It wasn’t the image of someone clawing at their own face on the cover that drew me to Darkness Within: In Pursuit Of Loath Nolder, but the three lines written at the bottom claiming inspiration from the works of HP Lovecraft. As with many games before, I installed it half expecting the worst. After all, there have been some terrible games over the years claiming Lovecraftian inspiration, but I was soon pleasantly surprised.
In Darkness Within, you play as Police Detective Howard E Loreid, who is investigating private investigator Loath Nolder and apparently – as is evident from the very beginning, when you wake up in an asylum – going ever-so-slightly insane. The game takes place in 2011; Loath Nolder had just returned from five unaccounted years travelling to ‘strange places’ when he becomes number one suspect in the murder of Clarke Field, a known occultist.
The game is a first-person perspective point-and-click adventure, which can feel a bit stilted in the world of free-roaming role-playing games and shooters, but you do have 360-degree view perspective to give at least the illusion of freedom and the game worlds are beautifully designed.
Graphically, Darkness Within is stunning, with a lot of design detail going into each location you encounter, from Loreid’s rundown apartment building to the cave dwelling of an ancient Mushroom Cult. It’s nice to see adventure titles pushing DirectX 9c graphics as far as they will go.
All of the puzzles you encounter in the game are solved using the detective interface, which is accessed by clicking the right mouse-button. Often this will require you to compare crime scene photographs with what you can see as you revisit the scene. This is achieved by manœuvring to the same position in the room as the photograph was taken, right-clicking to bring up the interface and dragging the crime scene photograph into a special action bar which allows you to compare it with what you are seeing by means of the think/combine icon. This method is both blessing and curse, as sometimes you know where you need to be looking – for instance, behind a painting that has moved slightly from the crime scene photograph – but you can only look there once you have followed the steps mentioned above.
The other frequently used method for puzzle-solving is one I had not come across before in an adventure title and involves underlining passages from texts you find around the place to unlock clues. Most of the texts contain between two and six clues that must be unlocked before you are able to progress with the story (as well as one or two bonus clues, which seem only to serve the purpose of making you feel rather clever). Once you have unlocked the clues from a text, you have to combine them using the interface until you finally unlock the ‘master clue’, which is often a new location to visit or, in one case, a password for obtaining data from a PDA. Although cumbersome at times, on the whole the interface is very well integrated into the game and will be a favourite for any players who have ever fancied themselves as super-sleuths. On this note, it is also possible to pick between one of three difficulty settings, from Standard mode, in which you are spoonfed clues and it’s possible to avoid reading a lot of the texts you encounter, to Senior Detective mode, where nothing is given, requiring the player to read (and often re-read) texts numerous times. Seasoned adventure gamer that I am, I often had to swap from Senior Detective to Detective or Standard mode in order to progress.
Aside from budding detectives this game will appeal to those who, like me, are Lovecraftian lore geeks. The whole story drips with references to the works of HPL; you spend much of your time in the town of Wellsmoth, an obvious allusion to Innsmouth, scene of one of his most celebrated stories. Most of the texts you encounter throughout the game have references to aspects of the Lovecraftian Mythos. For me, a big part of the pleasure in playing was looking out for these references and also the names of characters and places either borrowed from Lovecraft or sounding as if they should have been. You get a sense that the story was written by people who genuinely love his work, and the game is true to the essence of his style of psychological horror; there are no sudden scares, but in parts it has the power to chill the gamer to the core and cause delight in doing so.
One thing that does let the game down a little is the voice acting, which at times is delivered in such a matter-of-fact way as to detract from the story. You wouldn’t expect a man concerned for his own crumbling sanity to discuss it in the tone of voice someone might use in describing how to change a plug. Best sound bite of the game goes to Loreid’s close friend Arthur, who calls the first time you’re committed for observation to the Wellsmoth asylum and opens with: “You’ve had a breakdown mate, you need some rest”, delivered in such a way as to suggest that it was the most normal thing in the world to wake your entire apartment block up in the middle of the night screaming about monsters. The voice acting also makes it very difficult to place the game geographically, as you get the impression from the outset that it is intended to be set in America but everyone you encounter talks with strong RP British accents.
If you like the thought of being a detective and enjoy reading Lovecraft, then Darkness Within is the game for you. It’s not perfect, but I loved it, and was pleased to hear Zoetrope have announced that this is the first of a trilogy. There is no indication that the other two games will draw on HPL, but I for one hope they do.
MORE REVIEWS
Bookmark this post with: