|
VGLN.com PC >> Reviews
>> article
Review: Dark Fall
by
Jolex Del Pilar
Sunday, August 24, 2003
A genuinely frightening experience, is there still a market for Myst-type adventure games?
 |
|
|
Title:
Dark Fall
|
Platform:
Pentium II 233, 64MB Ram, SVGA card |
Publisher:
Dreamcatcher Interactive
|
Developer:
The Adventure Company
|
#
of Players: 1
|
Genre:
Adventure
|
Origin:
United States
|
Expected
Release: July 2003
|
Grapevine:
"Many times in the game, the mixture of sound and static environments evoked a genuine feeling of fear." |
Dark Fall is one of those games from another era. Back in in the early 1990s, when most PC systems barely scratched 50mhz, click-based adventure games were fairly common. When Myst came out in 1995, it solidified the click-based adventure genre as a viable and madly popular area of gaming.
Now days, however, it would seem that the industry and most games have moved on, which is why we found it surprising that Dark Fall landed on our desk. Although we would be the last people to prejudge a game simply based on its genre and style of gaming, we were simply puzzled (pun intended), and surprised, that games like Dark Fall were still made.
Regardless of our preconceptions about Dark Fall, after playing through it, it's obvious a lot of time and energy went into this title. It's a solidly built game, given what the developers worked with.
First off, the game was created completely with Macromedia Director. If this surprises you, you're not alone. In an age when most game projects have huge budgets set aside just for building a complex and fancy 3D engine, Dark Fall went with a commonly available authoring tool usually reserved for creating media for websites. As a result, you probably shouldn't expect Dark Fall to blow you away with graphical eye-candy. The plus side is that even though the game looks about 5 years old on the technology scale, it'll run fine on a system from that same era.
The game actually begins with you as the brother of a man who is working to restore an old British train station. Suddenly, your brother feels that something may not be right with the place and decides to drag you into the terror. What are brothers for? Once you reach the station, you find that your brother isn't at the designated meeting place and all that is left is his PDA, with few tips as to where he might have gone. Thus begins the adventure. Dark Fall really threw me for a loop when I played through it, seeing as how I had never completed a game of this genre before. Some new things I had to learn while playing this game were note taking (there's no Questbook for you spoiled Morrowind fans), and examining every little detail on "every" screen. Dark Fall at times reminded me more of a logic exam rather than a game.
We dare you to say "Candyman" three times.
That being said, the game shoots for a creepy, scary, adventuring experience, and does exactly that. From 12 year old ghost children, to dark, ancient, shaman writings on the inside of cave walls, there's a lot presented during the adventure that helps to emphasize the "scary" approach this game is taking. Definitely try to play this game at night. The puzzles themselves are not hard all by themselves, usually involving finding a room, or tweaking a switch, but the actual copying of notes is what makes the game difficult and sometimes tedious at times (I would've killed for a log or questbook).
In the end, I'm just not sure a game that allows you only 4-way directional movement in the first person view, featuring static graphics, and underwhelming visuals can survive on the market, even if it is a faily solid game. The MSRP for the game is about $30, and for that price, many solid PC titles can be purchased, especially from discount bins. I'd recommend the game without a second thought to fans of the genre as it will give you your fill of clicking, exploring, and puzzle solving. However, for those of you wanting a more varied visual and less constricting experience (4 walls of movement really makes you feel like you're in a literal box), there are better options.
--- Jolex Del Pilar
|
