Dark Fall is a first-person slide-show adventure, in much the same style as Myst, a game that inspired Boakes to begin designing games. You will explore the Dowerton train station and the station hotel, and uncover a lot of very interesting history. Scattered throughout the hotel rooms are various newspapers, notes, letters, journals, records, memos, and plenty of other reading material. You will slowly uncover the stories that took place in this station many years ago, and learn about the people who populated the hotel. All of this text is written with personality and is intriguing (and often humorous) to read.
Dark Fall: The Journal for the Mac
You will not interact with any other human beings during your exploration of the station and hotel; however, you will have opportunities to converse with ghosts and ask them questions. You will also find yourself assailed with the haunting voices of former hotel guests as you explore their rooms. Clearly there is a very eerie history here, and it all will lead you to a confrontation with an evil darkness that you must trap for good.
The best part of Dark Fall is summarized in one word: atmosphere. This game demands that you turn off the lights and turn up the speakers. Boakes has succeeded masterfully at creating a world that is truly creepy. The stairs will creak, wind will whistle, and ghosts will howl unexpectedly. All of this lends credibility to the spookiness, and Boakes does a great job creating a dark environment without actually making things too dark to see, as other games have done. Every important object on the screen is very clear and visible. However, if you're running at a resolution of 1024x768 or above, you'll definitely want to decrease it because Dark Fall will run in a 640x480 window and then it will be difficult to see.
Explore the seamless open-world of Agon, a vast realm filled with ancient and fantastical creatures. Climb to the top of the mountains, explore the beautiful cities of Agon, enter in the deepest and darkest dungeons, sail to remote islands, ride through rivers of lava and sandy deserts. You can travel everywhere the eye can see; the freedom is yours in our open world sandbox MMORPG.
This is the business that brought Pete out to The Station in the first place where he ran into Polly and Nigel, two college students turned amateur ghost hunters. But by the time you arrive to the abandoned hotel, neither your brother nor his two new friends are anywhere to be seen. Like those six people from six decades ago, Pete, Polly and Nigel seem to have disappeared without a trace. Instead, as you walk through the shadow-laden train tunnels to The Station, you are greeted by the disembodied voice of a young boy, yet another victim of the hotel's dark secrets. As he guides you to the hotel, he explains that it is up to you to help not just your brother, but everyone else who has fallen prey to whatever it is that stalks the halls of the hotel.
Compared to modern point-and-click adventures of this type, Dark Fall is positively streamlined with a very simple interface. The cursor automatically changes to indicate if you can move to a certain place, use an item, perform an action, or investigate closer. Your inventory will remain at the top of the screen, and all you need to do is click on an item in your inventory when you are on a screen that requires the usage of an inventory item. There are no independent inventory or status screens to navigate. Of particular note is that the game also does not keep track of any dialogue or documents you come across along the way, and given the sheer volume of information available here, it is highly recommended that you start up a journal of your own as you play. Also of note is that your game is saved as a notepad file and you will be asked where you want the game to be saved. As a result it's also recommended that you create an independent save folder so you don't have to go hunting when you want to load your game later.
As you explore The Station, not only will you piece together what happened to your brother and the two college students, but you will also meet the six missing persons of yesteryear as well. You'll uncover the stories of a failed actress and a bank robber, an overworked young woman secreting her boyfriend away under her mother's nose, and an odd pair of friends whose own explorations have uncovered something great and terrible somewhere in the bowels of The Station. Can you unlock the mysteries of this once thriving hotel? More importantly, can you lock its darkest secrets back up before it's too late?
Providing nearly as large an impact on the gameplay is the extremely bare bones approach to adventuring on display here. There's no separate inventory or status screen, no cursors to manually cycle through, and most importantly no automated method of keeping track of the scores upon scores of documents, letters, narratives, journals, etc., that you will come across. This will force most who play Dark Fall to keep their own journal which might seem at first to be a decided negative, but I can say with confidence that being forced to take my own exhaustive notes throughout the game added immensely to the experience. Indeed, I credit this aspect of the game for making this the most fun I've had playing an adventure game in a very long time because I not only felt more invested than I usually do with these kinds of games, but I felt more a part of the entire process. Couple that with the fact that the inventory is on screen meaning that you never navigate away from the main playing screen and you have a game that doesn't let you walk away and hide in some options menu or status screen somewhere.
Prepare for thrills, chills, and fun at The Great Escape's popular Fright Fest. The month-long celebration involves kid-friendly Halloween activities during the day and frightful fun for the adults at night. You can expect walk-through attractions, scary shows, and rides that become even more terrifying once dark falls.
TED JOANS LIVES!Mukilteo, WA: Quartermoon Press, 2003. Printed by Verdant Press. Quartermoon Press Broadside Series No. 2. Black ink on dark red cardstock, letterpress. 1st printing: 250 copies. Second printing, on lighter red stock, 250 copies.
TED JOANS LIVES!Mukilteo, WA: Quartermoon Press, 2003. Printed by Verdant Press. Quartermoon Press Broadside Series No. 3. Black ink on dark red sticker stock; letterpress 1st printing: 100 copies. Second printing, smaller size, 100 copies. 2ff7e9595c
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