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I finally got around to playing the demo for Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder and my first thought was “Myst clone.” Not in the pejorative sense, rather I was referencing the “first person, point-and-click on a series of slides type” presentation. This interested me, because I’ve recently played BioShock and The Orange Box and the term “Doom clone” never occurred to me.
“Doom clone” was a common way to describe FPSs after Doom’s success, but along the way FPSs gained widespread appreciation, while the first-person-point-and-clicker adventure game has been relegated to the back of your big box store’s games section near PopCap’s commercial releases. Of course, the reason why FPSs are no longer “Doom clones” is because they’ve incorporated adventure game mainstays such as interesting characters, detailed plot, interesting puzzles, and the acquisition and use of inventory to solve aforementioned puzzles.
Curious, I e-mailed Cyan Worlds’ Ryan Miller and asked him, “If Myst were being made today would they still use the slideshow presentation?” His answer, “I’m sure if Myst we’re being made today, we would use a 3D engine, but who knows if it would be nearly as successful - definitely a different time.”
Back to the demo. Darkness Within is billed as having a Lovecraftian vogue which is enough to peak my interest. The demo begins with a quote from HPL and then the player finds himself in a tower room which is filled with all kinds of stuff. Basically, it’s the type of room one finds in an adventure game, but (disappointingly) never in real life. There are paintings, drawers, scattered notes, a telescope, various thingies, and an impressive lens flare. Wherever you stand in the game, you can swing the mouse around for a full 360-degree panorama. The lens flare from the sunlight streaming in the window is something I’ve never seen in an adventure game — or in real life, for that matter.
I find a chest with a three digit combination and am relieved when 6-6-6 didn’t work. I find letters like someone might find in a Lovecraft-themed adventure game–breathlessly scribbled notes in a computer font mentioning strange occurrences and a speedy trip to Africa and Oceania. These were from Loath Nolder, whom I believe I am pursuing. As an aside, having never met anyone named Loath Nolder, I have to assume it’s an anagram for Tool Handler.
Finding the combination seems to be the first thing to do, so I trek down a ladder, down a spiral staircase (filled with dust motes), to a hallway which has a chest of drawers. Rifling through the drawers I find a combination and click back to the tower room, but not before encountering a sinster gust of wind. This nice touch leads me to discover a draft coming through the flooring, but more on that later. Inside the chest I find a map, which brings me to the inventory system.
Inventory appears as a toolbar along the top of the screen. At the right end are a magnifying glass icon and a brain icon. The magnifying glass is used for a close examination of an item you have. The brain was not available in the demo. Examining an item shouldn’t require as much clicking, but it’s a servicable system.
Back down the ladder, back down the tower, past the hallway, I come to the front entranceway. The most remarkable thing here is a scary lifelike statue of an African native wearing a shrunken skull necklace. It’s the type of foreboding accessorizing one finds in horror adventure games. There is little else to do here so I go back up to the drafty hallway.
Okay, knock on floorboards, find the hollow one, slide the drawers over, pull the rug back, open the trap door, head down ladder.
Continue heading down ladder.
Still heading down ladder.
At the bottom, and lo and behold, there’s a brass lantern and a dead rat. I try to pick up the brass lantern, the adventurer’s friend, but cannot add it to my inventory. I can get a close-up of the dead rat and confirm that it is, indeed, a dead rat.
I walk down a hallway, which soon becomes torchlit, and find an underground temple with statues of stone alligator people worshipping a giant headless idol. Apparently, I’ve also caught pneumonia, because my character won’t stop coughing. Other than coughing, my character isn’t reacting to the fact that he’s in a pit of ancient evil. Cue the weird music.
At this point, music has been ambient, but now it’s intrusive and one track sounds like a guy in a recording studio who’s been asked to make scary noises.
Okay, more exploring and I find a side tunnel blocked my a metal door. There’s a round spot on the door which probably houses the three broken seal parts I’ve been lugging around (I found them upstairs, but I’m not telling you where). I also have a metal spirally thing which looks vaguely like the Yellow Sign. I’m told that I picked this up inside the palaquin. I don’t know what a palaquin is, but I know I haven’t opened one up. At this point, I decided to have a scotch-and-soda.
I look around some more and find the palaquin, which is a large box with a metal spirally thing inside. I add metal spirally thing to my inventory creating a paradox. Back to the metal door and I do the seal puzzle, using the metal spirally thing, and the door opens to a dark hallway. Of course they wouldn’t let me take the brass lantern and the only flashlight I found upstairs was too muddy. So I backtrack through this evil temple place, go back up the long ladder, and suddenly the muddy flashlight is fine for me to pick up.
Back to the dark hallway, where I’m impressed by the flashlight effect– it follows the mouse cursor and looks very realistic. Then I come to the demo’s end where I have a haunting vision and am menaced by something that looks doughy in a sequence that recalls a filmstrip.