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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Dark Dome Studios Released: August 31, 2026 Requirements: OS: Windows 7 or higher Processor: Minimum, 1.6 Ghtz processor Memory: Minimum, 1024 MB RAM Graphics: Integrated Graphics (Intel HD or equivalent) Storage: 100 MB available space
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By flotsam The Girl in the Window Dark Dome Studios Someone told me if I liked the Rusty Lake games, I would enjoy the Dark Dome series. Based on this, the first of nine games released to date, they were right. Strange things are happening in Hidden Town. People have reported seeing a women in the window of a long abandoned house, the scene of an unsolved murder 20 years ago. A young man enters, drawn by something calling from inside the house. The door shuts behind him and the lack of a handle prevents him from leaving. How to get out? There are four rooms in the house, and you point-and-click your way through them. In each room, what you see on screen is what there is, the scene not sliding or moving around. You might though move closer in, to better investigate the bits and pieces in each room. Cupboards, tables and chests for instance, or the items within or upon them. Many will be locked, or need solving in some other way (e.g., rewire that electrical panel) in order to move on. All four rooms are available from the start, but the things you do and learn across them all will be applied back and forth across the game’s conundrums. There are quite a few and all of them are explicable given the clues involved. Assuming of course you can put them together. A hint button can help if needs be. You will gather items, and these will be displayed in a ribbon bottom of screen. Click to try and deploy them in the game world, or on each other. Books you find when clicked will open, and you can then rifle through their pages to see what insights they might reveal. There are no hotspots, so just click on things to see if anything might happen. The simple visual style helps, in that there aren’t huge amounts of detail to have to click on. I liked how it looked, and the sounds are provided by effects and a soundtrack. There is no spoken word, but not much is spoken anyway. ‘Word bubbles’ and some other written material provide relevant information. You can save at will, but only to a single save point. I don’t think it needed anything more. When you finally leave the house, you will have unraveled some secrets from within its walls. I confess I didn’t see the ending coming, and enjoyed the low-key narrative. You will also have been introduced to the Dark Dome world, made up of connected stories about the inhabitants of Hidden Town and the enigmas and secrets involved. A few hours should see you through. At the end of my game, I triggered some Premium Content. I don’t know when this was added, but it involved a new room, additional puzzles and a cutscene that is apparently a prelude to the next game. I look forward to checking it out. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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