Alone in the Dark graphics settings and controls detailed

Players can tweak Alone in the Dark graphics as they desire. The cult-classic survival horror game has been brought to life in Unreal Engine 4 thanks to developer Pieces Interactive. This suggests a modular experience at first glance that will scale to most modern PC hardware, even if they are a few generations old.

Thankfully, that assumption would be right. Here is everything players need to know about Alone in the Dark graphics settings and control schemes across platforms.

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All Alone in the Dark graphics settings and control options explored

First, let's cover the basic options available for players before the Alone in the Dark graphics settings:

• Window Mode: Allows players to pick between three modes: Windowed, Windowed Fullscreen and Fullscreen.
• FSR: Players can choose to enable AMD FSR to use dynamic resolution scaling for better performance between the following options: Off, Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance.
• DLSS: Players can enable Nvidia DLSS technology for image reconstruction technique if they have an Nvidia RTX-series graphics card. The following options are available: Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Ultra.
• Resolution: The rendering resolution of the game can be adjusted here.
• V-Sync: Toggling this on removes screen tearing at the cost of some latency by locking the game to the refresh rate of the monitor.
• Frame Rate: Allows players to enable frame rate caps at 30, 60, 90, 120, and 144 FPS. Alternatively, using the Unlimited option allows the frame rate to run as fast as the PC can render.
• Graphics Preset: As an Unreal Engine 4 game, the expected presets are accounted for - Low, Medium, High, and Epic; however, an option even more taxing than Epic, called Cinematic, is also here.

Next are the more advanced settings governed by the master Graphics Preset option.

Alone in the Dark graphics options detailed in full (Image via THQ Nordic)

Alone in the Dark graphics feature the full suite of options expected from a modern game:

• Volumetric Quality: Governs the quality of volumetric effects in the game, such as fog. Higher settings ensure higher resolution and more realistic effects.
• Ambient Occlusion: Responsible for the smooth shading between objects where light does not penetrate, like recessed areas. Higher settings guarantee more realistic shadowing.
• View Distance: Determines the distance at which objects are culled and affects the LOD (Level of Detail) of the object meshes. In a nutshell, higher settings mean higher-quality assets will spawn even at further distances.
• Detail Setting: Controls if more expensive-to-render assets spawn in the environment; reduces to enhance performance on lower-end hardware.
• Particle Quality: Higher settings ensure a greater quantity and quality of particle effects.
• Screen Space Reflections: Governs the quality of screen space reflections in the game, such as mirror reflections and other reflective surfaces like puddles.
• Subsurface Scattering: Higher settings allow more realistic lighting scattering when interacting with semi-translucent objects like skin.
• Shadow Quality: Determines the rendering resolution and quality of shadows in the game.

Alone in the Dark graphics options can be tweaked as users desire (Image via THQ Nordic)

• Post-Processing: Controls the quality of post-processing effects like god rays and bloom.
• Texture Quality: Adjusts texture size of assets, with higher settings ensuring crisper textures while consuming more GPU memory.
• Anti-aliasing: Helps smooth out jagged edges on the rendering image, with higher settings being much more effective.
• Shader Quality: Governs the complexity of materials on top of surfaces of objects in the game world.
• Effects Quality: Tweaks the quality of materials that use refractive and translucent materials like fire, blood, smoke, and more.
• Foliage Quality: Helps change the density of foliage in the game world.
• Anisotropic Filtering: Controls texture filtering quality with higher settings showcasing smooth textures even at angled views and at a distance.

If players wonder about ray tracing features, they will be disappointed to learn that the game does not feature ray tracing - there is no such option under Alone in the Dark graphics settings. There do not seem to be any plans for it either.

These should help round off the core visuals of Alone in the Dark (Image via THQ Nordic)

There are some additional display options to factor in under the Display tab in the Options menu:

• High Dynamic Range (HDR): Enabling this option displays more vibrant colors and crisper blacks if the display monitor supports HDR technology.
• Chromatic Aberration: Camera-distorting effects can be toggled on or off.
• Depth of Field: Distorts backgrounds, such as during cutscenes, with a blur; can be toggled on or off.
• Field of View: Tweaks the horizontal field of view, with higher numbers allowing the game to showcase more of the game's world on the screen and maxes out at a value of 90; this also comes at a performance cost, however.
• Motion Blur: Governs the strength of applied motion blur on objects when they move.

This is all fans need to know about Alone in the Dark graphics settings and display options. Check out our Alone in the Dark review to know more about the game.