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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: WRF Studios Released: February 7, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 or 11 Processor: Intel Core i5/AMD Quad Core or better Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780/AMD Radeon R9 280X DirectX: Version 9 Storage: 16 GB available space
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By flotsam Last Half of Darkness (35th Anniversary Edition) WRF Studios I liked this game a lot, right up to a certain point. I never played the original DOS version, and while I have a hard copy in my collection I don’t recall playing the 2000 Windows version either. I did though play subsequent games, and reviewed a few of them, and was generally quite effusive. Plus you got ‘feelies’ in some of the game boxes! Your character has inherited a California property, 225 Dead Bluff Drive to be precise, and the lawyers acting for the estate suggest you might want to check it out. According to their letter it has been through some hardships, including fire, flood and some paranormal activity. Why wouldn’t you want to check it out? You arrive on a beach, and it enables you to settle into things. Played in the first person with complete freedom of movement, sparkly things when close enough suggest something to inspect. Explore the beach, remember things you found, pick up a few items, read a note. By which time other things will have happened, and you will either be in the garden or you won’t. From very early on this is a wide open game. You don’t get led down a single path, but can solve things, roam freely and explore. Which you should and need to do. In keeping with its non-linear design, the more you explore and find things, the better your chances of moving on. It’s a definite strength of the game. This openness impacts the puzzling. Not only can you solve conundrums in a non-linear order, things you find (or don’t find) early on might impact your progress much later. Ditto some things you can interact with but don’t know how; the means may not be available for quite a while. Which might well produce some frustration, but I thought the game did a good job of providing clues as to what might be missing. Journals in particular are a great source of information, potentially sending you back to something you didn’t know you missed but now desperately require. But other elements (e.g., messages on walls, piles of blocks) can also assist. Which means you aren’t just relying on stumbling around all the time, but you have to explore carefully and methodically to ensure you find the relevant clue/s. And if all else fails you can take advantage of the hint system. You have to find it first (and come back to it each time you want to use it), and then you have to spend a coin (so pick these up if you come across them) but it is yet another way in which the game helps you to move on. It can also be challenging to find your way back somewhere – where was that door that accessed the yard? A map you can find can help with that. It only works outside, but enables you to cycle through about 7 or 8 locations which will then result in a little arrow being superimposed on your exploration (a HUD... heads up display, if you will) indicating which way to go and how far to get there. I found it invaluable, especially in navigating to places I had learned about but hadn’t yet found. One item you will find early is a gun. Shortly followed by the bullets to load it. Suffice to say that numerous things need shooting, so best be ready. I confess to spending most of my exploration with the gun drawn, finger on the trigger and ready to shoot. It isn’t an FPS, but it does ramp up as you go, and there is a so-called boss battle at the end. While the action generally involves seeing things coming and shooting them, some elements require a bit more dexterity, and things can appear suddenly from behind and elsewhere. Which is what it is, and might well result in your demise. Should that put you off, various elements might help mitigate that. You can take a fair degree of damage (the little red line bottom right will tell you how you are going) and elixirs you find can restore your health. And if you die, you respawn with all your found items intact and restored to full health. Nonetheless, all things considered I think it is fair to describe this game as an action adventure. So factor that into your possible enjoyment. Finding and using items is a key component of the puzzling but there are some out and out puzzles as well. In the initial stages the latter are limited, but more occur as you move on. Little icons will be generated at hotspots to indicate what might go on there. Not every puzzle is essential (unless of course I missed something). The piano for instance. And not everything you find is part of a puzzle (look out for the 1989 trading cards). The story is suitably strange, as is the behaviour of some of the areas you access. The former is revealed through the journal entries and other things you find, the latter you just need to accept. If a corridor seems closed, perhaps it really isn’t. Not to mention the supernatural denizens that inhabit the game world. The game looks and sounds incredible, and both come together to provide an effectively creepy atmosphere. I literally jumped out of my chair more than once, and whilst it might have been a ‘boo’ moment, my trepidation had been well primed by the moans/howls/heavy breathing/music, etc. that had come before. Play it with headphones in a darkened room and I will be surprised if you aren’t at least on edge. It plays in the first person and utilises my favourite means of interaction as far as immersion goes. WASD gets you around and the mouse does most everything else, although certain keys activate certain items (e.g., M for map, T for torch). Left mouse interacts with things and utilises whatever you are holding, right mouse cycles through your inventory to determine what you are holding. Usefully, given the extent to which I wanted my gun available, the E key will also interact with things, meaning e.g., you can open a door with your finger ready to shoot. You can save at will just by hitting the Esc key, but there is only one save slot so while you can have three games going at one time you can’t load earlier saves in any of them. Loads also don’t restart from where you left off, but at the entry point to the particular location. You can choose to play on one of two settings, which impacts how the inventory behaves. On Normal you have to be holding the relevant item when trying to interact with something; on Easy the game will just use the relevant item, assuming that you have it. So what of the elephant in the opening sentence? I accept that if you can’t do a puzzle it is often more about you than the puzzle. Take that into account when I say that in my opinion, the blood cell mini-game near the end is a dud. There was an earlier mini-game, so it didn’t feel completely out of place, and it is contextually ‘explained’ by a journal entry, but it’s a frustrating bit of manipulation. Plus you can get attacked whilst trying to complete it (although I think I eventually prevented that). Despite numerous attempts over several days, watching videos and getting hints, it eventually wore me out. If you can’t get it done, you can’t move on. I will get back to it at some stage but in the meantime I watched the end of the game on a video walkthrough. Which didn’t undermine the 8 hours of enjoyment I had gotten to that point. They were top-notch, and I enjoyed them enormously. Plus you might well sail straight through the mini-game. I hope you do. There is so much to like in this half of darkness. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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