The good atmosphere and interesting but cryptic storyline don't quite make up for lackluster gameplay
After the phenomenal game Dark Fall, I was very psyched to play its sequel. Even more so after reading that it was very much like its predecessor: I didn't really expect or want the game to be something completely different. I wanted more of the same: an interesting story, a captivating atmosphere and difficult but logical puzzles.
Did Dark Fall 2 deliver? Let's see.
Well, the story gets good… after a while. In Dark Fall 1 I was hooked almost from the beginning, but in Dark Fall 2 it takes a little longer. You start the game off in 1912 in England as a cartographer sent to do a weird job: map an area that's been already mapped. However, it turns out there's something up with the lighthouse: everybody's telling ghost stories about it, and it's not on the map! How nice, something to map after all. When you get to the lighthouse and start exploring it is basically the best part of the game. The atmosphere is chilling and the story starts unfolding. But it stays very cryptic a very long time. As the game progresses, and you travel to various time periods, the story doesn't get much clearer. This is kind of a problem, especially if you consider that I was playing the Director's Cut, which has changed some things to make the story more easy to understand. In the end, it does kinda pay off, as the villain in this game is very interesting (I won't spoil anything, but it's something very different from the first game). However, the rest is of the story is a bit too cryptic and the ending is VERY disappointing, even more so than in the first game. All you get is a line of monologue, and it's very hard to hear because of all the effects added. I had to look it up on the internet, because not only was it hard to hear also the game does not have subtitles. It feels like they missed out here: the ending could have been much better.
I already touched on the subject of atmosphere, and that part is just as good as in the first game. The feel of every time period (there's 4 in total) is different and that definitely adds something to the game. The lighthouse in 1912 is in my opinion the best part, because it's the scariest. Time travel itself always has an aura of mystery around it, and I really liked the first moment in the game that you figure out something's happened to the timeline: when you find a floppy disk in 1912! Nicely done. It's also nice that you encounter a character from the previous game, albeit almost exclusively through written text and recorded messages. But that's the nature of the game I guess. There's only one problem with the time travelling, or actually two. The first is, as I said in the previous paragraph, that it made an already cryptic storyline even harder to follow. The second problem is that going back to a certain place to check for clues or try out an item takes quite long. In the first game I liked that every location was close by: you could trial-and-error all you wanted without having to travel very far. In this game you do have to travel quite a lot to try something out. Lastly, the attention to detail is once again exquisite. We have to do a fair bit of reading once again, but I don't mind that, it's part of the experience. The locations are also meticulously detailed.
But the part they really did not get right this time around is the puzzles. I really liked them in the first game, but here they are few and far between and the ones that are there seem short and mandatory. The only one I really liked was the big end puzzle. The difficult part of the game this time is endlessly searching for items, clues and pathways you missed, which is… well, kinda boring. For example, finding the cave on the island takes forever, or getting back from the prehistoric age, where you have to find the EXACT same spot where you entered the time period. It's just no fun.
So, in conclusion, the game was a bit of a letdown. Although the story was good (though not as good as the first game) and the atmosphere often spot on, the gameplay was often boring and frustrating. The villain was very good, and felt at the same time very powerful, mysterious, and evil. As the game progresses, you notice ever more things this being has influenced, like the timeline, the lives of very much people living in its area and even the shape of the island itself! But, although it certainly adds something different from the first game, overall this second installment is just not as good as the first one. I recommend it only to fans of the series and people, like myself, who can stomach some dodgy gameplay if the story, characters and atmosphere is decent. But even for those people, they probably won't enjoy it as much as the first game.