This is probably one of the most difficult reviews I’ve had to write. All reviews seem to come with their own difficulties, as you have to omit putting certain key points to paper as they could (and most likely would) contain possible spoilers. What makes The Lost Crown SO difficult to write a review on is that there is so much about the game I am dying to talk about, but can’t – again because they would amount to spoilers. Hopefully I can speak in vague enough terms to provide enough information without spoiling anything and to give you a complete view on the game.

The Lost Crown is Jonathan Boakes latest creation after having successfully developed DarkFall: The Journal and Darkfall II: Lights Out. While the first two games were 1st person adventures, Mr. Boakes has gone with 3rd person in The Lost Crown. I honestly was expecting something on the scale of Scratches and Barrow Hill in terms of size, yet should have gotten a clue from Darkfall 2 that Jonathan tends to think on a much larger scale. I had previously read that the expected playing time for The Lost Crown was somewhere in the neighborhood of 30+ hours and found myself curious as to how he could pull that off without artificially lengthening the game – obscure puzzles, item placement scattered on opposite ends of the game world, etc. The Lost Crown suffered from NONE of these things.

The Lost Crown has you playing the part of Nigel Danvers as you begin the game at a train station located just outside of Saxton in the hopes of eluding your employer – the Hadden Corporation. It becomes pretty apparent that Saxton isn’t quite as calm and idyllic as it would first appear. The town is steeped in tragedy and there might just be a restless spirit or two lurking about in addition to some personalities whose motives are in question…

Screenshots Suck

Yes, it’s true. The screenshots just do not do this game justice. Why? Because they lack movement and nearly every screen in The Lost Crown has some type of movement going on. From birds sailing across the sky, to dust glimmering in the sunlight filtered through windows, to flowers slowly waving in the breeze, to the fog rolling through town. Nearly every screen is alive and a pleasure to view.

The entire game is in black and white, which really adds to the mood. Well, lets say the game is mostly in black and white. Practically every screen has a dash a color thrown in to either add emphasis to key components or to break things up. This works quite well.

One thing that jumps out at the player is that many of the screens are made up of black and white photographs, which could potentially cheapen the feel of the game. While this has been done before with mediocre results, each screen has been dramatically worked over and given various effects to bring them to life. Again, it’s something that the static screenshots just can’t show. For The Lost Crown, I think all the screens have been reworked to great effect. While walking through the streets of Saxton, the mood and graphics reminded me greatly of the movie Village of the Damned.

The special effects in this game are truly rewarding. Ghostly apparitions are extremely haunting and believable. Particle effects have been provided by Matt Clark (aka, Barrow Hill) to greatly enhance the scenes.

What’s that sound?

As can be expected, the voice acting can be a mixed bag. With such a large cast of characters, some voice actors do a better job than others. In the early scenes I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about it.  I’ve never been one to really care much about the quality of the voice acting in games I’m playing unless it was REALLY bad. In the initial screens though, there just seemed to be some awkward pauses where you wouldn’t expect them. However, after that was out of the way, things seemed to settle in and flow nicely.

In addition to there being movement on most screens, you are also greeted with ambient sounds and effects that truly bring each screen to life. The sound editing in this game is second to none and Jonathan Boakes has really done an outstanding job in this department.

Technical Stuff – Check!, So How Was The Game? 

To give it to you in a nutshell, The Lost Crown may actually go down in history as the best horror adventure game ever written.

Seriously.

Ever play a game where you have various ghost hunting tools and really wish you could use them? Most games give you an item that is only used in one place, or like in the case of Delaware St. John, you have the VIC, which is supposed to do all sorts of neat stuff like recording and taking pictures yet you never really use the thing. Well, in The Lost Crown you have a full arsenal of ghost-hunting tools and you get to use them all…a LOT. Not only that, but remember how the screens are all black and white? This makes the use of your tools that much more dramatic because they show you the scenes in 1st person view and in night vision green or via well placed motion cameras in blue with various colors when appropriate. It’s a bit of a wonderful jolt after having your mind settle on mostly grayscale.

The game itself runs the full gambit of emotions - from sadness, to happiness, from laughter to flat out fear. One scene in particular I found disturbingly shocking and well, yeah, disturbing is the right word. REALLY disturbing.

Game size? The Lost Crown truly is HUGE. I was glad to see adventure games starting to move out of the budget price range of $20.00, but even at $29.99, I think The Lost Crown might just be under-priced.  At a time in the game play when most games are winding down to some conclusion, The Lost Crown is not only hitting it’s stride, but the world itself expands out even further to epic proportions. It was with a lot of pleasure that I found the game just kept going and becoming more and more intriguing.

One of the benefits of this is that after such a long amount of time spent on the game, you really start to become attached to the characters.  The characters are also unique enough to make them stand out from one another. Most games in recent years seem to end just as I’m starting to get everyone’s name straight.

As a storyteller, Jonathan Boakes really shines. As I found myself exploring the town and learning about all of the history of the area that was playing into to storyline, I couldn’t help but draw comparisons to the work that Jane Jensen has done with the Gabriel Knight games.  The game gives you bits of information in small doses that slowly weaves itself into an intricate and complex story - a story that holds your interest and builds on it with each new piece of information discovered.

If I had to draw comparisons to movies, I’d say The Lost Crown is part Village of the Damned, part The Wicker Man (The original one), and a heavy dose of Poltergiest. There is so much mystery and suspense in the game that your thoughts will run from one end of the spectrum to the next. I think at one point or another I was suspicious of every person I had run into. The game really keeps you on your toes.

Puzzle/challenge-wise, I’d rank this game right about even and well balanced. I never found myself stuck for more than 10-15 minutes before figuring something out as there is nothing that seemed like a stretch in logic. The majority of puzzles are inventory based although there are two timed puzzles and one sound puzzle in the game. There are plenty of visual clues to the sound puzzle, so don’t let this one worry you. For the timed puzzles, again don’t worry, if you don’t get them you are instantly allowed to try again.

One of the very nice features of the game is that despite it’s huge size and massive amounts of locations, they are all self contained. Don’t expect to have to run from one extreme end of the map to the other just to solve something. For example, at certain parts of the game there might be some crates stacked up on the docks preventing you from being able to get to the other side of the village. This effectively gives you a much smaller area to cover in order to advance. With the game world being so massive, this is a welcome feature that will greatly reduce the number of player frustrations.

With that said, don’t expect to be able to play through the game in an evening or even a weekend. The Lost Crown is a game that if you play for a few hours a day, will take you at least a week or two to complete. For the walkthrough writers, this may very well be the longest walkthrough ever written for an adventure game because again, there is plenty that you have to do to keep the game going. For the most part, the game experience is a busy one.

All Things Must Come to an End

The Lost Crown is truly a remarkable achievement. Sure there are some issues with the game like some parts of the voice acting, some graphical glitches (such as a door being open in the far scene, but when zoomed to an object next to the door it is closed), Nigel seems to glide/moonwalk through the screens, and the most notable being only having 8 save game slots, but despite all of this, much of which really is just nitpicking anyway, there is so much good in the game as to make these shortcomings nothing more than a minor nuisance – well, other than the 8 save game slots.

The most amazing thing about all of this is that it is the work of one person – Jonathan Boakes. While Jonathan put indie adventure gaming on the map by showing just what one person could achieve with Darkfall, The Lost Crown puts him on an entirely different plateau. In one fell swoop he has managed to not only create a game that will be talked about for years to come, but also made the majority of adventure games that have come out in the last few years by teams made up of numerous people almost laughable in comparison. So while Jonathan was on top of the heap in terms of indie developers, he has just elevated himself up into the ranks among the greatest of adventure game developers.

The Lost Crown stands head and shoulders above most of the adventure game offerings that have come our way over the last few years and frankly I was saddened when it finally ended. I have the sneakiest suspicion that I’ve just been hugely spoiled and am going to have to suffer through some withdrawals over here. While there is some room for improvement – mainly on the production side of things - The Lost Crown is as close to perfection as any adventure game I have played in the last few years.

System Requirements:

• DirectX9.0C
• OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows XP(SP2) or Vista.
• GRAPHICS CARD & MONITOR: 128 MB DirectX® 9 Compatible 3D accelerated video card, supporting 32bit (true color) color depth at 1024x768.
• CPU: Pentium(R) 2 or equivalent. (Pentium(R) 4 or equivalent Recommended.)
• CD/DVD-ROM: 16x
• RAM: 512 MB RAM. (1 GB RAM Recommended.)
• Disk Space: 1.2 gigabytes
• Sound: 16-bit DirectX® Compatible
• Input: Mouse and Speakers