The Darkness Within, In Pursuit of Loath Nolder was initially released for PC back in 2007. With a story inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, it’s a point and click adventure filled with puzzles and mystery. The game is the first in a series, with the second being Darkness Within 2 – The Dark Lineage. The game recently released for Steam on November 14 for just under $10.

The game is a point and click mystery game, with a police detective named Howard Loreid as the lead character. There’s no moving around or shooting here, just click-based exploration and puzzle solving.  Now if that’s your kind of game, then you might be in luck here, but if not, then don’t bother.  There’s nothing here that’s going to sway you, not even the Lovecraft inspired locales and story influences.  And even if you are a fan of these types of games, you can do better.

The story is heavily influenced by H.P. Lovecraft, dealing with the occult and slow, prodding madness.  You’re on the hunt for Loath Nolder, someone who just may be the killer of a man named Clark Field.  The narrative can be engaging at times, but ultimately falls flat, leaving several unanswered questions in the end.  I take it this story is supposed to pick up in the sequel, but nothing else that I’ve seen in the game seems to suggest that.

Environments in the game look somewhat nice and detailed, however there were some tweaks I needed to make just for it to look passable. For whatever reason, the developers decided that a grain filter would make the game look better and it needed to be turned off.  The backgrounds were also unnecessarily dark, which lent a creepy vibe to the game, but is not all that useful for a pixel hunter.  And despite my best efforts, the game definitely shows its age, and then some.  This is most evident when looking at people in the game, of which there are admittedly few, but they look…weird. Just weird, with excessively rounded shoulders and ridiculously large, always open hands.

Now, my overall enjoyment of the game was probably hampered by the fact that I’m not particularly great a puzzle games, but I can still have fun with them.  There’s a lot of reading to be done in Darkness Within, and that’s fine – I have no problem with reading.  It’s just what you do with that knowledge is frustrating.

I found that many of the puzzle solutions were ridiculously obscure and unintuitive, requiring extra steps. There are many examples that I can cite, but the earliest one has you looking at an office that Howard states has been trashed. There’s a picture that’s very crooked, and you know that’s the clue because it’s so obvious.  I want to look at that picture, but I can’t – there’s no option.  Not until you take the pictures of the crime scene and compare them to the scene before you will it click with Howard that the picture is crooked, even though it is clearly askew.  Gah!

See, the game doesn’t require thought just from the player, but from Howard, too.  Of the many, many books that you are presented with, some will require you will underline the passages you think are important. Some of them are obvious, some of them…not so much. You then click on a button to get your character to think about whether or not they are important. If they are, you can add them to your think page for use later. You can combine these clues and pieces evidence together and get Howard to think about what they mean.  It’s just one extra step in solving the puzzle.  You can spend a long time marking up books for no good reason whatsoever, as Howard will simply say “doesn’t ring a bell.” to anything that he…um…doesn’t recognize.

Something that definitely stood out positively about the game was its soundtrack. It lent the environments a creepy aura in a game that would have otherwise put me to sleep. Voice-work, when Howard was simply speaking, was good, but there wasn’t a whole lot of enthusiasm or anguish or anything in Howard. His screams were half-hearted, his anguish was not present.  He sounded more like he was pissed off at a video game than being tortured by restless sleep and vivid hallucinations.  I can’t stress how much this game needed that sound, because otherwise, you wouldn’t even know that this was a horror game at all, despite it billing itself as such. Sure, there is some slightly creepy imagery here and there, but it’s notably tame otherwise.

Arguably the best part of the entire game were the nightmares.  No, the game didn’t cause me to lose any sleep, but Howard does slowly and predictably go mad, in true Lovecraftian fashion.  He will wake up in his apartment and find a cockroach in the bathroom cupboard, someone knocking at the door that isn’t really there, other hallucinations, or a hallway that just leads into darkness with strange sounds coming from it.

The best part of the nightmares was looking into a crack in the wall into Howard’s apartment, as Howard, and seeing him asleep in bed, with a demon sitting on his chest, looking right at the crack you’re peering in from. as if it knows you’re looking. That’s intense, and the only thing Howard can say to that is that he can’t see what’s happening.

When you wake up, you realize you’ve been asleep for four days. If the entire game had that kind of creep factor, I’d probably have had a few better things to say about it, at least in that regard.

But here we are.  At least it’s under $10.

(5 / 10)

Average

Rely on Horror Review Score Guide