If you've ever read Lovecraft, you already know this story.
Let's say you're plagued with extraordinary nightmares. The kind where you wake up days later, shaken by visions of specters and demonic rites, and are slowly being driven insane by events beyond your control. How do you think you'd react, especially if you were a cop? Maybe try to get help? Not detective Howard E. Loreid, protagonist in Zoetrope Interactive's Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, one of several issues I experienced while playing through. Based on a haphazard amalgamation of H.P. Lovecraft-inspired locations and themes, Darkness Within tracks Howard's investigation of Loath Nolder, a peculiar murder suspect. In true Lovecraft fashion, expect to plumb the depths of tombs and wells, visit several stuffy New England residences, and slowly link together connections with an ancient evil.
Darkness Within is a slow-paced, methodical, conventional adventure with point-and-click gameplay and lots of cursor scrolling to find objects and curiosities. Though you'll find the occasional unnecessarily convoluted puzzle, such as a tedious sequence of prepping a paintbrush to further your investigative efforts, much of the puzzle solving is done in Howard's brain.
At nearly every location you'll find books which Howard, being an investigator, must read to fill in bits of local history and illuminate the relationships of the characters involved. While reading in adventure games is absolutely fine, and something I personally enjoy, the mechanic through which you pull thoughts and facts from the text is rather frustrating. As you read, you're given the opportunity to underline sections of the text. If you've tagged the right spot, Howard "learns" the information and writes it in a journal. Often you'll have to piece together these bits of thought by placing them in UI slots and hitting a button to combine them. If they mesh, they'll form a new thought and the way forward is made more obvious.
Thought combinations seemed to be equal parts sensible and trial-and-error, but the real frustration was simply that as a player, you've often figured out what you need to do long before Howard does. You'll be staring at a marked map, knowing you have to go to a specific location, but the option to travel won't be available simply because you haven't underlined the correct passage yet. Zeotrope included a few options to make procuring the right thoughts easier, including a clue counter showing how many can be discovered, and an option to auto-scan pages instead of manually underlining, but the whole system seemed unnecessary. Also unwarranted are the often ill-conceived collection requirements, where you can't actually pick an item up until you've discovered something else. In one section, you can't pick up a flashlight until you've discovered a secret passage and encountered a dark area. You wind up backtracking and, in some cases, might not realize the item or note you passed over before could only be acquired later on. The prevailing notion in adventure games is if you can use an item, immediately or in the future, you can pick it up and add it to your inventory. Darkness Within plays with that convention, producing muddled, confusing results.
As mysterious earthquakes, secret meetings, and strange chemical mixtures are dealt with, Howard seems to have an amazing tolerance for all things demonic and supernatural. His most common expression uttered during supernatural encounters is "what was that?", his most common solution being to run away and go sleep. Like in most Lovecraft or Lovecraft-inspired stories, the protagonist gradually parts with sanity as more of the mystery is uncovered. The motivation for Howard, however, isn't really developed beyond a simple curiosity. In his stories, Lovecraft always made a point of focusing on the process of logical disintegration, describing how curiosity leads to fascination and eventually inescapable obsession. Howard merely bounces between locations, reading books, and reacting to demonic encounters by simply walking out and closing the door behind him.
He also has a cell phone, which must periodically be used to contact Arthur, an associate. Shortly after the adventure's beginning Howard is told to take it easy for a while, yet he continuously harasses Arthur for help with analyzing substances and such. Arthur barely shows any interest at all, instead politely inquiring if everything is all right. It's just odd that Howard has absolutely nobody checking on him, and that he's continually surprised by horrific occurrences when they're exactly what he sets out to find. The game needed to go further into the reasons why Howard was so obsessed, make him seem like more of a person than a dolt who, after reading a few books and having a bad dream, is suddenly willing to risk life and sanity for nebulous purposes. You could argue he's merely following his professional instinct, but given the nature of some of the circumstances it's hard to believe anyone would willingly proceed, especially when they're off duty, as Howard is.
Yet for all the tedium of making sure I had all the clues, testing thought combinations, and traveling from mundane location to mundane location in Howard's modest automobile, I still felt drawn in by atmosphere. Howard isn't much of a character, but there's something about the elaborately carved wooden panels in the New England homes' walls, shelves of ancient, forbidden tomes crammed in amongst sinister alembics and guttering candles, and the periodic unsettling sculpture or idol that set me on edge. I wouldn't call anything about the experience gripping or terrifying, but there were a few tense moments where I found myself to be simultaneously apprehensive and curious about what might lurk in a well's secret passage, or beyond a puzzle door in a cult's vault lined with stone lizard men. I know it's all cliché Lovecraft, but I enjoyed what was there as far as mood is concerned.
If you have picked up a copy already, we should mention there's a game-stopping but fixable bug that occurs when trying to underline the clue that uncovers the location of the cemetery. I was playing in 1280 x 800, which apparently caused the text in the book I was examining to shift and prevented the clue from being discovered. Switching to 1280 x 1024 resolved the issue.
Closing Comments
This isn't a novel story, but Howard Loreid's descent into Lovecraftian insanity can be entertaining if you can put up with sloppy puzzles and a slow, deliberate pacing. There's also the question of your tolerance of production values. We all know graphics shouldn't affect how enjoyable a game turns out to be, but there's no denying the visuals here, even for a low-budget adventure game, are particularly poor. The sound, as sparse as it is, actually works well, occasionally fostering mood, and Zoetrope included some blurred vision and breathing effects in some sequences to try and generate tension. Though you may be caught up in the ambiance at times, the adventure often stagnates, as the majority of the game features Howard traveling to nearby surroundings to snatch notes from other people's books.
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