Dark Fall 2:
Lights Out
Dark Fall 2: Lights Out is the
second game from independent developer Jonathan Boakes. The story in
Lights Out was inspired by events described in the poem "Ballad of
Flannan Isle" by Wilfred Gibson, wherein three lighthouse keepers
mysteriously vanish without a trace. The Adventure Company's
original box design for the game had the title "Dark Fall: Lights
Out," but the final design says "Lights Out" and in much smaller
letters, "Prepare For What Happens After Dark Fall." I'll be
referring to the game as "Lights Out" for the rest of this review,
though outside of North America it may be published as "Dark Fall 2"
or "Dark Fall: Lights Out."
The year is 1912 and your
character, Benjamin Parker, has accepted a job mapping the coastline
near the harbor town of Trewarthan. Initially he feels the work is
beneath him, until he notices that for some reason the lighthouse on
Fetch Rock has not appeared on any previous maps. For reasons he
won't explain, Parker's employer, Robert Demarion refuses to discuss
the lighthouse. The mystery deepens as the lighthouse mysteriously
stays dark the following night, despite the thick fog that has
descended. Where are the lighthouse keepers and why haven't they
tended the light? Demarion summons Parker and sends him to
investigate. In the course of unraveling the mystery, Parker finds
himself exploring the lighthouse and surrounding area in four
different time periods. He is haunted both by whispers that beckon
him forward and by ghostlike apparitions that warn him to get out
while he still can.
The stories of Lights Out and the
earlier Dark Fall: The Journal are not directly connected. One of
the characters from the earlier game, Polly White the ghost hunter,
makes a brief appearance. But it is not necessary to play the first
game before enjoying the second.
Puzzles
Puzzles consist mainly of finding
evidence of what might have happened at the lighthouse and
discovering the means to get into boxes, cabinets, locked rooms, and
other places you haven't explored yet. Some clues are well hidden
and you must go through several steps in order to gain access to
them. Sometimes you must search for symbols or designs that are
scattered around various unlikely places. Artistic skills are
helpful or you may want to make a save whenever you find a
likely-looking symbol so you can go back to refer to it when
necessary.
There is quite a bit of what many
would consider pixel hunting, both in searching screens for clues
and in locating movement cursors. This adds considerably to the
difficulty of the game. You can miss important clues if you miss
seeing a cursor change in some dark corner or other. I definitely
consider Lights Out to be a more difficult game than the previous
Dark Fall, not so much because of the difficulty of the puzzles
themselves as because of the difficulty of locating the clues. Even
without the pixel hunting aspect, the gameworld is much larger and
clues may be found in any of the four time periods. The means by
which you travel from one time period to another suits the
supernatural aspect of the game and offers more puzzling
opportunities because you can't always get back by the same way you
came.
There is also a bit of reading to
be done, some of which fills in the backstory and some of which
contains clues for solving puzzles. Most of the print and
handwriting was not difficult to make out. But there is one location
in the game where you must read small white print against a black
background, and I found it difficult to read because some of the
letters were grey rather than white and appeared blurred or smeared.
Controls
Lights Out is a first person
point-and-click game, with mostly static screens and no panning. The
control system is almost identical to that of the first Dark Fall.
The cursors used for moving around, turning, interacting with
objects, and using inventory are the same. Inventory appears along
the bottom of the screen and is always visible. As with the first
game, you click an inventory item in order it use it, and it will be
used where appropriate. Usually the "action" cursor will indicate
where an inventory object can be used, but I noticed some areas
where no action cursor appeared, such as the area where the glasses
are found. Though movement isn't difficult, it is easy to miss
areas. The cursor to move forward won't necessarily be in the same
part of the screen as in the previous screen. And there are some
areas where the nodes for movement branch at an acute angle and it
is easy to miss one of the branches. So you must be very meticulous
when searching areas for the first time. Just because you can't
access an area from one node of a branch doesn't mean you won't be
able to access it from an adjacent node, and there may be more than
one part of the screen that has a "forward" cursor.
Saving
The save system is very similar
to the previous Dark Fall game, except the words Save, Load, and
Quit are clearly written out at the upper left of the screen instead
of being three circular icons at the upper right. On my Windows 98
system, the default folder for saves is the Lights Out folder
itself, though you can create your own folder to put your saves in.
On my Windows 2000 system, the default folder for saves was the My
Documents folder, but again you can browse around and create a
separate folder for your saves wherever you want them. Whenever I
started the game, I'd have to browse to my save folder to open my
last save, but after that the game would remember where the save
folder was for the rest of the playing session. Saves are small .txt
files and you can make as many of them as you want. When loading a
save, it may not restore you to the exact same spot where you saved,
but it will be very close by.
Options
There aren't any. And in my
opinion the game could certainly have used a subtitles option. In
the first Dark Fall game you could toggle subtitles on or off with
the F1 key, but that didn't work in Lights Out. And there is no
indication in the manual or readme that a subtitles option exists.
There are no volume controls either, though for most of the time
this is not a problem.
Graphics
The graphics are in 32-bit color
and 800x600 resolution. This is an increase in resolution from the
first Dark Fall game, which played at 640x480. So graphics are a bit
more detailed, as you'd expect. The viewing area is slightly smaller
than in the first game, with wider bands at the top and bottom of
the screen. The palette used is very muted, which adds to the
disquieting atmosphere but can make it hard to see things. It's even
more muted and monochromatic than the previous Dark Fall. In many
areas, the colors resemble an old photograph, with everything in
shades of grey or brown. Details of the environment are well
researched and I particularly enjoyed seeing the ancient appliances
and tools that people might have used back in 1912. The reflections
on the glass that you see when you're at the top of the lighthouse
are beautifully rendered and there are many other details that add
realism and character to the game environments.
Animations are used sparingly.
Once in a while I'd notice a window light up with a flash of
lightning. One area had smoke rising from a cooking fire. Some
locations have water animations in areas where you walk near the
ocean or marsh. There are two places where you can cause water
animation yourself, by clicking on the water. It moves differently
depending on where you click on it, which is sort of fun to play
with. One thing that seemed a little strange was that the patches of
fog you see at night would never move. The lack of seeing the fog
slowly drifting along made the visuals appear more static in those
scenes than in other areas where you'd expect things not to move.
Sound
Background sounds were used
effectively. There were some areas where the overall background
sound was silence, with the occasional scuffle, rattle, creak,
crunch, banging, footsteps, or other unexplained noise. When you're
near a machine, you may hear it running. Sometimes you'll hear ocean
sounds if you're walking near the shore. These may be the sound of
waves or the sound of water sloshing and bubbling around piers. When
you're up in the top of the lighthouse, next to the light, you can
hear the wind blowing. When there is a storm outside, you'll hear
occasional thunder in the distance.
There was one area late in the
game which has an annoyingly loud and persistent hum in the
background that caused me to turn the sound off when I couldn't
stand it anymore. I'm not sure if it was supposed to be that loud,
but it was loud with both the computers I played the game on and
they have different sound cards and different versions of Windows.
Although there was a reason for some background hum, I can't imagine
people living in a place where they had to listen to that all day.
Compared to the volume of other background sounds, I think it was
too loud. Not only was it annoying, but It obscured some speech I
was trying to listen to.
Sound effects for actions were
well done and nothing sounded out of place. There was a nice variety
in the sound of footsteps made on different surfaces and they all
sounded realistic. The noises made when you pushed buttons and
operated equipment were also very believable.
Music sounded in certain areas,
though it would usually turn off after a while. Sometimes it was
eerie, sometimes somber and majestic. Different music was chosen for
different locations and time periods. It helped set the mood and was
not intrusive.
Voice acting was very well done.
Jonathan Boakes has some talented voice actors in his acquaintance.
The only real problem I had with the voices was in trying to figure
out what the ghosts were saying. This is why I mentioned the lack of
subtitles earlier. The ghosts spoke in whispers that were often
distorted, with words overlapping one another. Their speech was
often very difficult for me to make out. Although it isn't necessary
to understand what the ghosts are saying to complete the game, it
annoyed me that I might be missing some interesting detail of the
story by not hearing them properly. The worst bit was near the end,
where I was reminded of the problem with understanding the speech at
the end of Riddle of the Sphinx. I really had no idea what was said
until someone sent me a transcript. Before that, I couldn't tell
whether my character was marooned at the end of the game or not.
(The GameBoomers walkthrough for Lights Out now includes the words
to this indecipherable speech.)
Installation
Dark Fall 2 installs completely
to the hard drive. You don't need the CD in the drive after
installing and can put it away for safekeeping. The installer warns
you that there are two very large files that may take a long time to
install and the system may appear to hang. I found three places
where it seemed to hang - at 17%, 23%, and 64%. This happened on
both computers. The game comes on a single CD and there is a lot of
decompressing that has to be done during the installation. The time
it takes to install will vary with your processor speed as well as
the speed of your CD drive. On my PIII 750 it took 25 minutes to
install the game.
Required Specs
(as listed in the game manual and
on the box)
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Pentium III 450 MHz or better
128 MB system RAM (256 MB
recommended)
24x CDROM Drive (or PC DVD Drive)
SVGA graphics card or better with
32-bit color (32-bit color at 800x600)
DirectX 9 compatible sound card
The computers I played it on
Windows 2000 SP2:
Athlon XP 1800+ (about 1533 MHz)
512 MB system RAM
16x/10x/12x/40x Toshiba SD-R1202
combo drive
Matrox G550 graphics card
SBLive Value 4.1
Windows 98SE:
PIII 750 MHz
512 MB system RAM
16x/48x Toshiba SD-M1712 DVD
drive
Geforce 2 TI graphics card
Hercules Fortissimo II sound card
Possible Glitches
Some people, including myself,
have had problems getting the opening and closing videos to work. I
never got them to work properly during the game on the Windows 98
computer. They would start to play and then freeze, either on a
black screen or on a still image from the video. Then a few seconds
later the game would proceed without showing the rest of the video.
With the Windows 2000 computer the opening video would sometimes
work and sometimes not. Either it would work perfectly or it would
skip entirely. The videos are mpg files and can be viewed outside of
the game if this happens.
One glitch that has been
reported, which I did not experience myself, has to do with the
disappearance of a certain inventory item if you pick it up and then
go back to a previous save without saving after getting the item.
Apparently this does not always happen, but it's a possibility. The
item is not necessary to finish the game. But if you want it and
didn't get to pick it up, you can edit your saved game using Notepad
or another text editor. Just change the listing in the save file
from invfloppy2off to invfloppy2on and save the change and the item
should be in your inventory next time you start the game and open
the save.
My computers both had their
refresh rates changed to 60 Hz when I exited the game. Apparently
this doesn't happen on all systems, but you might want to check what
your refresh rate is after playing if you're prone to headaches at
60 Hz.
Additional Comments
If you enjoyed the first Dark
Fall game, you'll probably enjoy Lights Out as well. The first part
of the game, where you're exploring the harbor and lighthouse in
1912, is definitely the scariest, in my opinion. I didn't find the
other time periods to be as scary, with the exception of some goings
on in a haunted diorama in a non-1912 time period, which is fun if
you happen to notice it. Unfortunately once I discovered the nature
of the second Dark Fall, there wasn't any real suspense left for me
for the rest of the game. All that remained was to solve the
puzzles. This was a bit of a letdown from the first Dark Fall game,
which managed to maintain its suspense and scary atmosphere until
the end. Of course this is only my impression of it and others may
have a different reaction. Lights Out is excellent in the detail of
its environment. There are many things to look at and interact with.
When you explore a person's room or living quarters you get a real
feel for the type of person they were. You can see pictures of their
friends and family, read their correspondence, see what kind of
hobbies they had, and wonder at their choice of reading material and
cheerless taste in art. Every once in a while I stopped to think
about how a real person from 1912 would have reacted to the
situation my character was in, especially after he suddenly found
himself in a completely different time period surrounded by objects
that would have been totally alien to him.
Recommendations
Recommended for fans of the first
Dark Fall game and anyone who enjoys exploring a spooky and
atmospheric gameworld in first person point-and-click style.
Overall Grade B+
design copyright ©
2004
GameBoomers
Group
