Dark Fall 2: Lights Out

If you liked the ghosthunting gadgets in The Lost Crown, this game is for you. On the whole, my favorite of the three Dark Fall games. Not as polished and gory as Lost Souls, but more immersive and refined.

Very boring game. 99% of the game is just zooming in on things, and if you haven't zoomed in on the right thing then you can't advance the game. You litterally can't go to an "open" path until you've zoomed in on the right picture. Everything that's written in curvive is hard to read, and annoying. Atmosphere is good. Step down from the first game in most cases.

Really a 3.5. I played this when it first came out and remember thinking it was not as good as DF1. So here I am many years later, replaying it while I replayed DF1 recently. The cursed lighthouse crew story is absorbing. I enjoyed exploring the lighthouse in different times. I admit, sometimes I didn't understand clues I got and had to backtrack to view the information again. I also had some navigation issues when underground as some of the scenery seemed so similar that I got turned around. There are some creepy moments. It is first person view and you are wandering thru a dark lighthouse and often hear footsteps or slight movements that are somewhat unnerving. There are some confusing moments. There are some visual clues that you need towards the end that I had to venture guesses because I couldn't see them very well. I used a walkthru a couple of times because I was at a stand still and had no idea what my next step was. It felt like parts of the story were edited out and I missed things I should have known to move forward. I like Jonathan Boakes' games so I enjoyed this one but it suffered at the end. The end story made some sense but just didn't hit the right spot in me. I think with a tighter more satisfying ending it could have been a 4 star game. I understand that DF: Storm Warning is supposedly under development. That sounds like good news to me!

Overall: It feels much more competently made than the first game, but shares the proble of the resetting puzzles. While it looks and feels better, however, story and puzzles are worse than in Dark Fall. The puzzles: Often, this feels more like a hidden object game than a puzzle game. There are much more screens in this game than in Dark Fall. For example: There were almost no screens for stairs in Dark Fall, here there are several for each set of stairs. This doesn't really add to the game, just increases the clicks you need to go from here to there. At the same time, this is extensively used to hide items, notes or hints in dark corners, in shoes, behind paintings and so on... The puzzles that are there almost all have a completely spelled out solution that you just need to find. The story: It starts strong, gets even more interesting in the middle and the falls flat on its face in the last quater. All in all: I think it's as good/bad as the first one, just with strengths and weaknesses in different places. Worth a play for the atmosphere, but not for the puzzles.

So, first off, I started this having played the first game and not really knowing if I had enjoyed it or not. All these games are rather Myst-like in that you just kind of meander around and stumble upon spooky happenings, but I found Lights Out to be somewhat more immersive and less "what the hell am I doing and where am I supposed to go?" than the first game. That said, I needed a walkthrough just to get the game bloody started. see, you spend a lot of time just clicking anything in the hope that doing so will magically unlock the next stage. First it's getting into a boat, and I can't even FINISH the game because it seems i've missed one "crucial" (read, not at all) pixel that I didn't click and so the stupid game won't allow me to complete it despite having the information I needed all there and plugged in. *headdesk* this sort of nonsense makes of a rather infuriating experience and breaks immersion massively. Having to go back over and over and click everything just to try to progress isn't fun at all, and having to redo every single door opening puzzle every time you want to go back through that door is STUPID and redundant. Gah. I don't like how hard it is to navigate. I kept getting turned around and lost and it was too easy to miss areas due to this. Now that said, I did find the lighthouse quite stunningly creepy. The sound design is excellent and the little spooky elements are quite effective. The plot goes off in a direction I didn't expect either, but I can't say it was a disappointing revelation. Just a weird one. My one problem with it would be the complete lack of explanation for a lot of what's going on, leaving you to simply speculate. I don't mind not having plot spoon fed but I would have loved to know HOW it was doing what it was doing and what precisely it was trying to do and why Parker was so special. That never seemed to be resolved or explained which was a bit unsatisfying. Still, a pretty odd, albeit rather flawed game.