Alone in the Dark

If you enjoy Resident Evil, you have Alone in the Dark to thank. It's not the first survival horror game, but it's the one that combined the horror elements with a puzzly adventure style and presented itself with fixed, cinematic camera angles. Suffers from obtuse puzzles and the awkward 3-D modeling of the time. Overall an enjoyable piece of gaming history.

A giant step forward in gaming but it's also inscrutable and clunky. Both the environment and the gameplay scared the crap out of me as a kid.

I could never remember to be scared or entertained by this game because I spent the entire time fighting the awkward controls.

There was novelty here, but the game wasn't very good.

A game with trendsetting style, if not much else. The blend of blocky 3D characters, nicely prerendered backgrounds, and dramatically skewed camera angles was to prove very influential over the next decade or more. In fact, it was so forward-thinking it would be a few years before other developers could even pull it off. The stiff tank controls, awkward animations, and thin gameplay and plot would sadly prove just as popular.