Dark Fall: Lost Souls – PC Review

Reviewed by Michael Slevin on January 4, 2010

Dark Fall: Lost Souls - PC Review  | read this item

Dark Fall: Lost Souls is a quaint little title. Hailing from British developer Darkling Room, the adventure-horror series has had two previous incarnations, The Journal and Lights Out. It combines exploration and supernatural horror to create an adventure game in the purest sense possible. The first focused on one man’s journey to the fictional village of Dowerton in Dorset to save his missing brother with the second following Benjamin Parker through the folds of time in order to stop the evil that lurks in Fetch Rock lighthouse. Both titles were met with a mixed reception, so does Lost Souls manage to improve upon its prior treks into darkness?

You take on the role of The Inspector, a disgraced policeman who failed to solve the disappearance of a young girl from a playground five years ago amidst a hail of outrage and disgust over the planting of evidence and the arrest of the (supposedly) wrong suspect. Having being drawn to the long abandoned Dowerton hotel and train station, it’s up to you to work with the ghosts of the area’s past to conquer your demons and solve the mystery of Amy’s disappearance once and for all.

Played from a first-person perspective, Lost Souls plunges you directly into events. The very first thing you’re greeted by is a black screen. Before you start cursing your system for crashing, however, you’ll notice the mobile phone, one of the most valuable weapons in your inventory, in the bottom corner of the screen. Its flashlight function illuminates the blackness, allowing you to see your drab surroundings for the first time. It’s not the only time you’ll need it, either: there are plenty of incidences where its torch feature will come in handy. Your phone is also useful for receiving cryptic texts from someone known only as ‘Echo’. The audio corruption sound that briefly plays whenever you receive an SMS from the stranger is a nice touch.

Lost Souls’ sense of horror is well implemented. As you make your way through the station, you’ll find your environs becoming ever more grim and abhorrent, being lead through locales including dilapidated train tunnels, long-deserted waiting areas and ransacked, blood-splattered hotel rooms littered with scissors rammed into walls and floorboards. The feeling of fear you’ll experience is boosted effortlessly by the impeccable sound work: high-pitched drones, music boxes tinkling, incessant disembodied whispers and the occasional horrifying hiss and snarl all serve to create moments where you’re genuinely gripped by terror and too frightened to turn around to see what, if anything, is following you.

Unfortunately nothing else is as polished as its almost-flawless audio work. While the music and sound effects collaborate to create a chilling and tense atmosphere, the same can’t be said of the voice acting. While mostly passable, such as the girlish giggle of a young ghost or the disregardful tone of a heartbroken bank robber, the greatest aural failing comes from The Inspector himself. With inconsistent inflection and a strange, he comes across as a caricature of the determined and heroic plod he is meant to represent. A large number of the scares rely on jump frights, with bright flashes and sudden noises making you jump. It’s a shame that the title has to fall back on such a lazy shock mechanic. The visuals are also hugely unspectacular, consisting of static backgrounds intermingled with only very basic animation if the situation calls for it.

The biggest dagger in Dark Falls’ heart, though, is its pace. You can only turn 90 degrees at a time, which wouldn’t be so bad if you could hurry or skip the action. Instead, you have to turn gradually in one direction. The large amounts of backtracking and investigation means that progress is excruciatingly, sometimes painfully, slow. The problem is only exacerbated by the necessity to go through the same lines of dialogue more than once and text messages being displayed one… letter… at… a… time. There are also numerous occasions of grammatical and spelling errors and clumsy syntax which only serve to break the fiction the title tries so hard to establish.

Dark Fall: Lost Souls is aimed squarely at the Myst crowd: if you like taking your time pondering over clues, taking meticulous notes and solving some brain-bending puzzles, then you’ll render  a considerable degree of enjoyment from the game. If not, then its tension and suspense will be lost on you thanks to the snail’s pace it takes and the distinct lack of anything remotely exciting happening. Not quite a Dark Fail, Lost Souls can only be recommended for the hardcore adventure collective.

Tags: adventure, Dark, Darkling, Fall, Horror, Iceberg, Interactive, Lost, PC Review, Room, Souls