Completing optional objectives in a game should feel rewarding, not tedious and frustrating. If you’re like me, you’ll want to know how to fix collectibles disappearing in Alone in the Dark.
Alone in the Dark — Lagniappes bug
Few things in Alone in the Dark are optional, and this retelling of a cult classic sticks to a linear game progression for the most part. Players can grab these collectibles called Lagniappes throughout the game. When you collect your first one, the game lets you know certain collectibles can only get acquired after completing both sides of a playthrough, such as Emily and Detective Carnby.
I did my first playthrough as Carnby, grabbing every collectible I could. Fast forward to my time playing as Emily, and I stumbled on a truly game-breaking bug.
Once I had almost every collectible in the game, I advanced Emily’s story until I reached the last chapter of the game. It was then that I went to check my collectibles to unlock an alternate ending. However, upon looking at my collectibles page, every collectible I obtained with Carnby was removed from my inventory.
This was especially frustrating since the majority of Lagniappes I had were from Carnby’s playthrough. Even if you reload a previous save from this point, your collectibles are retroactively removed. The only way I’ve found to temporarily fix this involves a lot of different saves and loading and reloading the game.
Alone in the Dark — How to fix collectibles disappearing
I experienced this bug while playing the PC version of Alone in the Dark, so console players may not experience the same problems as I did. Unfortunately, players will have to wait until the developers push out a patch to fix this error.
If you’re looking to complete every Lagniappe set and get the achievement, there are a few things you’ll need to do.
- First, go ahead and start a new game from the main menu. Make sure you save Emily’s playthrough before doing so, as starting a new game erases your autosave immediately. This new game is simply to erase the autosave, as it seems the bug is caused by having an auto-save in the last chapter of the game as Emily.
- Once you load into the new playthrough, quit to the main menu and load into a save from your Carnby playthrough. This should at the very least, give you back some of the collectibles you have depending on where your save with Carnby is. Unfortunately, if you don’t happen to have any save from Carnby, then all you can do is replay the game and grab all the collectibles you no longer have.
This is extremely frustrating and even locked me out of getting two alternate endings. But at least I knew where the collectibles were thanks to turning on the best Player Guidance settings.
