I
should start off this review by admitting, in the interest of full
disclosure, that I’ve grown tired of the H.P. Lovecraft-inspired
adventure games of the last several years. Starting with Necronomicon
in 2001, there have been a depressing parade of games that deal directly
or obliquely with the Cthulu mythos. After a while I just find the
themes depressing, dark, grubby, nihilistic, and boring.

That having been said,
Darkness Within is one of the best explorations
of this genre, though it definitely proceeds on its own terms.

This is a first-person
adventure with nodular movement and 360 degree scrolling. From the
very opening of the game, you get the impression of a more lush budget
than we’ve grown accustomed to with adventures these days. Though
not in 3D (will this disappoint anyone?), the pre-rendered graphics
are absolutely superior in quality and create screen after screen
of imagery that’s attractive and fun to explore.

The story takes place a
few years in the future. In classic Lovecraft fashion, the game begins
in an insane asylum, with your character looking back as to how you
got here. Before the men in white coats came for you, you were a detective
on the trail of another detective (the titular Mr. Nolder) who is
now a murder suspect.

From the very beginning
the game has a somewhat dreamlike quality. When queer things happen,
it’s difficult to know if you’re witnessing an actual
phenomenon or simply in the middle of another grand mal hallucination.
Did you really just sleep for four straight days? Why are there no
messages on your machine even though your concerned friends have been
calling you? Is someone meddling with your daily medicine? Why do
you keep waking up in your room after mishaps out in the world? This
is not really a complaint, for Lovecraftian stories always seem to
exist on the edge between nightmare and reality.

Another
aspect of this game that the player will either like or not like,
based on his or her own tastes, is that most of the horrific stuff
is implied. There’s much less frank gore as in the recent Sherlock
Holmes: The Awakened, for example. I generally like
this style of horror storytelling, because I think the unknown is
almost always scarier than the known (with the possible exception
of Star Jones). Throughout your explorations, there’s hint after
hint at a story that you suspect may be much larger than the one you’re
actually in.

The game is a mystery,
and one that requires quite a bit of patience and meticulousness on
the part of the player. Like many adventure games, you come across
a lot of reading material. Unlike many games, however, you REALLY
have to read these documents carefully. In fact, careful analysis
of many documents (in the form of identifying and underlining important
phrases and passages) are a required element of the game’s puzzle
solving. So if you’re a player who sees a 12-page journal in
bad handwriting and tends to think, “Blah blah blah”, and
then move on, you might have a tough time with Darkness
Within.

The game also literally
has an interface designed to help you think about various clues. You
have to drag combinations of clues onto a sort of think pad, and when
you use the right combination, your character will have a mental epiphany
and figure out the next step in the puzzle. The game can be unforgiving
in this regard, because important hotspots will remain inactive until
you have put clues together in this way.

So
if you like the precision detective work of poring over letters and
journals, comparing photographs to actual scenes, combining clues,
and studying obscure symbols, the game can be quite rewarding.

In classic adventure fashion,
as you uncover more clues, more new locations appear on a map, allowing
you to travel to them. You spend a lot of time underground in this
game, as it seems that every place you go has vast subterranean tunnels
and chambers built beneath them. (Who built all these tunnels,
anyway? I always wonder.)

The locations, both above-
and below-ground, are consistently vivid and scary.

The game is a pretty lonely
one, as you have very little interaction with other characters.

The music and the sound
design are effective in augmenting the game’s atmosphere of
dread.

Speaking of scary. I have
to say that there is one sequence in this game that scared the crap
out of me. I can’t remember being this scared staring at a computer
screen since System Shock 2, and that was
a long time ago.

As
absorbing as the puzzle solving and exploration can be, it’s
unfortunate that the plot turns out to be a bit of a shaggy dog story.
Nothing really adds up to anything, and it turns out that the hints
and shadowy trails of story turn out to be not much more than that.
The journey, however, can be fun if the meticulous style of information
parsing doesn’t turn you off.

Turkish developer Zoetrope
seems to have some good ideas, and certainly some good artists. I
think they are a studio to keep an eye on. I would definitely pick
up their next game and see how they develop.

System Requirements:

• System: Pentium III
  1.0 GHz or equivalent
• RAM: 256 MB
• Video Memory: 128 MB
• Hard Drive Space: 1000
  MB

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.