Genre: Adventure
Publisher: Lighthouse Interactive
Developer: Zoetrope Interactive
Release Date: November 6, 2007

Have you ever watched a TV show that started off well, but went downhill after a few seasons? In the beginning, they had some great ideas and executed a few of them really well, but somewhere along the way, something happened and it all fell apart. Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder is a little bit like that. It presents some excellent ideas and implements a few of them really well, but at some point, it manages to lose everything that it had going for it, leaving you to feel cheated.

In Darkness Within, you are Howard Loreid, a great detective on the Wellsmouth Police Force. You've always idolized Loath Nolder, an extremely well-known private detective, who abandoned his last case quite abruptly and then proceeded to travel around the world. Nolder is such a secretive person that some people believe he spent the time researching ancient cults and black magic. Five years later, he has returned, only to become the prime suspect in the murder of Clark Fields, an elderly, rich man. You must use all of your investigative skills to uncover the secrets of Fields' death and figure out Nolder's involvement, if any.

Darkness Within plays like a typical adventure game — you enter an area, find some items and solve a puzzle or two — although it attempts to broaden the gameplay in a number of ways. For example, you're required to search certain documents; now and then, you'll come across a letter or file that contains clues. You underline a few words and "think" about them, and if you underline the correct words, you've found a clue.

Initially, this seems like a really neat idea, and it works out really well for the first few documents you encounter. Unfortunately, you start to find longer and longer documents, and it gets really, really tough to find the correct words to underline. You're allowed to skip this part by having the game automatically locate the clues for you; as the game goes on, you tend to do this more and more, which is quite unfortunate because searching the documents is one of the title's neatest features.

Combining items in an adventure game is nothing new, but Darkness Within takes it a step further by allowing you to combine things you see, things you've heard and clues located in documents to gain new, more in-depth clues. It's an innovative idea that really pulls you into the detective role, but unfortunately, like the document searching system, it loses its fun pretty quickly. You receive no guidance at all so you'll spend a bulk of the time being unsure of what needs to happen next, and in frustration, you'll just randomly try different item combinations. This would have been a much better system if the game provided some sort of guidance during this process.

The rest of the adventure elements in Darkness Within are mediocre at best. There are some pretty severe pixel hunts, the game has very little in the way of puzzles and there's really no guidance or information on how to solve the puzzles that it does have. You'll end up randomly trying stuff and working through a process of elimination to open a door. It's almost as if the developers focused all of their efforts on the document searching and clue combination elements and neglected the rest. It's unfortunate because when those start to break down, you're left with a game that seems kind of crippled.

The title's lack of guidance works against it in other ways, too. Sometimes, your character will think about the area he should focus on next, but most of the time, you're left revisiting every area to see if anything has changed. At one point, I had to return to an area I hadn't seen since the first hour of gameplay, because a document-searching puzzle had opened up there. I would have never thought to revisit that area, except that I had combed every other area in the game and had come up empty. It can get extremely frustrating and, truth be told, it seems like the designers felt they needed to lengthen the game, so they made you search a bit.

The control works well enough. You maneuver through the environments in first-person view by clicking in the direction you want to go. You can look around by moving the pointer to the edge of the screen, which creates the only real problem with the scheme. Since most of your inventory interactions take place on the edge of the screen, when you click out of the inventory or thought screen, you tend to start spinning. It's a minor annoyance with a system that, otherwise, works perfectly.

Since Darkness Within is a horror game, you would expect the presentation to play a big part in the atmosphere, and you'd be right. The graphics are nice and dreary, creating an excellent sense of spookiness in all environments, whether it's a mansion or a cave. The only major complaint I would have is that sometimes, the graphics are a bit too dark and make it a bit tough to see important items. Even with the gamma and brightness cranked up on my monitor, I still managed to miss quite a few items in some of the rooms during my first visit.

The shining point of Darkness Within, however, is the sound. This game is filled to the brim with spooky, atmospheric sound effects. There's nothing like walking through an empty mansion, only to hear creaking floorboards off in the distance, to really set you on edge. When the big surprises come, you will jump out of your chair; it's just that good. Fortunately, the rest of the sound scheme, music and voices are just as top-notch. If there's one thing that Zoetrope Interactive did right in this game, it's the sound design.

However, there's also a low point to the game, and that honor goes to Darkness Within's story. It starts out brilliantly and, combined with the investigative elements, really draws you into your role in the game. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the title seems to lose focus and introduces random elements that have nothing to do with any murder or Loath Nolder. Eventually, the murder of Clark Fields takes a backseat to an even more confusing story involving a cult. You eventually meet up with Loath Nolder and talk to him for about three minutes, although nothing is resolved during that time.

You'll spend 10-15 hours on Darkness Within during your first playthrough, and unlike other adventure games, there is some replay value to be found here. There are a few secret clues, Easter eggs and other secrets contained within; after the credits roll, you'll see a rundown of how well you did in your investigation. When I saw the things I'd missed, I felt like going through the game again to find all of those things. It's definitely an interesting turn of events when the game had felt so tedious just a few hours prior.

I wish I could recommend Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder. I really do. I thought it started out really well and showed some major promise, but it feels like an unfinished game that's not worth the time or effort. It scares the heck out of you the entire time, but due to the extremely tedious gameplay during the latter half of the title and its complete lack of guidance or direction during the puzzle-solving segments, I'd say that it's not really worth the trouble.

Score: 5.4/10