 Cant even play the game |
| Review Date: May 15, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Timothy D. Buckley, Brooklyn NY |
| The registration code that came with the game doesnt work, Ive tried every possible way to type it in. To make matters worse, the tech support for the game no longer exists so theres no one to ask whats wrong.So if you have the same problem, your money just went down the toilet |
Great if you know what to expect as a Boakes fan
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| Review Date: April 28, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Stacy Alicia Linton, |
Ok, I love Johnathan Boakes. he makes all these spooky thriller games. But you have to know how to play them. It's a bit harder with a set character you can move around and see. Many of his games are first person, making the main character yourself. But I still manage.
The voice acting, as with all his games, is decent but not great. Good enough to not take away from the story. The graphics are not the best, but good. Especially if you concider the budget restraints.
As for actual gameplay, I've played it several times, but you might want to play it with a walkthrough on hand, and liberal use of ctrl F on that walkthrough.
Setting is very interesting though sometimes takes a little while to get used to, but once you do it's like you really are there, learning to roads of this little village.
I like ghost hunting games and supernatural games, So this one's right down my alley. The numerous array of characters and their personalities is interesting and refhreshing.
Overall, if you know what to expect and have the right mindset, this is a very pleasant game that gets a little better each time to play it. Great for just killing time ith a slightly spooky 'thriller'. |
A very slow play.
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| Review Date: April 9, 2010 |
| Reviewer: J. Weaver, USA |
| Reading the reviews for this game I had high expectations. Needless to say, they were dashed soon after playing a few times. The game moves at a glacial pace. You can walk the charactor around town many times and nothing will happen. When something does happen it is kind of a let down. I wish I could send this game back for a refund. My money was not well spent. |
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| Review Date: January 27, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Jimfl47, Orlando, FL |
| This game is similar to most adventure games that are out there and if you are into these games, like I am, it is well worth it. Some of the puzzles were a little hard for me so I had to cheat and use the walkthru. The game was fun to play and had a good story line to it. If you like adventure games similar to this, you will like this one. |
Don't waste your time!
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| Review Date: January 12, 2010 |
| Reviewer: Jan Morrow Bell, USA |
| I found it an interesting story, but found out the hard way that if you don't collect your inventory in EXACTLY the same order as it is written in the Walkthrough. You had to start all over. Just by turning a corner this way or that would require you to go back to the previous save and start ALLLLLLLLLLLL over. The problem being,it took you hours to get to this point, it became a monumental waste of time to continue. |
Froze
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| Review Date: December 15, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Joann Stora, USA |
| Loaded the game on my computer, played for a few minutes and the game froze. It does not work, and a request to the manufacturer for help went unanswered. Big disappointment. |
SCARY GOOD
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| Review Date: November 29, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Kwenon, Virginia USA |
| I love this game. It is a little slow at first and I have to download a cheat/walkthrough sheet from the INternet because it is not intuitive for an old dame like me. I like the music and sound effects. It adds to the already spooky atmosphere. I like the characters and the scenery. Just have to remember to go through every room with a fine tooth comb! I advise you download a cheat/walkthrough to follow the game completely. |
Bought it for $9, and it wasn't worth that
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| Review Date: November 23, 2009 |
| Reviewer: Autodidact, |
Sorry to be contrarian, but I would rather have my money back.
This game gets five stars for atmospheric graphics and sound. That's about the only good thing I can find to say about this game, which I will not finish.
Most of the game is spent moonwalking your main character through eight to ten accessible sites. The main character moves with glacial speed, and playing this game is primarily an exercise in Buddha like patience as you must criss cross the town 150 times.
The voice acting is so appallingly bad it is actually interesting. I spent a lot of time wondering just how it came to be this bad. Unfortunately, the worst of it comes from the main character, who is also the one who does the most speaking. The inflections of all the words and phrases are wrong -- think William Shatner as Captain Kirk, to the power of 100. "Oh! How. LONG. Have you been. In Saxton!" No one speaks like this or reads like this, so I wonder if they recorded individual words and phrases and spliced them to make whole sentences. It's the only explanation I can figure out.
The game is absolutely linear. Not only must you do the next thing, you must be sure to do it in the right (nonobvious) order or the rest of the game won't unlock, leaving you to moonwalk fruitlessly about town repeating your previous actions and conversations in the hope that you'll unlock the lucky sequence. Fortunately (?) every character is willing to have exactly the same conversation with you an infinite number of times . . . And indeed, you must select every possible conversational response with each character, and hear every possible answer in the tree. Save me some grief and just have them spew the entire thing when I meet them, rather than making me jam the return key a dozen times.
Not only linear, but also buggy. The first time I met Bob Tawney, he refused to talk to me and told me he was busy. I got on line and found out that many people had this problem; you have to review everything in your inventory, then have all your conversations again, trying to figure out what unlocks Tawney . . . A phone call to the wrong number requires you to announce the solution to a mystery, and there is no way of opting out.
It only adds insult to injury that the main character is a twit.
Can't conceivably finish this. I'm glad so many other people enjoyed it, but I have to say honestly that they must be more patient souls than I am . . . |
Superb and Frightening game by J.Boakes
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| Review Date: October 2, 2009 |
| Reviewer: T. Ruark, Cameron Park, CA United States |
This is a game that you can't stop playing once you start because you NEED to know what's going on with this town, and where this treasure is, and who/what is haunting your house, Saxton in general, who/what is trapped in the caves, and the church, and in the woods, and in the cabin by the tracks, and why! There are a lot of secrets to learn, scandalous murders to discover, spirits to identify, mystery to be scared of, and things to give you nightmares. Don't play it in the dark!
It's a game by Jonathan Boakes, who, if you have ever played a game he's made before from start to finish, you know has made another masterpiece because failure just doesn't seem to be in his capacity. His name is a selling factor in itself. He's probably the only creator's name you'll see in the center of the box cover as a main advertizement, because his games are that good. If you loved Dark Fall, you'll adore this. It's right up there, but with more story, more timeline, and interactive characters you can talk to.
Each individual panel/scene you walk through has anywhere from a few to a huge number of things to click on and explore, search through, read, see more closely, etc. All of this brings incredible life to the town of Saxton that you got off the train at, and then got flooded into staying. All the minute details reveal a town of two faces. One that is popular with tourists, full of surperstitious but friendly enough people, and has flowers growing around town if you're only there for a few minutes. But within 10 minutes of gameplay you're pretty freaked out because you start to realize (and this grows with each passing frame) this Saxton has murder, a grisly history, voices in the walls, macabre imagery absolutely everywhere, lots of ghosts (no character will ever deny the ghosts. they'll give you frightened warnings in a nervous way while making sure no one is watching, but no one will ever say the town is a safe place, and if they did, you'd never trust them because, let's face it, you're not blind.). You start to see that some characters are literally and dangerously insane. You even get the distinct impression and increasingly scary feeling that you're not in the twenty first century anymore, that not all the people you're talking to are really alive anymore but they don't know it, that perhaps some people have split personalities because by night someone may be doing something very disturbingly out of character...
The whole game keeps you unsettled in a place frightening enough that you'd really like to find some solid ground, and for a gamer who lives for scary stories and/or movies, the things that jump out at you or literally go bump in the night, and the twisted tales you learn of really hit the spot. The effects are very effective and eerie, modern, believable, but still simple. There isn't a lot of useless walking around because the story moves at a nice pace, is interesting, and the clues do make you think and effectively take you to where you need to be without being painfully obvious. Sometimes you need to experiment and play around with the things you get, like the ghost hunting gear you come by, in order to figure out what they're for, but it's never too complicated.
Jonathan Boakes is somewhat of an icon in the scary/puzzle game community for creating the best point and click games with a frightening edge available in the world. This isn't just personal oppinion, he's actually award winning and has a cult following. While Dark Fall is viewed by most people as his star creation, I found that this story entrapped me even deeper than Dark Fall did, though Dark Fall is more nightmare-inducing. I think this game is actually part of the Dark Fall series in a distant way, because the main character is a Dark Fall character, and the reason he's hiding in Saxton in the first place is because he stole evidence of the Dark Fall demon from a company that was looking into sending someone to go check out the Dark Fall hotel. It turns out that it is at the end of Lost Crown that Nigel is asked to go and look into the hotel by the company he stole from. So you realize that Lost Crown is literally the start of Dark Fall, which is SO neat to people who have played it. If you haven't, buy this and buy Dark Fall, and play them both. Greatest game investments you will ever make! |
Not bad, could have been better
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| Review Date: September 18, 2009 |
| Reviewer: BillyJoeBob, Palo Alto |
Long, so value for money. But the plot is rather weak, and several key points go unexplained.
Poor graphics - essentially 2D (mind you, I just started Syberia, so the bar is set pretty high right now!)
The puzzles are too simple. You will only require a walkthrough in a few places.
Better than Boakes' previous efforts (Dark Fall, Barrow Hill), but compare these to Benoit Sokal's masterpieces, and they come up a little short.
Atmospheric, yes - but hardly as creepy or scary as most reviews pretend. |
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