Solid But Flawed Horror Adventure Game
Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder is a horror adventure game heavily inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. That much is obvious just from the general tenor of the game, but it is reinforced by the use of certain names that Lovecraft himself prominently used in his fiction ("lurkers", "Pickman", etc.). As a Lovecraft fan, I found this to be in large part a charming homage. That being said, the game has some substantial limitations that made the game at times unpleasant to work through.
The first thing that struck me upon playing the game is that the graphics have aged reasonably well in the three and a half years since the game was released. Scenes are often dark, but this seems to be done by design in order to properly set the mood. But when there is sufficient light, it is clear that the backgrounds and visuals are nicely drawn. That being said, this more easily done because the game does not let you move freely. Each screen is a set design. You can look around, but in order to actually move, you have to select a forward arrow to move to the next screen. This really limits your ability to interact with the environment, and was a consistent source of annoyance when playing the game. This interface is old and clunky, and really not a major improvement over games I played in high school (Zork Nemesis comes to mind).
The plot is, for the most part, fairly solid. You are a police detective investigating the murder of a local man. Your search leads you to a man named Loath Nolder, whose whereabouts are unclear. As you investigate his involvement in the crime, you come across a shadowy cabal of occultists, evidence of evil rituals performed in the dead of night, and rumors of monsters lurking just on the edge of human comprehension. Again, this is very much out of the Lovecraft mythos. In the process of solving puzzles and moving along the plot, you will encounter plenty of written documents. While the poetry you might read will come across as amateurish, some of the letters and journal entries are very interesting and well-written.
Darkness Within contains some fairly typical adventure game mechanics, with a puzzle system requiring you to maintain your inventory, combine items, and explore environments to forge a path forward. The game does have one aspect that is fairly unique within the genre. When reading certain documents, the game allows you to underline certain passages that it considers to be important. If you properly pick these out, the concepts are added to a special "ideas" section of your inventory. You can then combine different concepts to reach conclusions that allow you to move the story forward. In practice, unfortunately, this works a lot worse than it does in theory. You may find it exceedingly difficult to determine what facts the game wants you to consider clues, and what facts the game has determined to be filler material. So you can spend a lot of time initially underlining useless fragments, not making any progress. This can become incredibly tedious, but fortunately the game includes several difficulty levels, including one that adds an auto-complete option for this part of the game. Good thing, too, because it's absolutely no fun randomly underlining eight pages of documents. I have to hand it to the developers for including this option; I think the game might be close to unplayable without it. The game also displays some typical adventure game problems. Some puzzles are solved in fairly obscure ways, but more annoyingly, it can be difficult to determine where you should go at various points in the game. Given the clunkiness of the interface, it is no fun randomly revisiting areas until you find the trigger that moves the plot forward. Fortunately, there are walkthroughs available online, because the in-game hint system does not do a very good job at pointing you in the right direction at times.
I earlier commented that the story is competently done, but the ending is not as well crafted. You are left with quite a few questions. It could be argued that this is in keeping with Lovecraftian stories, which often leave endings unclear and details to the reader's imagination. But the presentation here is not so cleverly done, so I was left unsatisfied. There is a final twist that I was able to predict about halfway through the game, but I was still hoping for more explanation about some of the other pieces. That being said, a game like this has to leave somethings to the imagination, and it's a difficult line to draw determining where to stop. This is an art form, and I think the developers can be forgiven for not getting this precisely right.
All in all, this was a solid effort that I'm hoping the developer has improved upon in the sequel. I have included some gameplay footage below that shows some standard sequences.