If I was Frédérick Raynal, I would totally call the lawyers on this... lol

Nothing to be sorry about.
Well done! :)

I took a look at the studio behind this game and I cannot shake the feeling that all of it seemed off. The abundance of low quality games, questionable prices, very little if any reviews, poor scores. More often than not the games looked like a mix of hastily stitched together assets. Whether it is some sort of scam or not, one thing is clear:

This kind of low quality junk of a game does not seem to fit GoG at all. Please do better job when you do your selection next time.

Is this a GOG exclusive?

That's amazing. ←this is irony

By the way… is Diana Eden supposed to look like the wife of a former president of the USA that wanted to become president herself?

Is this ironic? Is the game self-aware that it's a weird knock-off version of Alone in the Dark (1992)? The screenshots make this game look like just another cheap asset flip.

On the other hand, that kind of jank was very much authentic to the era; especially in games such as Estatica, where all your combat feedback is non-existent and your models are ellipsoids. Another nice get would be Sweet Home, the horror RPG which inspired Resident Evil and was by Capcom themselves. Problem is, that's based on a movie licence so...might have to Ersatz it up a bit since Japanese copyright law is brutal as it is effective.

Addendum: Any of the Digital Devil Saga/Megami Tensei games would also be nice.

No, it's getting a steam release on 31 Oct, 2024 with... hihihi... 3rd-party DRM! LOL

No joke!

I could even forgive the intro (well, if we ignore how terrible it looks) and the font (if you are really dead set on making your homage as blantant as possible), but you start in the attic and you must push furniture to block the window! Even the layout seems very close to AITD (although the awful lighting makes it hard to see). Then the sequence with the female lead is again VERY similar to the one in the caves in AITD.

Sure, the screenshots do show some stuff that doesn't seem a carbon-copy of something from AITD, at least at a glance, but boy does the game look bad. I guess if we are trying to be optmistic, it seems like GOG is trying to make publishing games here easier. XD

On the one hand, it looks like such a blatant rip-off of the first Alone in the Dark that I'm actually surprised they haven't got into legal trouble for this. On the other hand, the quality of the copy is such that I suppose it could pass as a parody and fall under fair use laws :p

It's amazing that this looks almost worse than the (very awesome) original from 1992. The animations, for example when you go up stairs and having no clipping on enemies... this is terrible!

When I saw the first screens, my hopes were high for a good AitD remaster, but the more footage I watched the more disappointed I got... Too bad.

This...this Carnby real ! O_o

+1

Yes, this has to be some kind of joke, right?
Because this game is neither a "love letter" nor a case of "inspired by 90's horror". It's plagiarism.

Before I even watched the trailer, i looked at the banner and thought: Hey, this guy looks like Edward Carnby in the original Alone in the Dark 1 from 1992, mainly because of the outfit and colors.

And then the trailer. OMG! They simply copied EVERYTHING. And I mean everything. The male/female protagonists, the whole intro including the close-up of the frog, the attic, moving the wardrobe in front of the window, the piano, the trapdoor, ... , the catacombs, the lizardmen, the spider, the collapsing bridge.

What? Why would you do such a thing? This is an abomination. Like the evil twin or deadly mirror image in a cheap horror film. Get thee away from me, devil!!!

I guess it would be kind of okay as an amateur freeware fan project trying to stay under the radar of copyright lawyers. But as a commercial product, for €17.77(!) no less (what kind of a strange price is this, btw?), and without any mention of being a remake of the first Alone in the Dark game (which it very obviously is), this looks more like an April's Fool's joke at best or a cheap attempt to profit from someone elses work via blatant copyright infringement at worst. I'm curious whether the staff members responsiblle for greenlighting it have ever played or heard of AITD or even just looked at the store page here on GOG and how much longer than Devotion this game will manage to stay purchasable before it will inevitably be taken down again ...?

I ... can't believe they even copied the intro... down to the frog !