Dark Fall: Lost Souls (PC DVD)

Dark Fall, Lost Souls is the 3rd game in the Dark Fall series by Jonathan Boakes of Darkling Room. It is not necessary to have played the earlier games (The Journal, Lights Out) but I'm sure that once you've played Lost Souls you will want to see what else Darkling Room has to offer.

I cannot praise Lost Souls enough. The graphics, navigation, music, sound effects, gameplay, puzzles - all are of an excellent quality and take 'point and click' adventures on to a whole new level. The game is as creepy as hell and you will definitely find yourself checking behind you as some visual or audio event spooks you out. The gameplay is never dull and the length of the game was just right for me - it took me about 20 hours to complete.

You play in 'first-person' as The Inspector - an ex police inspector who, several years before, investigated the disappearance of a young girl called Amy in the town of Dowerton. She was never found. You are back at Dowerton Railway Station and the Station Hotel, which are now in total disrepair due to them being abandoned shortly after Amy's disappearance. It is bonfire night and fireworks light up the sky above the eerie night-time setting. It soon becomes clear that some bad things have happened here. There are many lost souls - some good, some evil, lurking in the shadows. Some want to harm you but others need your help. You will be transported to times past in order to understand all the events that have taken place and to finally find your own fate. This is no ordinary place though. Jonathan Boakes, the creator, has surpassed himself in creating a world which is familiar enough to make you feel at home, yet weird enough to make it a very unsettling and scary place indeed.

The puzzles are very well done and are of many varied types - inventory based, logic and others - hard enough to make you think without being impossible to complete. The game is gripping right through to the excellent finale.

I recommend it 100%.

My partner and I play quite a lot of these type games, and were looking forward to playing the latest instalment of the Dark Fall series.
However, we both felt rather disappointed by this one in some ways.

Good points: It IS quite scary, and a bit gruesome.
Some of the puzzles are different and interesting.
Travelling back and forth between different time zones is an unusual touch (tho not unlike the second Dark Fall
game in that sense)
If you have played the first Dark Fall game which featured the same hotel, you will recognise certain parts of it
and certain people who you encounter. This does not mean tho that you have to have played the first one for it to have
made sense.

Bad Points: There was a frequent bug which shot the mouse cursor to the left hand side of the screen and there was nothing you could do to fix it except ctrl-alt-del and close the game. This usually happened on full screen puzzle zoomed in screens rather than normal game play screens. This was most annoying and required you to save the game at least every 5 minutes so the next time it happened you don't lose all the work you have already done.
Some of the story line/game play seemed rather disjointed and require frequent referral to a walkthrough, which is not something I like doing. There were quite a few times where we were left wondering what on earth to do next, and after wander aimlessly for a good while and finding nothing new, we were left to look it up, and then to find that the next thing to do was in no way relevant to what we had just done, and would not have been able to come to that conclusion on our own.

Tips: Have a notepad ready, there are lots of clues you need to write down, and diagrams to draw to refer to later.
There are items in your inventory that you will NEVER need to use.
Some puzzles require you to be quick, as there are dark forces in the room that will 'kill' you if you aren't quick enough. You will know when these are because there is adrenalin background music which makes you more nervous when you are doing the puzzle (However, if you do 'die', you go back to the place just before the puzzle again so you can try again, you don't need a save point or anything.)
As before mentioned, SAVE VERY OFTEN! Until such time that there is a patch fix for this bug (as of 21/05/2010, I have scoured the internet, including the game producers website and have found nothing) then it is most frustrating to have to keep reverting back to the save game because you have had to close the program unexpectedly.

The game is definitely worth a play, but I don't feel it up to scratch of the previous 2 games in some ways. The story is great tho, and I was definitely scared quite a few times and sitting on the edge of my seat!

Dark Fall Lost Souls

I have played this extremely exciting and scarey game, it holds you in suspense from beginning to end, in fact I found it so enthralling that I have now completed it for the third time, to me its the best ghost adventure to have been written since the Lost Crown both having been written by Jonathan Boakes (Darkling Room) I hope there will be many more games to come from his pen.