Dark fall

The plot of the game revolves around an old hotel near the railway station, which, as it turns out later, is inhabited by an ancient supernatural force. The protagonist of the game arrives at this hotel in order to help his relative, who is involved in architectural development, and soon realizes that the hotel does not have a single living soul - the building is shrouded in mysterious dark forces. In fact, it was these forces that did not allow his brother-architect to finish his project of the railway complex, and besides him, countless more souls were captured in the past. Thus, the hero, whom the dark forces for some reason do not touch, is taken to investigate the secrets of the hotel and the dramatic events that occurred in him in the 1940s .

The game has a fairly low maximum resolution - 640 by 480 . The player has a limited ability to inspect a space of 90 degrees (and the turns and movements are not accompanied by animation - the player simply “switches” between the viewpoints). He needs this to inspect the hotel premises, search for necessary items and read diaries and notes that the player finds in the hotel rooms. Also, during the game, the hero will have to solve various puzzles, many of which are connected with numbers, as well as with the opening of various caskets, safes, etc. There are also usual "quest" tasks for using inventory items in a certain place.

There are no NPCs in the game, that is, a character that a player could meet or talk to. Sometimes a player communicates with ghosts, but does not see their human images (only hears voices)

Graphically, the Dark Fall save system looks very simple. When saving / loading a game, a standard Windows- menu for saving files appears on the screen. Save is a file in .txt format, which, if desired, can be freely opened and edited by a program for reading such files, for example, a standard Windows program - Notepad .

The game has no subtitles.

Atmosphere

The atmosphere of the game, for the most part, is created through the manifestation of various sounds, which are designed to make up the atmosphere of suspense . This is the sound of incomprehensible voices, the sound of a device that scans space for the presence of supernatural and psychic powers, etc. Lighting plays an important role in creating a “terrible” atmosphere of the game.

• The site GameRankings gave the game an overall rating of 71.91% , based on 22 reviews. ^[1] . Another aggregator, Metacritic , assigned Dark Fall a slightly lower overall rating - 68 out of 100 , based on 23 reviews, 8 of which were positive, 13 were mixed, and 2 were negative. ^[2]
• The Russian magazine "Game World Navigator" in 2002 reacted to the game with a negative review "Poltergeist will not work!" By Ilya Nikolayevich. The rating is 2.6 out of 10 . Each element of the gameplay was subjected to devastating criticism. Among the statements about the game were such as: “stupidity sits on stupidity, and they are driven by total lack of thought” , and “This is a diagnosis. Crush. Feet, wheels, tracks. ” There were also very harsh statements addressed to the developers, for example, “ The words “good graphics”, “interesting plot”, “the presence of gameplay” and others like that clearly pass by some personalities "" , or "What the hell are you still ignore the fact that most fans of playing on a personal computer have long forgotten the resolution of 640x480 as a bad dream .... " . ^[3]

• Dark Fall on the All About Quests site (Russian)
• Official website
• The game page on the site of the Russian publisher (Russian)
• Review on the Adventure classic gaming website