Yet another great adventure from Darkling Room!
STORY: 9.5/10
The most important part of any adventure game, and definitely this game's best aspect. The set-up is that you are Nigel Danvers, a pencil-pusher for the mysterious Hadden Corporation who stumbles onto some classified information while browsing the company's website. Before you know it, you have two men (presumably assassins) after you, and you wisely decide to make a break for it. You hop on to the nearest train to God-knows-where, and end up in the haunted town of Saxton.
I'm not about to give anything else away, but the plot is well paced (a bit slow, but it works), with lots of interesting characters and mysteries to solve. This being a horror-themed game about ghost-hunting, there are spooks aplenty, but these aren't your standard white-sheet, jump-out-and-go-boo ghosts. One of the best parts of this game is that the ghosts are characters just like any of the living people you meet in Saxton. Each one was carefully created so that they all have their own backstory and reason for being where they are. There's something very satisfying about how the story behind each ghost Half the fun in this game is discovering the story behind each of the restless spirits.
PUZZLES & GAMEPLAY: 9/10
The other half of the fun is the many challenging puzzles throughout the game, which range from helping a local woman make a stew, to casting a spell to banish evil spirits, and many, many, many things in between. There are a LOT of puzzles in this game, leading to an almost unheard-of (for an adventure game) play time of 20-30 hours. Most of the puzzles are well integrated into the story, (there are a few Myst-like anomalies) and have logical solutions, even if they aren't always obvious. The only problem, which is rather small in the grand scheme of things, is that you often have to exhaust an entire conversation tree with a character in order to progress, which can lead to a few unnecessarily long conversation sequences. On the whole however, the puzzles are difficult enough to keep you interested, but not so obtuse that they detract form the game.
GRAPHICS: 8/10
Technically, the graphics are not very good. The character models are rather low-poly compared to most games. The animations are very slow and tend to "glide", and although you can skip the dragging animation of Nigel walking to the next room, the technical aspect of the graphics could have been greatly improved.
The style, on the other hand, is off the charts. Most of the game is presented in the style of a black and white photograph, with little splashes of color thrown in to emphasize important elements of the environment. The background images are very cool-looking photo composites, touched up so they fit into the game
TO BE COMPLETED (sorry)