#101: Dark Fall II: Lights Out

Lights Out

XXv Productions
Initial release: August 24, 2004 (Canada)
Platform: PC
Also known as: Dark Fall II: Lights Out (UK, Steam)

images c/o MobyGames

They tell you point and click adventure games are a dying breed, and they’re right. But somehow the genre manages to grimly hold on, for better or worse. In the early 2000s, a photography and adventure game enthusiast by the name of Jonathan Boakes began releasing games with a ghostly bent. His work circulated among a vanishingly small community of adventure game developers, with an equally small, but dedicated fandom, which tells you who buys these things. Boakes’ 2002 outing Dark Fall sold 17,828 copies the following year — in the adventure game scene that’s a blockbuster. Where to go next but make a sequel? Enter Lights Out, more commonly known by the title Dark Fall II: Lights Out.

Released in 2004, and updated five years later by the company XXv would merge with/evolve into (the exact details aren’t exactly clear despite some googling), Lights Out starts out simply enough: a young cartographer in 1912 gets shipped off to a nowhere little town in Cornwall and soon discovers there’s more to the town than he expected. It turns out that there’s an island with a lighthouse that’s not on any map, and nobody is willing to discuss it. Worse, the light on the lighthouse has gone out. So, getting on a boat, our hero goes to investigate. It soon becomes apparent that there’s something sinister going on at the lighthouse; the three keepers are missing, and ghostly shadows lurk about in the corner of the eye. What follows is a weird adventure involving time travel, space probes, and… demons or something, I don't know.

It’s obvious that this is a love letter to old British sci-fi TV serials, as well as being something of a reference to a famous case where three lighthouse keepers off the coast of Scotland disappeared in 1900. (If you're wondering, no, not the same lighthouse that Robert Eggers’ landmark thriller The Lighthouse is based on.)

Unfortunately the game is marred by a lack of subtitles, which is understandable given the low budget and the original release date (2004) but unacceptable for the 2009 remaster. What this shakes out to is: I hope you like incomprehensible British accents, often heavily filtered. There’s also the traditional adventure game irritants of pixel hunting, plus the deeply annoying lack of any sort of journal or clue collection. If you want to look up your clues for a puzzle, you have to go back to the location you found them. It’s seriously annoying. The puzzles, by the way, border on pure, unfiltered bullshit. Some of them have solutions that are poorly explained or hinted at; the lack of any real note-keeping just makes it all worse. The game itself is, in a word, ugly, made up of mostly still-frame CG shots. moving about is done entirely with a mouse, which is annoying because you have to constantly hunt for the “turn right/left” spots and “go forward” spots.

You’re not going to be too terribly put out by the $5 asking price for this game, but in all honesty there are better adventure games out there, and they’re more tonally consistent to boot.

-june❤