From Terror to Trauma. The Remake as a Container of Narrative Motifs in Alone in the Dark (1992, 2024)

Abstract

Remakes are a common strategy in video games, a cultural industry heavily dependent on intellectual property. Often motivated by technological changes and the dependence on closed platforms, these new versions range from an update (the so-called remasters) to reinventions that take the original and, keeping the name, offer a new product. This is the case of Alone in the Dark (Pieces Interactive, 2024), a new version of the eponymous horror pioneer (Infogrames, 1992), in which the central ludonarrative elements of the original are maintained, adapting them to current trends. Here we analyze the new version (from now on, AITD2024) from the prism of myth-criticism, studying those motifs or mythemes (ideas that, following Barthes, naturalize a vision of the world through repetition) that are added to the originals, specifically the cultural obsessions with trauma as a determining vector of its protagonists’ identity and interiority.