I found myself inspecting the back of the box of Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder, a game inspired by the works of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, following its release shortly after Halloween. Ignoring the frankly rubbish name of Loath Nolder, I read the blurb of what promised to be a truly terrifying adventure - I can feel Mr. Lovecraft spreading the fear already. This first person style horror point and click adventure is laden with intriguing quotes of true horror and tries to blur the line between reality and myth - but can all this marketing blurb lead to a outstanding (and pant-wetting) horror game? Unfortunately not.

Sliding the first of two discs into the drive of my shiny and expensive laptop, I feel a slight sense of anticipation mixed with dread - Halloween has come and gone but I'm still in the mood for a good scare! As if the gaming gods heard my wish, the screen of the laptop suddenly goes bright blue - ahhh! The blue screen of death! Mercifully, Darkness Within is not nearly as unreliable as my digital nightmare would suggest, but the presence of nightmares does play a major part in the game.

The first nightmare wriggles its way into the game quite early on with a quote from H. P. Lovecraft about the very small difference between reality and unreality - is a game real or not real? This quote, read in a dark, deep, sinister voice is followed by a short cut scene that unfortunately only explains a little of the story, which bizarrely takes place in the near future of 2011, yet the visual style - mysterious mansions and run down hotels look more like the past. You take control of a police detective named Howard E. Loreid and must track down the suspected murderer, Loath Nolder - not a very common name that! You may think this is not a very spooky or original story but the investigation eventually turns your life into a living nightmare with terrifying dreams and paranormal experiences. In fact, the character you control ends up mad as can be derived from the first cut scene - once you have read the fourth page of the manual and know the story that is. Having a cut scene that actually makes you think without telling you what to think is a very welcome and refreshing change to the standard fare.

After this cut scene is over you are plopped into a dank and dreary looking corridor. The flickering light illuminates the indescribably normal hallway, with wooden doors on either side. All the doors are locked bar one and finding what lies behind it - which I'll leave you to discover - prompts the computer to take control of your character's movements, turning the screen back to find the door and your only exit now locked. Who (or what?) locked the door you wonder in the seconds before you are rudely pulled from your dream by the ringing phone.

Answering the phone, you learn of the escape of Loath Nolder, who is accused of murdering a wealthy businessman, from the hospital. So sudden was his disappearance in fact that no one saw anything and the person calling you says that he's left several messages about this, but after further examination none can be found - are you still dreaming? What's going on here? Whether you are wide awake or not, the game continues on this theme of you piecing together clues and trying to find the supposed killer - a slightly disappointing and well-worn idea for a game story, even with the dosage of scares.

In order to piece things together you first must find some clues - not an easy task. You control your character with the mouse only - moving the mouse left or right rotates your vision a full 360 degrees - and with no noise or evidence of feet movement I wondered if I was playing a human detective or an owl! Clicking the left mouse button performs an action depending on what the mouse is pointing to - examining an on-screen item like a painting or moving forwards, for example. Movement is not free as in other adventure games; you can only move to set locations, which is a bit annoying, unnatural and time consuming, considering all the stopping and starting needed to cover a large distance. Where you can move to is denoted by a squashed up arrow and, very confusingly, where you can't move to is indicated by a diagonal arrow, the similar look of these arrows making it hard to tell them apart. Like the restrictive movement - usually due to low obstacles that could easily be stepped over - you're limited to examining only certain on-screen items and it's often difficult to find the item that you're meant to be looking at.

Your mouse is also used to open your fairly large inventory. This is basically a simple scrollable horizontal bar of slots for smaller collectable items such as a mobile phone - unfortunately only usable at certain times - and car keys. In addition to this usual layout, there is an examine function like the one used in Resident Evil, which brings up a 3D view of an item that can be magnified a little, zoomed back from to a pointlessly small size and rotated freely. There's also an extremely unusual - and a bit daunting - "Think" button… wish I had a button to make me think! This button stores all the clues that your character has noted down and any important audio files, which you can replay in case you missed something - a very useful feature. The think screen also allows you to get hints, combine items or even combine the noted clues to form bigger clues. 'Thinking' is a bit perplexing (a statement you don't hear everyday) and I really would have appreciated a small tutorial before the game started - but sadly no such tutorial is given.

'Thinking' is quite an unusual feature in games (I hope I never have to say that again!) and so is the document research and underlining concept that Darkness Within introduces. Certain documents found throughout the game contain hidden clues and to understand these clues you have an interface that allows you to bring up a pen and underline sections - don't worry about scribbling over everything in a uncontrollable mouse movement though, as the pen automatically locks to the bottom of the nearest sentence to where you clicked, ensuring that even the shakiest of hands can draw a straight line. This is definitely an excellent change to the normal single-click to extract all information type documents usually found in murder mysteries and a very positive and original gameplay feature, but there are some problems with it too, like the inability to underline text on the bottom line of a page and the single-click auto-research granted on the easy difficulty failing to find all the clues in a document.

The hints accessible through the Think screen are meant to get you out of places where you have no idea what to do next, but to my mind they fail miserably. One of the first problems where I really got stuck was early on in the game where you must compare photographs of a crime scene to the crime scene's current state. I eventually spotted what was different from the photographs and went to examine it further. Taking a closer look just repeated the standard text for examining that item though - not helpful! I tried the hint feature and this is what I got back: examining the pictures and comparing them with the current state of the crime scene may give you a clue. This so-called hint gives me no help whatsoever, simply instructing me to do what I had already done - very frustrating! After more random clicking to try and do anything different with the altered item, I started to wonder if what I was seeing as the change was what the game wanted me to see as the change - or was it an error and not a change at all? Re-examining everything and after much pointless wandering around, I finally discovered - through trial and error - that you have to put the photo inside the Think screen before anything happens, even though there was no indication that I needed to do this - why should I have to make the character think about something when I already know the answer? This unhelpful hint - only one example of them - and the simple but not understandable solution were highly irritating - suffice to say, I was beginning to understand why the investigator you play goes mad!

Thankfully, the graphics are nicely put together. The game as a whole looks pretty good, with impressive detail on all objects, including ones that cannot be interacted with. There's not a lot wrong with the game in terms of attention to detail - light sources cast some of the most realistic light and shadow effects I've seen in a game and you can even see the individual dust particles in the light beam - but compared to modern games the graphics are nothing special. Adding to this there is hardly any animation or movement in the game, so the impressive lighting and shadows are not shown off to their full potential - a slight disappointment.

Darkness Within does succeed in being scary at times - not the gruesome in your face scares of Clive Barker's Jericho, where you at least have big guns to defend yourself, but a more subtle fear - a kind of niggling, lingering presence that makes you feel ill at ease. However, the music does little to increase the tension and make things scarier - as well as being far too loud for the other audio elements of the game like the speech (this can be adjusted in the options), it has too many exaggerated 'boom' and drum-like sounds to be really scary. It should be quieter and more eerie, underlining visual frights - but unfortunately it isn't. Music plays a large part in the game - looping in the background as you mull over the situation - so its failings impact the overall atmosphere of the experience. The rest of the sound is pretty standard, with little in the way of background noise and indeed no eerie footsteps as you explore the various locations. The voice acting is reasonably executed, keeping in step with the written subtitles, but there are plenty of these subtitles that feature no acting at all, which seems strange and is quite disappointing.

As with most adventure games, this isn't the type of game you'll come back to again in a hurry, although it is quite a lengthy adventure and will last you a while the first time around. There are three difficulty levels - standard, detective and senior detective - but all they do is just switch between automatic or manual document searching, and delaying or eliminating the availability of the hints. None of this really affects gameplay and in a game where the whole point is finding clues there is little reason to play though again.

Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder is an intriguing idea that never really gets off the ground. The seldom helpful hints and lack of explanation of the story in-game mean that you will often be left spinning with no idea what to do next - followed by an outburst of random clicking. The restricted movement to limited locations, the lack of a tutorial for the confusing Think function and the fact that much of the dialogue lacks voice acting suggests that the game was rushed out for Halloween. However, despite this rather hefty list of downfalls, there is still a decent, playable game underneath. It doesn't appeal strongly to me, but I'm sure that some adventure gamers will enjoy it, as its graphics are atmospheric and the story has some depth, fleshed out well by all the in-game documents and books, plus there are some unique detective research elements like the document underlining. It's far from an awful game, but nowhere near being a great one either, so probably it's only one for the hardcore adventure gamers to delve into.

Reviewed by Tom Clark for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).