I'd like to start out by saying I don't believe in ghosts. I think people's
eyes can play tricks on them and let their imaginations run, sometimes making
them think they saw something that wasn't there or mistaking something that is
there for something else. Driving late at night in a rainstorm and seeing a
flash of somebody standing on the side of the road is fertile ground for your
deepest fears to fill in the blanks. When I was five I woke up in the middle of
the night to find an old haggard woman dressed in a blood-stained nightgown
dragging a chain across my room, moaning, "Death...death..." Had I been a little
older and more brave I would have quickly realized this was just the farmer's
wife old lady Withers, who was trying to keep me from going into the abandoned
coal mine. Wait, no, that was a Scooby Doo episode. Zoinks! The point is, ghosts
are only as real as we think they are.
Despite my pure skeptical eye, Dark Fall - The Journey, scared the bejezus
out of me. For the easily frightened, I would not recommend playing this game as
I often did, with the lights off in the dead of night, alone. Some nights after
playing I honestly had trouble falling asleep, it was that creepy. One
particular night, I had reached a particularly creepy area of the game (the map
room for those who have played), and a saw something out of the corner of my eye
moving in my room. It was dark, and my eyes were not adjusted, so of course I
assumed it was a monster about to kill me. It turned out to be a door mirror,
and I was just looking at myself. At that point I calmly turned off the computer
and went to my TV to watch Blazing Saddles.
Dark Fall takes place in the near-empty town of Dowerton, in Southern
England. I've been to Southern England, and seen many towns like Dowerton, dark
and dreary, although I assume it is a purely fictional town. In Dark Fall,
Dowerton is the location of an abandoned train station and hotel that your
brother was scoping out for renovation before he mysteriously disappeared. You
quickly learn that this town has a major history of losing its inhabitants to
gruesome death after gruesome death...a situation perfect for a whole bunch of
vengeful ghosts! To save you from spoilers, I will stop discussing the plot
here, but trust me that there is a very rich story behind this game.
Dark Fall gets the scaring job done with fairly sub-par graphics. The
movement, done in a first person view, is accomplished in the traditional Myst
style of moving through a slideshow of still images. Everything is done in
640x480 resolution which makes it particularly hard to see any real detail in
the game screens, which can be especially frustrating when you are pixel-hunting
for a latch or a button. Despite the low resolution, most of the artwork in the
game seems to be very professional and convincing. The hotel in particular is
complete with three floors of rooms, all unique, and all realistically creepy.
There is plenty to explore in this game, and you can usually bet you will not
expect what you end up finding.
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