Darkness Within and H.P. Lovecraft go hand in hand in creating a chilling and innovative murder mystery like no other:
After finding the story truely intriguing I started get excited. I played on the easiest mode without the auto-clue finder on and the tutorial mode a' blazing since my adventuring skills are a tad bit on the weak side.
You play as a detective - Howard I believe is the lads name in search of Loath Nolder - a murder suspect thought to be involved in a killing. From the get - go the atmosphere kicks in and I found myself immersed in a wonderful and delightful quest of sloving a crime and chasing this guy who I had no clue where to find let alone say his name correctly. Along the way you find a even deeper mystery than perviously thought and end up having crazy dreams and nightmares because of your endevors with the pursuit of this investigation.
The gameplay involves finding clues mainly by reading articles, diaries, news paper clippings and field notes. You also investigate drawings as well. Here's how it works. Once you find items such as these you make a mental note automatically at least on the easy mode and then combine your thoughts in a seperate interface which I think is not only brillant but innovative for this genre. No where have I ever played a game with this feature present!
The gp concept is your basic point and click interface you've seen so many times where you move from scene to scene with a left click of the mouse and you can pan around 360 degrees to find clues. There are icons indicating where these location are however, you need to look close at certain items to find the item your looking for so keep that in mind when you play.
There are logic puzzles throughout mainly toward the middle and end of the main story but none of them are really hard and after playing "Next Life" previously I found them to be on the easy side but that goes to show you how hard Next Life is when it comes to the timed puzzles. There are none of these present here with the main focus of the difficulty being with mainly finding the clues and combining them in your thought interface to find the answers or to unlock new locations via thinking. You can also underline clues in many of the articles in the game but this can be easy for you if you choose the easiest difficulty settings and turn on the auto-underline setting so that these words and sentences will be underlined for you however, I did not do choose this setting due to the fact that I wanted to find them myself so its your call.
The graphics are some of the most detailed I've seen but about 95% of them take place indoors which is a shame. However, in a detective game like this one has to come to expect great graphics due to all the pixel hunting involved.
The sound in the game is where its strong point lies. You have to have great ambient sound to make this game come alive and be what its suppose to be - a horror - adventure game and there is no let down here neither. Sometimes I got chills up my spine when I heard strange voices or sounds that go "bump" in the night and you will to so get ready to jump a little in this game.
Replay value is quit high this time around which I found surprizing that I only found two out of the five hidden secrets in the game. Also is keeps a tally of other scores such as easter eggs, hiddle clues, story clues and total game points at the end which means "replay" in my book. I do plan to replay this game at least two more times in different ways just to see if I can find the other clues and secrets that are hidden and I believe this needs to be present in more adventure games these days as well so its not a "play it and throw it away or sell on Ebay kind of game" like so many of these titles turn out to be. (Return to Mystery Island is to be another exception to the rule)
Overall, Darkness Within turned out to be a wonderful addition to my collection of adventure titles and a must play if your a avid adventure gamer or a person who likes a good detective murder mystery. Go ahead and treat yourself to a chilling adventure that will keep you glued to your screen with every turn and about six and half hours or more of haunting gameplay!