This game is something special. It really does feel at times like you are playing a book, not a movie.
But it's only when you finish this and begin the game proper that things take off. You start out with no weapon, and little clue as to what to do. It's only buy investigating and talking to people that the game begins to open up. It doesn't take long before you begin to piece together suspicions of the true horror you are uncovering. I found all of this to be great fun – it's immersive and it also stretches your brain muscles rather than your finger muscles. You'll talk to people, arrange meetings and pick up clues from locked rooms and desk drawers.
But then, for me, it all seems to go wrong. Perhaps all this stems from my own ineptitude at 1st person shooters (I have no sense of direction in these things and always get lost for example) but the action sequences are far too hard. The first major action sequence is a daring escape from your hotel room over the town's rooftops and alleyways from a mob of town's people. The problem is, there only seems to be one proper way of completing it. Fail to perform one of the required actions and its curtains. Hang around a little too much when locating a ladder and, once more its curtains for your character. In 8-Bit platform games we had frustrating pixel-perfect jumping. In Dark Corners of the Earth, we have frustrating time-critical hoops to jump through.
Moving on from this escape I found the stealth sections far too hard, and very frustrating. I'd been enjoying the game enormously until these appeared. I accept that these sections add atmosphere to the over all ambiance of the game, but they turn what I found was a fresh, new take on the 1st person genre into the more predictable and generic. In short it sort of drags down what was special into something normal.
Normal cannot be used to describe the graphics though. They are superb – full of atmosphere and neat little touches (such as the rain on the screen in the opening). They may be a little too dark at times, but I'm sure this is just to enhance atmosphere. Also, far from normal is the fact no displays are present. You can see your hands at various times, but that's it. No indication of health (apart from heavy breathing, blood on the screen and controller rumble), no indication of how much ammo you have left, and no indication of equipment picked up. Surprisingly, this works well. I say surprisingly because other games had attempted this before Dark Corners of the Earth, and failed.
Finally, I must mention the insanity effects. Anyone familiar with the Call of Cthulhu table-top RPG will know sanity (and insanity) is important, and the same is true in this videogame. See to many disturbing images, and your sanity begins to crumble. This may result in double-vision, rooms and buildings swaying and waving, or simply your character rambling away to himself as you carry on playing. These are wonderful and again serve to enhance the atmosphere.
All-in-all, Dark Corners of the Earth is an excellent game, which really does push the Xbox sytem to its limits. I find the later reliance on arcade style skills to be frustrating, but I'm sure many more people will continue to enjoy the game well beyond this point.