Earlier this week, I found myself performing a sort of ritual, one that I’m sure every gamer out there is very familiar with: scrounging through your backlog looking for the next game you wanna play. It’s almost like clockwork; finish one big game, pick around at your casual games for a bit, then go looking around in your library for the next unplayed game that strikes your fancy and then repeat it all again once you finish it. This time, I settled on a game that I had, for reasons known only to 2024 Hatmonster, just stopped playing one day. That game is Alone in the Dark (2024) and I’m really not sure why I never finished it.

I have some ideas, of course. The only reason I had the game at all was because I’d received a review copy, so my reason for playing it at the time wasn’t necessarily because I wanted to. Also, I found that the in-progress file had Emily Hartwood as the player character, even though I remember playing through it as Detective Edward Carnby.

So, I suspect that I’d just played enough to get an overall feel for the game and meet my deadline rather than going all the way through again as Emily to make sure there wasn’t New Game ++ or something. Again, only my past self knows for sure now.

I still find it odd, though, that I didn’t continue even if I was only playing it for review at the time. Alone in the Dark (2024) has everything I like in a traditional story-based game. It’s got a cool premise, interesting characters, good enough combat, actual puzzles and runs very well. I’m also pretty sure that I hadn’t gotten to the real bottom of whatever was going on in Derceto Manor (the main location) so I should have been hooked. But here I am, two years later, only now getting back to it. It’s very weird. What’s weirder, though, is that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.

A long while back now, I started a series on here called “Getting Back to It” in which I intended to document my attempts to finish games I’d left incomplete for one reason or another. The story was different for each game. Sometimes there was another, newer game that I wanted to play, other times life just got busy, but the result each time was just leaving the game to sit for a very long time. Isn’t it odd how that happens? How you can go from being really hyped to play something to either forgetting it entirely or just becoming completely unmotivated?

Alone in the Dark (2024) hasn’t gone anywhere over these past two years. It’s been sitting on my PS5 hard drive and I’ve scrolled past it probably countless times while trying to decide what else to play, yet I never even felt like jumping back in until, well, until I played something similar that left me wanting more.

That game was Crisol: Theatre of Idols, and it was very reminiscent of the sorts of single player AAA and AAA games of the late 00s and early 10s. It too offered mystery. It too had a fairly linear structure and story, and it too had some good head-scratching puzzles thrown in for good measure. It’s gonna get its own post soon, but suffice it to say for now that it brought me back here.

It took getting a taste of Alone in the Dark gameplay to get me back into Alone in the Dark, so then why didn’t I go right to the source? Is it that you don’t know what you want until you encounter it, or is it something else? Perhaps leaving a game unfinished creates a negative association that lingers even after you forget why you stopped playing. I could something like that making it hard to go back and start playing again. Or, perhaps this sort of thing doesn’t happen to you and all and I’m just weird. That’s definitely a possibility. Anyway, still an interesting thing to think about, no?

Well, that’s all I got on this. It was just an odd thought that struck me as I was enjoying Alone in the Dark and trying to fathom why I left it the way I did. So yeah, I think I’ll just end it here and get back into the game. See ya’ll next time!

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Does this ever happen to you? What do you think causes it? Are there any other odd gaming trends you’ve noticed in your life?

Image from the Steam page