Well, I seem to be in a “trapped in a pyramid” scheme. First
Secrets of the Luxor and now Nightfall (Ed note: Hmm … and now
she’s inquiring about reviewing Riddle of the Sphinx. I think Darcy has
a pyramid fixation). Both games, however, are wildly different.

The closest
thing I can liken Nightfall to would be the wonderful and popular Mac shareware
game Giza, which I admit to putting in more than a few hours on. The graphics
of Nightfall, however, are much more highly advanced than Giza’s (of
course–this isn’t shareware, it’s a full-course meal).

Nightfall begins
in a Egyptian tomb and plays in Realtime 3D. You are an Egyptologist who has sneaked
into the tomb only to be trapped by loose rocks; now you must explore deeper and
deeper into the pyramid to find your way out. You are pulled forward and given
clues through scraps of messages left by a previous archeologist. The story is
pleasant but minimal, always a favorite with me–I puff up and explode if confronted
with too many details to track. It’s based on a legitimate Egyptian legend, which
offers an air of authenticity to the story, which gets a B.

One of
the most interesting things about Nightfall is the gameplay itself. This
has to be one of the most highly original adventure games to make it out of the
“hey, wouldn’t it be cool to …” stage in a long time.

Let
me try to explain this without giving away any of the puzzles. You must do certain
specific activities in a sequence in order to complete the game and get through
all the levels, but this is done in a very subtle and original manner. In other
words, you must use your head and pay attention to your environment to spot what
the puzzles are and where the puzzles are located. Still with me?

Gameplay
also uses an unusual and highly innovative (for an adventure game) mapping system
of which I’ve only seen the likes in such action/shooter games as Pathways
into Darkness. The maps only show as far as you’ve traveled and are extremely
necessary to get through the game (in my personal experience). Also, the game
is written in a series of levels, something unheard of in adventure gaming, and
gameplay from the combo of mouse and keyboard to the levels and degree of exploration
needed and mapping system is built like one of the myriad levels-based shooters
out on the market now.

I don’t know about you, but shooters have always
been very disconcerting to me. I always want to walk around and explore and look
at all the rooms and the stuff, and I am always taken aback to be accosted by
a warrior/mutant/soldier/giant bug with a big fat gun, and I invariably pause
too long and get shot and killed. Then, of course, I have to go back and do everything
I’ve just done and remember to shoot him first, etc., ad nauseam. (Of course I
was the kid that was always chosen last in gym class because I would invariably
duck when the ball came at me.)

For this reason and no other you should
go out and try Nightfall. You get all the best elements of the shooters
you’ve seen great screenshots of but couldn’t stand playing, rolled into an adventure
sandwich. The incomparable freedom of movement makes Nightfall the most
innovative adventure game to hit the Mac in a good long time. Gameplay gets
a well-deserved A.

Now, in the interest of fairness, what I didn’t care
for: there are 14 levels. I felt that after about the fourth or fifth level, these
became a bit redundant as all were very similar, at least until the last few,
where they did begin to change in their style. The look is of a very realistic
tomb. There are no flashy colors here; the game is designed to be a very accurate
depiction of the inside of a pyramid, and it does pull this off. But I am a lover
of the flashy in-your-face neon surrealism of Shivers 1 and 2 and
their ilk, so I give the graphics a B–flawless execution, but not my cup
of tea.

Ambient and well-designed music is prevalent at each level and thoroughly
enjoyable. The sound effects are great, but they could be louder and in greater
quantity. Music and sound receive an A-.

Puzzles are clever, some
easy, some more difficult, running the gamut, but I found they began to get old
in some instances as, after a while, there were the same or similar puzzles on
different levels. Puzzles requiring inventory became tedious, as the inventory
only stores one item at a time, causing long trips back and forth to get items
moved around. The puzzles were designed specially for 3D, a pretty whiz-bang feat.
Puzzles get a B.

Nightfall was designed using a first-person
engine, and it was designed from scratch, a feat involving writing two million
lines of code, which should get an A even though we don’t give scores for programming!

Altor, the publisher, has accommodatingly packaged Nightfall with
saves for levels 2 through 13, which makes it possible to play levels in any order
(pretty unheard of for adventure gaming), as well as editing tools and some source
code, including code for AI, 2D, and a bit of 3D for the public to use at their
will.

My overall score is a B+, a bit below a perfect score, just
for what I felt was a redundancy on the design of the levels and some puzzles.

Nightfall
can be ordered directly from the Altor
website for a cost of only $24 in the U.S. and $26 international.

System
Requirements:
100 MHz or faster power Mac (150
MHz and up recommended)
640×480 screen in thousands of colors
System 7.5.3
or better (8.1 recommended)
9 MB or more free RAM
3 MB of free hard disk
space
4x CD-ROM drive