The Stack

OK, so I basically called Gemcraft boring in my last post. And yet I’m still playing it. “Boring” and “compelling” are not always contradictory qualities, but in this case I think it’s because Chasing Shadows is doing a better job than its predecessors of keeping things varied, and of keeping a sense of forward progression. It’s not just that the battles keep getting bigger or that numbers in general are going up (although that’s certainly a factor). It’s that the bigger numbers result in changes in the dominant strategy.

To explain what I mean, I’ll have to describe the details of the game a little more.

Gems come in nine colors, each with a different special ability: blue gems slow down enemies they hit, yellow gems have a chance of doing critical hits, purple gems reduce armor, and so forth. You can combine multiple colors in a single gem for something that does more damage and has all the special abilities of its components, but isn’t as good at them as the pure gems — unless one of the colors is black or white, which are special colors for enhancing other colors. Gems with a black component are called “bloodbound”: they become more powerful with the number of times they hit enemies. Gems with a white component are “poolbound”: they increase in power every time your mana pool levels up by hitting certain exponentially-increasing thresholds of accumulated mana. (In the original Gemcraft, you had to pay large amounts of mana to upgrade your pool. Here, the only cost is opportunity: if you want your pool to gain levels, you have to refrain from spending all that mana while it builds up. This, it turns out, is enough of a cost.)

There are a few things you can do with gems besides putting them in towers. You can drop them as bombs, but this struck me from the very start as a big waste, getting a little temporary damage out of something that could otherwise dish out damage continuously. You can use them to enrage waves, as I mentioned before, although in the early part of the game this struck me as even more counterproductive than exploding them. And you can put them in traps, an alternative to towers that requires monsters to walk over them (more or less). Traps don’t do nearly as much damage as towers, but they’re much more effective at the color abilities.

Now, not every color of gem is available on every level. Most of the early levels have only two or three colors. But you can unlock skills that let you upgrade the effectiveness of specific colors, and any color that’s upgraded will be made available everywhere. This is part of what lets strategies dominate.

The first really effective strategy I found was to fill the pathways with green gems in traps. Green gems are poison: in addition to their normal impact damage, they do damage over time that ignores armor. Putting them in traps not only made them more poisonous, it also solved the big problem with poison gems in towers: that they tend to target the same thing over and over until it dies, at which point the next thing hasn’t taken any poison damage at all. Traps all along a path spread the poison around among everything on that path for maximum efficiency.

After a while, though, this approach can’t keep up with the increasing hit points of the enemies as the number of waves per level keeps going up. I haven’t really analyzed this, but I’m pretty sure that the general monster stats increases exponentially with the wave number — the base of the exponent is close enough to 1 for it to be a long, slow exponential curve, but it’s exponential enough to eventually overwhelm any non-exponential strategy.

My current strategy is powered by orange/white combination gems. The power of orange is mana-leeching: every time an orange gem damages an enemy, it gives you a fixed amount of mana, which increases as you upgrade the gem. I had more or less given up on orange gems early on as wasteful — they’re the least damaging gem type, and they never seemed to make their own cost back at the lower levels. But once I had both orange and white available everywhere, I realized there’s a neat little feedback loop to be exploited. Leveling up your mana pool makes the orange/white gems more effective, which levels up your mana pool faster. Eventually you want to make some gems that specialize in damage rather than leeching, but by that point, you’ll have loads of mana to do it with. The exponential enemies do overwhelm eventually, but I can hold them off for well over a hundred waves this way.

In fact, this is the point where I had enough of a mana surplus that I started experimenting with the things I had earlier dismissed as wasteful, like gem bombs and enraging waves. And it turns out they can be quite effective, once you can afford them.

The big question is: Is this the final dominant strategy that will last me the rest of the game? Or will it fizzle out like the poison paths and force me to discover something new? And I don’t know the answer to that. There’s still an entire difficulty level I haven’t unlocked yet. Maybe when you last to wave 200, the bloodbound gems start being more effective than the poolbound ones.

So, apart from your witnesses and undertales, what have I been playing for the last few months? Time-wasters, mostly. When I feel like I might be yanked away from a game at any moment, I choose ones where that’s no tragedy, either because I have low expectations for the game but just want to try it out to see if it surprises me, or because the game contains so little context that I’ll be able to jump in again without problems after an extended break.

Lately, the game that’s been wasting the largest portion of my time is definitely Gemcraft: Chasing Shadows. It fits mostly in the second category, but also a little in the first: I’ve played enough of the previous three ¹Chasing Shadows is designated “Chapter 2”, but that’s because two of the other games are a “Chapter Zero” and a “Lost Chapter”. Gemcraft games to know pretty much how they work, and I think I’ve gotten bored with each before reaching the end. (I’m not completely sure. I might have finished the first one, but if so, the ending wasn’t very memorable.) I suppose this reaction is partly because they were free online Flash games, distributed via sites like Armor Games and Newgrounds, which made me value them less than Chasing Shadows in my Steam library, even if I did get it as part of a bundle.

The Gemcraft games are tower defenses, a form where individual games are still mainly distinguished by how they innovate on the formula. The original Gemcraft had two chief distinguishing innovations. First, it separated the towers from the weapons installed in those towers. The weapons take the form of enchanted gems in various colors, which can be combined to create more powerful gems. If you upgrade a gem a lot, and then realize that it would be more useful somewhere else, you can simply move it to a different tower, albeit with a delay of several seconds while it “resockets” to discourage you from doing this all the time. I find that this actually isn’t much of a force on me or my decisions during gameplay. It’s a nice convenience, but it fades into the background once you’re used to it.

The other and more interesting chief innovation was that you could earn bonus mana (for buying towers and gems on the current level) and XP (for purchasing permanent upgrades) by releasing waves of enemies early, or even releasing multiple waves at once. This makes it into something of a bidding game, like Bridge: you tell the game how much of a challenge you think you’re capable of handling at the moment, and if you judge right, you reap a reward that makes things easier later.

After three sequels’ worth of complications to the rules, there are now several additional ways to bid. You can sacrifice a gem to “enrage” a pending wave, making the enemies tougher and more numerous, which means you get more mana and XP for defeating them. You can turn up the difficulty for an entire level to get a large XP multiplier. And there’s a whole system of more specific and multi-tiered ways to make levels harder, called “battle traits”. For example, there’s a battle trait that decreases the time between waves, another that increases the number of Swarmling waves and also makes Swarmlings harder to kill, another that makes your earned mana come in lumps at regular intervals instead of continuously. My favorite battle trait gives you a number of “orblets” at your base, which basically function like the power cores in Defense Grid: if a monster manages to carry one offscreen, all mana gains from that point onward are reduced by 10%. New battle traits are awarded over the course of the game, just like new upgrades. Activating multiple battle traits at once seems to be the real secret to gaining XP quickly, especially if you turn up the difficulty level as well, which increases the XP multiplier for each battle trait.

I’ve seen things similar to the battle trait system before. For example, the idols in Bastion are essentially the same thing. But for some reason I was hesitant to use it at all there, whereas here in Gemcraft, I often overbid with it, activating too many traits at once and losing the level. Probably because the game is so repetitive. Once I’ve beat one level, I feel like I can easily beat them all.

And here we are galloping towards a full year since my last post. The chief factor in my silence can be summarized as “work”, and summarized slightly longer as “the worst, most extended crunch period of my entire career”. It wasn’t eleven months long, but it was long enough to completely get me out of the habit of blogging, and habit is the most important thing.

But there’s another factor as well. Last year, I violated the Oath in a completely new way: by purchasing a game on Steam when, according to the Oath, I was not allowed to. It was one of those cases where a game was so zeitgeisty and in-the-moment that I felt like I had to play it in order to keep up with the broader online discussion of games in general. And, having done that once, it was easy to decide to do it again, and again. Now, I’m accustomed to breaking the Oath by posting late. And I know what to do about that: just write the post late and move on. But I wasn’t sure what to do about this new infraction, and that uncertainty has paralyzed me.

These are the games I purchased this way: Her Story, The Beginner’s Guide, Undertale, The Witness ¹Thekla, 2016; not to be confused with Stu Galley’s The Witness (Infocom, 1983). I’ve contemplated pulling the same joke as I did with Portal but I don’t think it supports it as well., and Firewatch. Each worthy of lengthy discussion that I still don’t feel up to. No, if I’m going to make blogging a habit again, I think I’ll have to just blog about whatever I’m playing on any given day — just write the post and move on.

I suppose I should at least say a little about Broken Age. I backed its Kickstarter back when it had no title other than “Double Fine Adventure”, and played the first half during this blog’s hiatus. Act 2 was released about a month ago, and I’ve managed to find the time to complete it.

I recall seeing some grumbling of dissatisfaction from other supporters when the first half was released, but I find the whole thing highly satisfactory. We were promised an old-school point-and-click adventure game, and that’s what we got. The style is gentle and sweet, even when people are being fed to monsters. It’s got the old familiar Tim Schafer sense of humor, somehow zany and wry at the same time, involving absurd situations and people taking them seriously — but somehow, the feel of this humor is changed quite a lot when it’s overlaid on soft and rosy children’s-book-like illustrations. Really good, well-paced 2D animation — sometimes I just sat and watched the character idles. So much good voice acting — there are some big-name actors here, but I felt the best performances came from the minor characters. Basically, a delightful world to be in, except in the few occasions when I got stuck. And even then, there’s a good lot of humorous quips to be gotten from trying wrong things.

The game wasn’t originally planned to be released in two parts, but it’s at least thematic. The whole story is broken in two, with two protagonists that you can switch between freely, like in Maniac Mansion and Day of the Tentacle. Except where Maniac Mansion put all the player characters into the same environment, and Day of the Tentacle put them into disjoint but linked environments where one character’s actions affect another’s situation, Broken Age almost puts them in completely distinct games. It isn’t until the end of Act 1 that the two characters meet, and it isn’t until the ending sequence of Act 2 that you have to control the two characters in tandem to solve puzzles. Before that, the only link between them is at the story level, and even that takes a while to become apparent. At the start they seem to be in completely separate stories.

Opposed stories, even, juxtaposed for contrast. We have two youths, Vella and Shay. Vella lives in one of those ahistorical sort-of-pre-industrial-seeming fantasy worlds with modern attitudes. You’ve got people living on clouds and the occasional talking tree there. Shay lives on a spaceship. Vella is suspicious and argumentative; Shay is naive and easily-manipulated. Vella’s story is full of people — entire families, sometimes — with their own desires and agendas. Shay lives alone, apart from some robots whose entire existence is devoted to him. That’s his base situation: pampered, infantilized, kept safe. Shay’s story starts with scenes of him being showered and his teeth brushed by automated systems, just another day for him; he’s taken to a bridge decorated like a playpen and given a choice of various important-sounding “missions”, which turn out to be fake play scenarios arranged by the doting ship’s computer, or “Mom”. A jab at videogame plots, perhaps, with all their save-the-world bluster? Anyway, this is his life, and he’s extremely bored with it, craving new adventure, just like the player after a few iterations — the whole thing repeats in a cycle until you figure out how to break out of it. Vella, meanwhile, is being rushed against her will into a grotesque parody of a rite of passage. Once every 14 years, her village sacrifices maidens to a monster called Mog Chothra so it will spare everyone else, and nearly everyone other than Vella treats this like a good thing. Not just “It’s good that we have a way to spare the village”, or even “We honor your sacrifice”, but “I can’t wait to be eaten by the monster!” The maidens wear elaborate prom dresses for the occasion, and the ones that don’t get eaten wonder “Is there something wrong with me?” Such is the power of social pressure that Vella goes along with this to an extent (with the result that she winds up spending the rest of the story in her prom dress), but she ultimately escapes, determined to find a way to kill Mog Chothra and bring her society to its senses. So, both stories are about youth rebelling against an authority that’s placing unreasonable expectations on them, but in opposite ways: eternal inconsequential safety in an environment that’s all about you vs demands for complete self-abnegation. Shay rejects this because he doesn’t like his life as it is and wants change; Vella, because she does like her life and doesn’t want to throw it away.

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into spoilers here, so I’ll only describe Act 2 briefly. Act 2 has a theme of unmaskings. The ending of Act 1 is a kind of great unmasking, a peek behind the curtain, but smaller revelations come thick and fast in Act 2, including the true nature of the ship’s computers, the exposure of the guru in the clouds, and the literal unmasking of the deliciously shifty Marek. Marek spends the entirety of Act 1 in a wolf costume, and, given the game’s style and content, it’s reasonable to think he might actually be an anthropomorphic wolf. He admits to being human within Act 1, but it isn’t until Act 2 that we see his face. The biggest revelation, though, is Shay and Vella getting to know each other. Through Act 1, they’re unaware of each others’ existence, and even in Act 2, they can’t interact. They’ve seen each other briefly, exchanged no words. (The extent of their communication was Vella throwing a punch at Shay.) But at the end of Act 1, they swap environments. Vella is now trapped in Shay’s ship, while Shay is in Vella’s world. In both cases, the presence of the other person is unavoidable. Vella is basically snooping around Shay’s house, looking at his old toys and embarrassing childhood photos. Shay is meeting Vella’s family and everyone who was affected by her passing through in Act 1, for good or ill, and they all have things to say about her. Neither of the pair is exactly looking for the other, but it’s clear that the story is preparing them for remeeting.

And what then, after they remeet, at the story’s very end? One of the things that I like the best about this story is that it doesn’t try to force a romance. Oh, there’s room for one. If you play this game and want to imagine Shay and Vella getting married after the credits roll, there’s nothing to contradict that. But I think I’d rather imagine them becoming friends, and the story affords that just as easily. But there is one thing hinting at some sort of deeper connection between the two, and it’s something that’s left mysterious within the game’s content.

Now, I said that the two stories are basically distinct games. The stories sync up at the end of Act 1, with the result that you have to complete both sub-games before either can proceed to Act 2, and a similar thing happens just before the endgame. But for the entirety of Act 1, the game never forces you to switch characters. And some players respond to that by, well, not switching characters. By playing through the entirety of Shay’s story before starting Vella’s or vice versa. I’ve even had conversations more or less like: “I’m giving up on Broken Age. I’m stuck on a puzzle in Vella’s half.” “Maybe you should switch to Shay’s half for a while.” “No, I wanted to finish Vella’s half first before starting Shay’s.” Now, I generally don’t like telling people other than myself that they’re playing a game wrong, but: This is the wrong way to play the game. The links between the two stories are set up to be optimally discovered gradually as you play through them both at the same time; if you play one to the end first, you’ll get a lot of the other half’s foreshadowing as aftshadowing.

In Act 2, though, the author forces the issue. The two characters still can’t affect each other directly, but there’s a puzzle in Shay’s half that can only be solved with information from Vella’s half, and vice versa. Thus, the obstinate player has to switch between characters to solve it without a walkthrough. The mystery comes in when we try to interpret this diegetically. In both cases, the player is acting on knowledge that’s unavailable to the player character, making us ask: I knew what to do, but how did Shay and Vella know? In the endgame, this happens frequently enough to become normal, to the point where the two characters are cooperating on complicated time-sensitive actions without any intercommunication whatever, occasionally saying things like “I have a good feeling about this combination. I don’t know why.” And they trust this good feeling above the advice of the grown-ups who get in their way. And so they should — both have been betrayed by the older generation plenty.

I imagine that there’s been a lot of complaint about this. That the game is breaking its own rules, forgetting to provide character motivations for player actions, and making the player do things that don’t fit into the story. But I personally dig it, because of the implications if it does fit into the story. There’s something special about these kids, something that links them, and the game isn’t telling us what. I mean, obviously you know full well what it is that links them: it’s you, the player. They are linked by the single mind that controls them both. But what are you, within the story? Usually the player is represented by the player character, but if there are two distinct player characters, what are you? Through Act 1, you can pretend that you’re nothing at all — you’re subsumed into Vella and into Shay. But the information-sharing puzzles wake you up, make it clear that you’re something distinct from them both.

OK, last post about Dark Fall: Lost Souls. Time to kill this thing and move onto something else. I finished the game about a week ago, but I’ve been taking about a week to write each post lately. This isn’t really the game’s fault — it’s a perfectly respectable representative of its genre, even if it is a different genre than the first two Dark Fall games.

So let’s talk about the ending, or, what amounts to the same thing, let’s talk about Amy. This gets a little confusing, because it’s not entirely clear where the boundaries are between Amy, the Inspector’s imaginings about Amy, and the Dark Fall.

The backstory presented at the beginning of the game is this: Amy, aged 11, disappeared. The Inspector was for some reason convinced that she was kidnapped by a local vagrant known as “Mr. Bones”, who he arrested. Apparently the Inspector was caught faking evidence against him, which ended both the Inspector’s career and any hope of finding out what really happened to Amy. Some time later, the Inspector seems to have attempted suicide.

Now, Amy appears several times throughout the game, in ghostly form, no older than when she vanished, demanding that the Inspector play childish games with her, then vanishing. Documents from her school days and from the Inspector’s investigation show her as having creepy powers, and befriending dark “angels”. The other ghosts in the hotel fear her, speak of her as the reason they’re trapped in the hotel. This can’t be taken completely literally, because they died decades before Amy was born. The words “Dark Fall” are spoken in reference to her.

Now, there are two ways of taking this. One is that the Dark Fall, which has existed since ancient times, has simply taken Amy’s form, or possessed her. (Can that happen? Can you possess a ghost?) The other is that this is all simply reflective of the Inspector’s mental state. The case of Amy is what brought him personally to his sorry state, so his mind turns her into a being of malevolence and power.

I mentioned how the ritual for freeing a ghost involves placing three significant objects. The Inspector performs something of the sort for either Amy, himself, or Mr. Bones, piecing together three dolls found throughout the game that Amy considers to be her “sisters” and placing them into mock graves that have been prepared for them in a room full of oversized scissors. On the way there, he has a breakdown in which he confesses/realizes that he didn’t just falsify evidence when he couldn’t make a case against Mr. Bones, he actually stabbed him to death. It’s not said what the murder weapon was, but my money’s on scissors.

Unlike the mostly free-roaming first two Dark Fall games, there’s a definite linear progression to Lost Souls, as you gain access to the floors of the hotel one at a time. Early on, you receive a key for room 3F, the last room on the topmost floor. Every ghost has its room, and this one is yours. Inside, with dream logic, it turns out to be the police interrogation room where the Inspector confronted Mr. Bones. Amy shows up, and you get a choice: “I need to go home”, she says, “but someone must stay. You are old and grey, you should stay.” If you refuse, you have one last puzzle to solve, and then wake up in the hospital; if you accept, she disappears, laughing, as you are consumed by darkness.

But why would you accept? In both interpretations of what Amy is, it seems like a bad idea. If she’s a demon, the last thing you want to do is set her free. If she’s just a figment of your unprocessed guilt, leaving her behind is clearly the first step toward healing. So the choice reminds me a bit of the Little Sisters in Bioshock in its obviousness, except that there the obvious choice was to save the little girl, and here it’s just the opposite.

Another repeated pattern in Dark Fall: Lost Souls comes to the fore in the later parts. Or not so much a pattern as a ritual, a multi-stage process for laying ghosts to rest.

It starts with a text message from the mysterious stranger who goes by the name “Echo”, telling you that a new guest has checked into the hotel. After procuring a formerly-absent key from the lobby, you go to their room, where you can move back and forth between 2010 and (a vision of) 1947. The disembodied voice of the person who stayed in that room talks to you while you’re there, commenting on things you examine, in both time periods. (There’s some unfortunately conspicuous reuse of lines.) Ultimately, you have to find three specific items of importance to that person, no more and no less, and put them onto a table or other surface in the present. Now, at this point I’m just doing what the UI lets me. Only certain indicated spots can have items used on them, and only the specific items they require will do anything, so when you find a table that can have items put on it, it’s not hard to find out by experiment out what it’s willing to receive. But if there’s an in-fiction justification for the Inspector knowing what to do, I’ve missed it.

Once the items are in place, you can have an actual conversation with the ghost, in the course of which you will be prompted to remind them of details of their backstory that you learned over the course of snooping around the room. This fits into the theme of recovering memories: you’re giving the ghosts exactly the kind of help that the Inspector himself needs, because they’re all in basically the same position as you. I said before that the whole game seems to be a dream that the Inspector is having in a hospital after a suicide attempt. All the ghosts in the hotel are suicides.

The ghosts are kind of hard to reconcile with the dream business, though. They’re largely the same ghosts as in Dark Fall: The Journal, and there’s information about them here that the Inspector could not possibly have known. For example, one of them was secretly an infamous bank robber known as Sly Fox. In The Journal, you could find her loot stashed under the floorboards. In Lost Souls, it’s still there. As I’ve said about other games, it might be a dream, but it’s clearly not just a dream.

Now, the game is kind of subtle about communicating this, but: helping the ghosts seems to work by actually altering history. It’s like your final conversation after placing the three objects isn’t really with a ghost, but across time, with a living person, who you talk out of suicide. Well, it’s hardly the first time I’ve altered the past in a Dark Fall game. It just usually happens all at once at the game’s end, not piecemeal throughout. It seems likely that the Inspector is headed for the same conclusion, reaching into his own past to prevent his own suicide. Maybe he’ll even talk to himself and fill in his own backstory. We’ll see.

Apart from the hunt-for-hotspots and find-key-to-open-door aspects, which are more like emergent properties than mechanics in themselves, there’s one puzzle type that Dark Fall: Lost Souls uses more than any other: the jigsaw-style assembly minigame. There was a puzzle like this back in Dark Fall: The Journal, but only one. Here in Lost Souls, there’s a torn-up (or cut-up) document of some sort in pretty much every new area you open up.

These documents seldom seem at all pertinent, honestly. There’s a lot of newspaper front-pages and magazine covers, some with scribbles and scrawls on them, like a particular person scratched over in a photograph. But you have to restore them to be arbitrarily allowed to continue with things. The last one I encountered was necessary to get a ghost talking to me, but was it necessary at all? Isn’t this stuff just filler?

Well, mostly, yeah. But I can see some thematic justification for it as a repeated element. Remember that this has turned out to be a game about recovering memories. Piecing together obliterated words and images seems like an apt symbol for that.

What’s more, it dovetails with another repeated image: scissors. I remember a pair of scissors stuck in a wall back in Dark Fall: The Journal. Like so much else that was memorable about that game, Lost Souls turns it up to eleven. Here, the author really wants to club you over the head with symbols, and so fills rooms with them. There’s a room with dozens of pairs of scissors stuck into a bloodstained mattress, and other caches of them besides, sometimes uncomfortably juxtaposed with another repeated image: eyes. You use scissors from that mattress to extract glass eyes wedged into cracks. Your first glimpse of the scissor-mattress room is through a peephole, specifically exposing your eye to the blades in a way that makes the player character express discomfort. Even the main menu is shown on a background consisting of a hallway covered with drawings of eyes, and uses a pair of scissors as the mouse cursor — an uncomfortable UI choice, giving us a pointer with two points!

Scissors combined with eyes yields permanent blindness. This is the game’s threat. But scissors applied to paper produces a loss that can be recovered through diligent effort. This is the game’s promise.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this analysis, though, because in the player’s hands, scissors are more a tool of revelation than obfuscation. You use them to break through barriers, prying up loose floorboards and the like to uncover what the past has concealed. And I’ve recently discovered that you can use them to kill the Gross Things I had been finding, which has a general cleansing effect on the area, removing filth and darkness and opening up new avenues for exploration. But then, the first Gross Thing I encountered turned out to be hinting towards the dire truth, so maybe what I’m really doing there is blinding myself by extending the illusion. But the illusion is the thing I can explore, so I pretty much have to take it.

I’ve hit a point in the game that all but outright tells me that everything I’ve seen so far is a hallucination.

It happens when, for the first time in the entire series, there’s a puzzle with a time limit. The puzzle is a simple matter of repairing a television by rotating some tiles and trying to match colors, but while you do it, you’re menaced by a lurking monster. It’s a sort of distorted human figure that seems to be made mostly of arms, with no head — I didn’t get a very good look at it, though, because its appearance provided extra impetus to pay attention to the tiles instead. This freak of nature materializes briefly, then vanishes, then appears again a little closer, and so forth, until either you back out of the puzzle (which causes it to revert to its starting state), or it gets so close that you wake up in terror. And the time limit is short enough to basically guarantee that the latter will happen at least once before you solve it.

The waking up doesn’t last long, and you just wind up back outside the room with the monster afterwards. You first get a confused jumble of images flashing by — the same images that I had seen when I tried to touch the gross thing in the bathroom sink. They showed two items that are in your inventory from the beginning, a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka. I hadn’t really processed what they were trying to tell me at the time, but now, it’s all followed by opening your eyes to the hospital operating table lights above you and hearing alarmed doctor-like shouts of “We’re losing him!” and such. And now it seems clear that the player character, the still-nameless Inspector, attempted suicide shortly before the start of the game.

It all seems very Silent Hill 2 all of the sudden — particularly considering that this revelation is preceded by finding a television in a hotel room. I need to be interpreting what I see as symbols of the Inspector’s mental state rather than taking them at face value. And yet I still need to think in terms of literal, physical puzzles: unlocking doors, repairing machines, etc. It seems to me that this emphasis on the practical is part of what makes the suppressed-knowledge theme work as well as it does. I spend most of my time methodically searching rooms for hotspots and loose items, my mind far from the backstory that the Inspector is trying to not think about. The pills and vodka are right there in front of me every time I open my inventory, but as long as I’m thinking in terms of how I can use things, I won’t be wondering why they’re there.

I’ve described some of the mechanical differences between Dark Fall: Lost Souls and its two predecessors, but the tonal differences are even more striking. The second game was set in a different place and time than the first, and veered into sci-fi where the first stayed firmly supernatural, but nonetheless the two games had pretty much the same feel: the feel of the lonely Mystlike, augmented by glimpses of the uncanny. The feel of exploring someplace desolate and unsettling, but not exactly dangerous. They were ghost stories, but not horror stories.

Lost Souls is more horror. Partly it’s the horror of the gross. The hotel’s dining room makes you dig through decaying meat to find things, and there’s something odd in one of the bathroom sinks, something red and slick that looks like an internal organ, but seems to be alive and fitfully breathing, making sounds like a clogged nose. The previous games had nothing like this. They were more about dust and cobwebs than blood and other fluids.

Partly it’s the horror of guilt, like in Amnesia or Silent Hill 2, where you’re somehow to blame and you can’t remember why. The backstory involves an eleven-year-old girl who went missing five years ago, and the player character seems to be the police inspector who was assigned to the case and failed to find her. Posters showing the girl’s face are all over, and I’ve gotten taunting phone calls and text messages holding me responsible for whatever it was that happened to her. The known facts don’t seem to support such blame, but that just means we’re heading for some kind of dire revelation. In contrast, in the first game you’re just a random innocent trapped in someone else’s story, and in the second, the accusations leveled at the player character by history were blatantly wrong.

(A side note: In the previous two games, the protagonist was silent, as is usual in Mystlikes. Here, the PC occasionally talks aloud, in a worried British baritone. This was so unexpected that I didn’t understand it at first, and assumed that the voice I heard was from some unseen NPC. When the player character utters words that don’t come from the player, it tends to establish that the PC is distinct from the player, for good or ill. Perhaps I would have thought of Benjamin Parker more as a character than as a proxy for myself if he had spoken aloud in Lights Out. Here in Lost Souls, I think the PC’s voice helps me to remember that he’s personally involved, but at the same time makes that involvement his, not mine.)

The thing is, I think horror is actually what Boakes was aiming for throughout the series. I mean, if he just wanted to tell a ghost story in Dark Fall: The Journal, he didn’t need to put a demon at the end. The real difference is that he’s being less subtle about it now.

It strikes me that, in addition to their shared themes and shared characters, the Dark Fall games have some common actions, things that the player has to do in all of them to make progress in the beginning. And, appropriately enough for a series named for darkness, they’re all things that help you see. You need to turn on the electricity to light up the site and enable basic exploration. You need to find a portable light source for the few remaining dark corners. And you need to find ghost-hunting goggles to reveal secrets.

I haven’t found any ghost-hunting goggles yet in Lost Souls, but I assume they’re around somewhere, because they seem like an essential part of the character of the series, much like Silent Hill‘s breast-pocket flashlights or Final Fantasy‘s airships. The portable light source this time around is just a flashlight app on your cell phone, part of your inventory from the very beginning. The game makes sure you find it by starting you off in complete darkness. It seems reasonable that it’s not bright enough to light up entire rooms, though, and thus you still need to get the electricity working.

This was the chief accomplishment of my last session, and it’s considerably more involved than in the previous two games. In Dark Fall: The Journal, your ghostly helper (or spirit guide?) tells you without prompting where to go and what to do, so all that remains for the player is a fairly simple self-contained machine puzzle. Here in Lost Souls, in the same setting, the only ghost I’ve met speaks in unintelligible backwards-masked gibberish, and the door to the power shed is blocked with a firmness that left me unsure whether I was supposed to try to get in there at all. And for good reason: the author clearly wants you to explore the grounds thoroughly before making any serious attempt at it.

We know this because activating the lights requires several inventory items that are scattered all over in hard-to-notice ways. All of the Dark Fall games have an emphasis on thorough exploration, to the point of expecting you to inspect blank walls, but here in the new engine it’s more burdensome, because there’s three times as many places to look: where the typical camera position in the first two games had hotspots for turning left and right, the default now includes up and down views as well. I haven’t yet found anything important by looking upward, but I’m sure I will at some point, and I’m fairly certain there won’t be anything indicating where I need to do this, so the upshot is that I have to do it everywhere. Add in the smooth transition animations that I was praising in my last post, and the result is that diligent exploration takes a great deal of time now.