Dark Fall 2: Lights Out

Great game. Good atmosphere. Play it.

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I was pretty disappointed in this game. So I started out with the Darkling Room games by playing The Lost Crown, and the rich atmosphere captivated me. I'm still thinking about it here and there, despite its issues - so much so, in fact, that when I saw Dark Fall 1 and 2 were on sale for the Lovecraft Fest, I figured I would give them a shot, because why not? Dark Fall 1 was unbelievably spellbinding, to the point that I still haven't figured out how to phrase my praise of it in a review. I absolutely adored it and wished it was three times longer. Dark Fall 2, on the other hand......well, I can see where things started to go wrong. So much of the mistakes repeated tenfold in The Lost Crown are here: the repetitive voiced dialogue, the same sound effects repeated constantly, the overlong dwelling on moments obviously meant to be impactful, the complicated plot aspects that come out to nothing or feel strangely cliched, and Hadden. Good old Hadden. I know my view obviously differs from the creator's, but I play these games for the spooky scary Lovecraft/M.R. James stuff, not Hadden. Hadden is probably the least interesting aspect of the entire series, for crying out loud. It's a perfect example of my point that they went from making a couple of gadgets in 1 to increasingly lurking in the background in 2, to the point where if you see something modernistic you know you'll either find a document saying "this was helpfully provided by Hadden :)" or just their logo plastered on it, and it brings me out of the environmental immersion every time. In terms of immersion, I found it hard to hang on once the game left 1912. There were bits and pieces of interesting moods here and there, but it went to places I did not want to bother visiting. You know something's wrong when you find the endgame puzzle and just look up the solution in a walkthrough to get to the ending faster (and it didn't play out right because I didn't have Quicktime installed, but I didn't even mind). It's almost as if everything that made Dark Fall 1 great was viewed as some sort of liability or flaw. I loved that game for its thick, suffocating historical atmosphere - and the creator obviously loves creepy history too, so why pivot abruptly and bizarrely away from that in the first place? The only thing 2 has in common with 1 is its title, and even that doesn't really work because 2 is essentially [spoiler]a Star Trek episode.[/spoiler] It wasn't impossible to play or even particularly frustrating to me in its controls, but I absolutely can see the beginnings of what The Lost Crown continued to develop to the point of frustration. If you didn't mind that, you may enjoy this. But I honestly really didn't.