Dark Hope: A Puzzle Adventure

When I was discussing the game with the developer ahead of time, this game was described to me as a Myst-style game. I remember having extremely fond memories of Myst, and I immediately got excited about this one! Myst-style puzzles with a more horror-styled atmosphere? Absolutely sign me up!! Almost as soon as the game started, however, I was bludgeoned over the head with the blunt, crippling fact that solving the puzzles can be challenging. Like, really challenging. Like, if-you-miss-one-little-thing-in-one-little-note-you're-hopelessly-lost-for-a-good-long-while challenging. It was in these moments of unfiltered, almost hopeless moments of being lost that I remember one very important, very crucial facts: [b] [i] I absolutely suck at Myst-style games. [/i] [/b] You can see me slowly have this realization here: https://youtu.be/F0C-ki5FSQE Sure, I love 'em, but oh, man, am I bad at 'em! This game replicates that feeling of Myst so well - from the atmosphere to the audio to the puzzles - and that, unfortunately for me and my unending desire to be able to plow through a game at a breakneck pace just to see all the cool set pieces and locations, translated perfectly into the difficulty surrounding some of the puzzles. This game led me around like an animal. It baited me with just enough cool stuff and spooky atmosphere to get me to dash out of the area I was supposed to be in just before I was about to stumble upon the very thing that would allow me to truly progress the game and leave the room properly. In short, this game played me like a damn fiddle - [b] [i] and I love every second of it~!! [/i] [/b] Sure, I suck at Myst-style games, but I still love playing them! I've mentioned it above quite a few times now, but I really do enjoy the atmosphere and pacing of those games, and [i] Dark Hope [/i] replicates them perfectly! The atmosphere truly teleports you to a new location, one that's darker and mysterious, and combined with the puzzles into something that can truly capture your mind for hours. That's good, because the difficulty of some of the puzzles will definitely have you here for hours! [i] Dark Hope [/i] requires you to pay attention to every possible hint that you come across. Even the most minute details, things that seem like mundane world building, can actually be the keys that unlock the next step in your journey throughout the game. Missing out on even one slip of paper can have you going insane and feeling trapped in the halls of the shadowy facility, helplessly backtracking as your mind races between determination to find the hint you missed and desperation to make sure you aren't being followed by a mysterious, dark figure. As fun as the puzzle-solving and atmosphere are, however, the one place that this game lacks is the pacing of the objects you interact with. The story is paced perfectly for this kind of game, giving you ample time to get lost solving puzzles and figuring things out without slipping completely into the realm of hopeless madness that makes you want to simply give up. The same absolutely cannot be said for things you have to interact with in the universe. Gears, elevators, and trains all seem as though they have the set speed of one mile per hour and they absolutely cannot be bothered to even consider picking up the pace. Spending a lot of time solving puzzles is fantastic, because you have the knowledge that at the end of all the time spent you have that euphoric moment of solving the puzzle, making it all worthwhile. The same feeling does not come around when you've simply been loafing around waiting for something to move in its own sweet time. If there is one criticism I can ask the developers to address, it's this! Overall, however, [i] Dark Hope [/i] provides a beautiful, well-executed, and fun puzzle experience that will satisfy any fan of puzzle games! The spooky atmosphere and at times genuinely unnerving settings, amplified by the use of flickering and on-and-off lighting, creates a truly immersive experience that'll enrapture any player. At $10, and with the amount of time you can spend solving puzzles and exploring in this game, I'd say the game is well worth the price!

If you want a very challenging puzzle game, this is for you. Plan on being stuck for quite some time as you look through papers and hidden secrets. Looking forward to some new content or your next game!

I got this game for a couple of dollars on sale. I was already expecting it to be very unpolished from other reviews but figured it could be an interesting experience anyway. I got stuck, resorted to a guide and then learned that the reason i was stuck was that certain blank notes were supposed to actually contain numbers and clues necessary to progress. Bad graphics, lag, glitchy lighting and occasionally broken audio is possibly tolerable. Being unplayable is not. Don't buy at any price.

Part of this game is played in a "steampunk" version of an R&D laboratory, and part in a futuristic setting. I especially enjoyed the "steampunk" setting and puzzles.

I played for a half an hour and the game seems kind of broken. I apparently randomly solved the bio lab puzzle? All I did was randomly punch numbers, and I came back and the door was open. I got an achievement for shooting lasers when I didn't even turn on the machine that shoots the lasers. I bought this game on a whim because it was $0.99, but you might need to advertise this as early access, it feels kind of broken and I haven't even played that much. It actually seems kind of fun, but when puzzles are solving themselves for no reason, it kind of defeats the purpose of the game.

The game shows promise, and I will be looking for anything that the dev puts out in the future. However, unless you have some god like patience and enjoy doing math/science I don't recommend this game. Even if you do decide to play it, I strongly recommend using a guide. Graphics are okay. They're very, very simple and at points have some amount of charm to them. Nothing special, but they're not so poorly done that you'll be left wondering what something is supposed to be. The environment is done well enough that I wasn't disappointed with it until the very end, where it is drastically changed. Overall they're not good enough to be considered iconic, but not bad enough to be called ugly. The gameplay is mediocre. The game does a really good job of making you feel like there's something dangerous out there, but you are at no time in a position where you need to hide or run from something. Hell, even the strange disembodied shadow that lurks around in one area will completely ignore you, and can't hurt you even if you go out of your way to run into it. Similarly, the occasional anomaly that does happen can be safely ignored as well. The game also has a fair amount of jank to it, from very poor and drawn out animations to a lot of frame skipping. The only good side about the gameplay is that you don't have an incredibly slow walk and run speed. The puzzles are a different story. it feels like every one is made less fun by some feature that could have been easily fixed or removed. Expect a lot of needless backtracking through the same areas for some, waiting for slow animations to finish for others, or just a long period of messing around with puzzles to finally understand what you need to do to beat them. Of note, two puzzles stand out. One is a color puzzle that requires the use of two different spectrometers, and anyone who's never used one would practically be lost without a guide. The second requires you to make several calculations where you convert numbers from base 10 to base 4, and input them into a frankly unusable number system. Why the dev thought that this puzzle was a good idea is a mystery to me. The story is, sadly, largely unimportant and uncompelling. Overall, I don't recommend this game. None of the aspects of it are done well enough or are unique enough to really justify spending time with it. A lot of the puzzles are fun, but there are just as many that are turned into a needless waiting game or leave you wondering what the actual problem to solve is, while others are going to require that you have some formal knowledge with mathematics and science to solve. Exploring the compound wasn't very special either, as a lot of the more interesting parts of it are left both unexplained and unimportant. Honestly, I feel a bit disappointed having looked forwards to this game for some time.

много писать не буду, игра про то, что ты в лабе, с помощью записок и логики, разбираешься что происходило, историю... присутствуют кадры ужасов. мне не зашла.