Game Info:

Category : Adventure
Publisher : The Adventure Company
Developer : XXv Productions
Release : July 29, 2003
MSRP (US): $19.99
ESRB: Teen

Minimum Requirements:

CPU: 233 Mhz or faster
Memory: 32MB Ram
Video: SVGA Graphics Card with 32 bit color
HDD Space: 502MB

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Background/Summary:

When looking for a suitable building for their office XXv Productions came across a nice, old building. Being an old building it had a tendency to have a few problems, such as power outages. After awhile it got really annoying and the team decided to research the history of the building. Turns out the place used to be a hospital until the 1970's, after about a hundred years of service. People die in hospitals. This one was no exception. The team began to become suspicious that their office was haunted, and have noticed things like whispers and the sound of steps being climbed when no one is near them. The team has even set up webcams around some of the more active areas. One of the webcams wasn't set up very well, the team says they were going to put it on the ceiling but ran away and never returned after the lights started flickering while setting it up. Such an environment is perfect for developing Dark Fall - The Journal, a game about talking ghosts.

Dark Fall is a Myst-style puzzle game with a creepy atmosphere. In the introduction your brother calls and says there's a slight problem at a hotel. Two students with him accidently unleashed a very evil... thing. He wants you to come help take care of the problem. So the next thing you know you wake up on some train tracks. Interesting. What follows is a game where you need to solve puzzles in order to get about twelve words which are used to stop the evil thing.

Gameplay:

The game is, as I said earlier, like Myst in its gameplay. You use your mouse and click on the screen to interact with objects and move around. Like Myst, the game focuses on puzzles instead of shooting stuff. The puzzles in the game are logical, for the most part. Most of them involve clicking something in a sequence. Usually the sequence is told to you earlier or is not difficult to figure out. A couple of puzzles involve use of an inventory, and can usually be figured out by clicking stuff in your inventory until something happens.

Dark Fall is different from Myst, however, with its spooky atmosphere. This game is advertised as a scary game, and is indeed unsettling, at least for about the first half of the game. The introduction is spooky, some of the first area can unnerve you, and one segment will probably flat out scare you, but after that the game really calms down. If you can make it through the first half you're pretty much good to go. Sure you still hear dead people whispering and the atmosphere is still dark, but there just aren't any more scary moments.

After you get past the spookiness there isn't much variance in gameplay to hold your attention. You listen to dead people, click stuff and read, but that's about it. While most games follow a basic formula, they at least put in some variance to make it feel like you're doing something different. For most of the game in Dark Fall it just feels like you're doing the same thing over and over. There was one nice little gimmick the game had at one point, though. You were allowed to use a computer which had stuff like a web browser in it. It might not seem like much, but it felt cool using a web browser inside a game. On the down side it isn't a fully functional web browser. You can only visit a few bookmarked websites, which probably don't even exist on the actual internet. There's an address bar, but if you go in and type www.gameclubcentral.com you're not going to go anywhere. Still, it was fun to play around with.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics are really a mixed bag. There are no models, only pre-rendered environments and movies. This allows the developers to create some very detailed graphics, but just because they can doesn't mean that they do. While most do look quite nice, others can be fairly bland and there's one room which is just painful to look at. I can also remember at least one instance where a wood texture was noticeably tiled. Moments like this, while rare, did remind you that you were playing a game. Aside from that, the graphics are appropriately dark and spooky. One particularly significant instance was a pair of scissors stuck in a wall. It was a simple effect, but it conveyed the mood very well.

There was one very nice effect pulled off at one point in the game. Early on you get a lantern to light dark areas. The developers rendered any given area twice, one without the lantern and one with the lantern. Then in-game it would blend between the two renders where your cursor was as it moved around. This allowed for some amazing effects. The game would be lit as you would expect thanks to its pre-rendered nature. Shiny surfaces would light up more than dirt, for instance. Shadows would be cast. Technologically the effect was fairly simple, but it's way better than flashlights you see in many other games.

The sound helps add to the feeling of the game. It'll often kick in as you're reading something. At one point in one person's notes they say they hear whispers outside their door, and whispers begin playing. It's creepy. You'll also hear the sounds of children singing, people whistling, and footsteps in an empty hotel. The sound effects are all of good quality. The few sounds that loop don't do so noticeably.

The voices, on the other hand, were not so good. A few of them were convincing and added to the game, but most weren't acted well. A good example is the intro itself, which has a bit of both from the same actor. When he first starts talking it's not at all convincing, but as he keeps talking it starts getting creepy and by the end it is quite unsettling.

Wrap-Up:

Dark Fall is a better-than average game. The game does a decent job of combining Myst-style gameplay with a creepy atmosphere. The system specs are very light, so you don't need a top of the line gaming PC to run it. While it does have a few flaws, for only twenty dollars it's a pretty good game. If you're walking in a game store with twenty bucks to spend on a game to keep you occupied for a few hours, Dark Fall isn't a bad choice.

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