As typical for Aldorlea Games, this is an RPGMaker-built game, but with pronounced survival horror elements: Your party spends the entire game trying to escape a haunted mansion, with no stores, a limited supply of items to acquire, and no inns or other cheap ways to restore HP (though skill points recover during battle, and some skills can heal HP).
The gameplay offers quite a bit of fresh air. You have the usual leveling up by getting experience points from battles, but you can also choose a special upgrade from a selection after defeating a boss, such as increasing a certain stat or increasing a skill to a different tier. The skills themselves are delightfully oddball while also useful. For instance, one does extra damage if the enemy is afraid, and another does a whole onslaught of hits to randomly selected foes.
Oh, and you have a whopping six party members. I've played dozens of RPGs over the years, but this is the first time I've seen that outside of a Tactical RPG. You'd expect having that many party members would make the battles too slow or too easy, or both, but the design avoids both those pitfalls. As many as your party members are, enemy parties at times outnumber them, and they can throw out plenty of hits. Once all commands are entered, combat animations play out so rapidly that it can actually be hard to follow what's going on. If you like being able to keep track of every move in a turn-based RPG, that may be a problem, but it certainly keeps the pace of battles nice and fast.
There are two difficulty modes, Illusion and Terror. Illusion is a bit easy once you figure out the game mechanics, but even then it's not so easy that you don't have to think about what you're doing. I wanted to try the game on Terror before writing this review, but life is so busy that I can't commit to that in the near future, and assuming there is a significant difference between Illusion and Terror, it's safe to say that this game offers sufficient challenge to those who want some.
In fact, in one sense the challenge is too steep. While the game involves little backtracking, there are a couple parts where it's difficult to figure out where you need to go next. In particular, after beating the spider boss you must return to a previous room, to a specific generic tile, and press the action button - without any hint whatsoever that you're supposed to do this. In fact, the resulting cutscene opens with the party members basically saying "What the heck do we do now?" That's too obscure even for a secret area, much less a required task to progress. And wandering around long corridors, fighting enemies you've since leveled beyond while you search for where to go next outright kills the pacing - a big problem in a horror game.
Which brings us to story and atmospherics. You can already see in the game's trailers that it has strong, distinctive character art and doom-laden music, the latter of which you may recognize as the same stock music used in Aldorlea's earlier Fortress of Hell. In fact, a number of assets are from Fortress of Hell, including the battle pacing, so if you've played that game you'll feel right at home. On the downside, it may be *too* familiar, and the character art could use more images; some party members only have one facial expression.
This is all the more a shame because the characters do have considerable depth. As you wander through the murky halls of the haunted house... or is it a castle?... you're increasingly teased with the characters' relationships and the mystery of the macabre world they've fallen into and why they're seemingly trapped there.
However, without spoiling anything, none of it ever pays off. At all. The ending is frustrating rather than scary, offering neither triumph for the characters you've worked to defend nor the slightest explanation of where they are or who their enemies are. I realize that copping out of any why or wherefore is a commonly accepted foible in the horror genre, but it is a foible nonetheless.
Still, the game has to be given credit for atmosphere. After viewing the disappointing ending, I turned off my computer, brushed my teeth, and strangely started to feel a bit... on edge. As I opened the door to my bedroom, the plastic covering for the suit hanging on the door rustled, and the sound made my insides clench with dread.
Stepping into my bedroom, I seriously considered whether there might be something evil inside my closet. It was a relatively cool night, so I turned the ceiling fan off. I got in bed, pulled the sheets over me... and soon conceded that I had to get back up and turn the ceiling fan back on, because the silence was just terrifying.
I'll leave you with that: Despite some considerable flaws, A Plunge into Darkness offers a spooky, often surrealistic, and haunting experience. Since that is, after all, its advertised selling point, it's worth a buy for those who want a horror RPG.
