks only as Edward. The standout is the clever lighting system: each backdrop was rendered in several brightness levels so the character’s flashlight can actually paint light on a 2D scene, casting shadows and turning the game’s shadowy creatures to ash. That mechanic feels just as tense as on the PS‑one, even if a handful of rooms vanish or shrink to fit the small screen. After its original launch, the cartridge resurfaced on Nintendo’s Classics service in early 2023, giving a new generation a glimpse of how the original handheld version squeezed survival horror onto a color‑screen Game Boy.

Storyline

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (often just called The New Nightmare) opens on October 31, 2001 on the eerie Shadow Island off the Massachusetts coast. Edward Carnby learns that his partner Charles Fiske has been found dead near the island’s shore, prompting a fresh investigation. Frederick Johnson reveals that Fiske was hunting three ancient tablets that can unleash a terrible power, and he begs Carnby to take Fiske’s place.

Johnson introduces Carnby to Aline Cedrac, a bright university professor who believes the tablets are linked to Professor Obed Morton, a man she thinks is her father. Together they set out to recover the missing tablets and uncover the killer behind Fiske’s death, operating in a storyline that exists outside the series’ main canon.

During a flight over Shadow Island, an unknown creature attacks their plane. Both Edward and Aline bail out, parachuting to the ground but landing separately—Edward in a dense forest beside a manor, Aline on the manor’s roof—setting the stage for their haunted adventure.