Haunted Lighthouse

Dark Fall: Lights Out - Director’s Cut Edition (www. Iceberg-interactive.com, $10 - Amazon, eBay) is a dark, spooky PC adventure tale which, like a good book, lets you use your imagination to flesh out the underlying story--an evil one with surprising twists. Scraps of information, clues, hints and artifacts all accumulate as you progress through the game. You’ll find strange names and symbols scrawled on walls, in messages and locked in boxes. Take notes as you go, because you’ll need the information later. Eventually you hope to piece these notes together into a story that will help you solve the mystery and find the answer. Many puzzles need to be solved, but the game is non-linear, so you can go on to explore other areas and come back to the problem later.

The story centers on an actual lighthouse on Fetch Rock in England ("Fetch" is an old English or Irish name referring to a ghost). Three men tending the light disappeared at the turn of last century without apparent cause. Since then mysterious happenings have been occurring at the lighthouse: sightings of ghosts, unexplained noises, time distortions and many paranormal events. You play the part of a cartographer sent to map the area. You discover that the lighthouse is not indicated on any map, so you ask the town folks, who refuse to talk about it, claiming it is haunted by something ancient and evil. Your mission is to investigate the goings on only to find yourself transported through time, from the Bronze Age to the future, trying to piece together all the parts to discover what is really happening and discovering it involves you.

Game play is easy, with point-and-click for movement and actions. As is typical for this type of game, the cursor changes appearance to tell you which direction you can go or when you should pick up an object for later use or when you can talk to one of the other characters in the story. Graphics and sound are OK and fit the mood of the story well and don’t get in the way of your becoming involved in the tale. During your explorations you may communicate with the dead or learn about life in a Victorian lighthouse and hopefully discover what really happened to the three lighthouse keepers who disappeared. It will take lots of patience to search each scene for those hidden objects you need to progress in the story. But if you like ghosts, mysteries and this genre of games, give this one a try.

(N.B. There really is a Fetch Rock Island Lighthouse, and it’s being groomed as a "Haunted Lighthouse" for a tourist attraction)