Darkness Within is the most tasteful Lovecraftian-horror game I have ever played.
There is no tacked-on 'insanity' mechanic.
There are no jump scares.
There are no guns.

But most importantly, there are no references to Lovecraft's work in poor taste. The only direct references to him are in quotes on loading screens, and a single easter egg. His influence otherwise is purely sentimental, yet quite palpable in the atmosphere of the game's various domestic, occult, and dreamlike environments.

The developers at Zoetrope Interactive did not shoehorn Lovecraft's most popular motifs into their game, although it could be argued that the general formula of the narrative is quite Lovecraftian, and the exposition definitely is, but I believe it comes into its own. Anyway, Zoetrope has created a narrative with less-direct horror than any 'survival horror' game. This was executed through their implementation and pacing of the horror.

The environments in the game are beautifully detailed, both technically and atmospherically. Howard's apartment and office, and the houses that he investigates, all feel genuine and lived-in, and evoke a mixture of being comforting and cozy, yet quite off-putting. The dream sequences that partially take place in these environments are therefore very surreal, in that they blend these mundane, familiar environments, with bizarre, and horrifying encounters.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=341437450

Through this detail, and the surrealness which follows, almost all of the game, not just the horror sequences, left me feeling uneasy. This uneasiness was accentuated as Howard begins to have trouble differentiating dream from reality.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=345226810

Especially off-putting are the few encounters the player has with other, seemingly inhuman entities. These encounters are sporadic, and mostly quite indirect. With the exception of a single instance, Howard only ever encounters these 'things' either in his dreams, or through a crack in a wall. Therefore they never pose any real threat to Howard. Which might leave you wondering, 'How could they be horrific?'

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=345226745

And like good, primal horror: it's in the utter obscurity of the encounters and the things themselves, the already instilled fear from the context of the encounters, and how few encounters there actually are, that makes the game horrific. This is important to note because horror is about the build-up, and the obscurity. If scares are frequent, or the things that are scary are able to be studied closely, then they become so much less effective. And thankfully Darkness Within doesn't fall victim to either of these issues. It overcomes them more effectively than any other horror game I've played.

All of the circumstances are so well built up, that this infrequent horror is something truly unique for a 'horror' game. It is actual, Lovecraftian horror at its finest; it is morbid curiosity resulting in a brush with something, without ever really knowing or finding out what. The second factor in good, Lovecraftian horror is the irrational compulsion to continue, regardless of prior experiences. This narrative device manifests in solving the puzzles that are entailed in the central mystery of the story.

The puzzles are cleverly developed, and effectively intertwine the narrative and storytelling. This is executed in all of the clues for puzzles being hidden in pieces of writing, and various minute details that are quite believably strewn throughout appropriate places in the environments. I could list all of the detailed connections and implications made through the puzzles, dream sequences, texts, and other discoveries throughout the game, and how consistently they've been intertwined, but I would prefer to recommend you go and experience them for yourself.

Another important aspect of the puzzles is their believability. The presentation of just about all of the puzzles is so plausible that only a single puzzle in the game left me frustrated at its absurd specificity. Otherwise, the puzzles flow into eachother with excellent fluency, and the way they manifest prior exposition demonstrates the developer's forethought. Through this, they're engaging, compelling, and literally always directly and importantly entailing the narrative.

I speak so confidently in my description of the puzzles because I developed that description directly from the puzzles themselves. Due to the density of the primary puzzles of the game, it would be redundant to give a necessarily detailed description of something better experienced than described.

Concerning the narrative, if you plot out what actually occurs in the narrative, and remove it from the context of the game, then it may not sound all that impressive. It may sound like a Lovecraftian fanfic. But it's not the plot in itself that makes the narrative shine. It's everything above; the presentation, and faithful fulfillment of the criteria of Lovecraftian horror; that makes the story so special.

Now, as I said, I won't list all of the positive, detailed connections and implications made throughout the game, but I will mention one very particular criticism I have of one very particular puzzle.

This puzzle is second-last in Clark Field's house, and entails quite the spike in difficulty. My main issue with this spike is the obsoleteness of the established mechanic of 'Howard's Mind.' Howard's Mind can piece together thoughts, clues, items, and observations to progress through puzzles by deducing solutions semi-automatically, so long as the player provides the correct clues. It's established as an important mechanic, but is frustratingly and suddenly not able to be utilized in Clark Field's home. And while it's occasionally useful throughout the rest of the game, it pretty much stops functioning during this puzzle, which leads to a key discovery in progressing through the game. What this essentially means is that the player is expected to decipher a plausible, but ultimately poorly executed puzzle, which is key to progressing in the game, but without 'Howard's Mind' to give them any guidance. Which was a very big issue for me when Howard is bombarded with numerous, meaningless, potential answers. It's a tedious puzzle, and is more needlessly than actually complicated.

There is also the minor complaint of an awkward inventory. It's annoying to deal with once Howard has amassed so many items that you need to scroll through it, but to be honest it really doesn't impede much otherwise.

The game's ambient noise also seems to be contentious. While I understand how the piano, creaking floorboards, and other noises can collectively seem overbuilt, I feel like they're most effective when they come apart. I agree it can be a little silly and overwhelming when everything is playing at once, but when those noises pause for a while and all you're left with is the ambient drone of the environments, it's worth it. It's how realized the isolation of Howard is at that point that's so striking. It's not necessarily the sounds themselves, but what they leave behind.

Apart from those last few points, the game is a very seamless experience.

If the name Lovecraft only brings to mind Cthulhu, the Shoggoth, Deep Ones, Innsmouth, etc. Then this game probably isn't for you. This game doesn't treat Lovecraft like a meme. It's a very respectful work after Lovecraft. It's also a game with an outstanding level of detail, which I would recommend to anyone impressed by such things. And if you have an actual appreciation for the style of horror and queer stories that Lovecraft, and other prolific writers, such as Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce are known for, then you are this game's target audience.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” ― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

Here I was, a bit bored and a bit biased about the marriage of a point & click adventure with the theme of horror, but Darkness Within 1: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder was a spectacular experience! I've spared 14 hours or so, discovered every achievement, read and re-read every single document, practically poked my nose in every single pixel in the game; but I am still paranoid about missing a piece of the great picture, as any Lovecraftian theme should make you so...

In this gem of a Lovecraftian setting, you play as Howard E. Loreid; a detective that investigates the strange murder of Clark Field, a wealthy man involved in the dark art of occult. The prime suspect of the crime is a man named Loath Nolder, a famous private investigator and an admitant of the local insane asylum. Our game starts with a nightmare, and a phone call coming from our partner, Arthur, in the middle of the night. We're informed that Loath Nolder has escaped...

The game takes brilliant twists and turns, and forces you to investigate odd objects coming from forgotten times, secluded buildings that no one visits and isolated areas of the local geography with dark histories. The atmosphere is carefully arranged to procure a balance between the uneasiness that we feel from a partially observed shadow that lingers in the night, and the raw sense of dread that we suffer whence we face the plain unexplainable. Environment is a huge success to create that lingering, uncanny feeling that haunts us when we are reading a random narration excerpt taken from H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. It actually uses direct characters and anecdotes from Lovecraft stories like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Whisperer in Darkness and The Rats in the Walls.

Gameplay carries two major features that makes the investigation process noteworthy. As you observe events and the environment, you take mental notes in your journal as ideas, observations and suspicions, alongside conversations. You are to pick and add the relevant ideas together to make a thought process to grasp the insight of happenings. This progress of deduction presents the player a unique gameplay. Nothing is presented to you on a silver platter: you actually have to think like an investigator to decide which evidence might go with another to indicate a fact. Another feature is about the documents you stumble in the game. In these kind of games, the gameplay usually presents you your next objective just after you read the document, automatically. Here, you underline the part of the document that you think to be relevant or important and think about it! I mentioned hard work, didn't I?

If you do sincerely enjoy the horror genre - not your common jump scare, or plain human cruelty: an actual sense of gothic that will keep pushing your buttons to keep you awake at night, you MUST try this game. It is brilliant as an adventure, astonishing as a horror game. Plus, it is Lovecraftian!

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This game does more service to this particular style of horror in FIVE MINUTES than most games with much larger budgets and more intense system requirements do THE ENTIRE GAME. You will do a lot of reading and that reading will lead you to unsettling implications that leave you with a subtle, creeping dread that never really goes away. The environments themselves blend with the musical score and come off as unsettling and believable, with a stark contrast between the falsely domestic and the absolutely bizzare. The game really, really captures the essence of what writers like Lovecraft, Blackwood and Machen crafted and plays like you'd expect one of those stories to read.

10/10

Ugh. I'm actually glad that I finally finished this game.


Don't do this to you unless you have masochistic tendencies. I'm playing adventure games for almost 30 years now and I've dealt with my share of clunky UI, pixel hunting and unintuitive game mechanics while still enjoying the game but this one - just no.


I actually liked the idea behind the main mechanic in this game. Rather than just looking for physical items that you can use on objects in the world, here you are also looking for clues for a kind of "brain inventory". You mainly find clues by reading documents, letters and books and underlining interesting stuff in them. You then figure things out by combining clues in your brain inventory.


First of all, the inventory system itself. It is much too convoluted and unintuitive.
You open your physical inventory by right click and another right click lets you investigate physical items more closely.
With left click on a brain symbol you open your "brain inventory". The left side of your brain inventory has a list with your clues, on the right side are 5 open slots for combining clues and sometimes items. You drag and drop clues and items from your inventory into these slots by holding the left mouse button. To remove clues from these slots, you have to simply click on them. Physical items you have to drag and drop back again into a free slot in your physical inventory. To combine items, you have to click on another symbol. If in all of this you accidentally click the right mouse button, the whole inventory closes and you can start anew. This happens a lot.

Secondly, finding clues in documents. Oh god. Open inventory, open document, click on pen symbol, try to actually underline what you want to underline, click on another symbol to find out if you were right. "Not particularly interesting", ok, rinse and repeat until you have basically underlined the whole document piece by piece (granted, you can adjust your difficulty and be spared from all that but why play an adventure if you do that?). Some things are apparently interesting, but your character doesn't know what to think about it, yet, so you don't get a clue from it and have to return to it later. No problem, right? Wrong. Some documents you don't take with you but you have to physically return to whereever you've found it first. So, if you get stuck, you go through all locations, looking at all documents again to find this one elusive clue that you had found earlier but couldn't use at that point. Argh.

Thirdly, this would be pretty annoying in any case but it is made almost unbearable by the god awful way in which you move in this game. You see everything from a first person perspective and to move around you move the "camera" around with an arrow in the middle of the screen. This arrow changes form if you point in a direction you can move in, which then beams you to the next point in the room where you can look around a bit. Why not move with WASD and look around with the mouse? If you want to have a first-person perspective this is the only way to do it. The way they did it is disorienting and induces sea sickness. No wonder the protagonist gets dizzy sometimes and/or loses consciousness!

The story is ok so far but it just stops in the middle. Almost nothing is solved by the end of it.

The graphics are dated but not too terrible. What is terrible, though, is the almost constant darkness. I used the highest gamma settings and still there were huge areas where I had no idea what I was looking at because it was all so dark.

In case you are still wondering, I totally do not recommend this game.

This game is, taken as a whole, fantastic. One of the best adventure games available. However, this point may not be obvious on the first playthrough. It's actually fairly difficult, which may drive some players to a walkthrough. That's unfortunate, because playing this game with a walkthrough is a terrible idea. The game's two strongest points are the story and the atmosphere. Both are fantastic, but excessive walkthrough use can ruin your understanding of the story. The game should be played with a mindset of truly trying to understand and solve the mystery. That will require reading and rereading the documents you find several times. But doing so is extremely enjoyable once you finally begin to grasp what's happening. If you get towards the end and feel that you have no idea who any of these people are or what's happening, you've missed a LOT. But putting the effort into exploring and understanding is extremely enjoyable.

Wow! This was one of my favorite point & click Adventure / Horror games years ago!

This is a point & click game that offers a 360* view in a very detailed and creepy atmosphere and the eerie sounds always make you feel unsettled. The experience makes you feel as if something is always wrong and full of dread.

The story leaves you as a detective thrown into a twisted and demented world of insanity trying to track down Loath Nolder, a private investigater gone mad and also a murder suspect. But as you begin to track his whereabouts, you start to wonder what is real and what is not, halucinating, seeing and hearing things as you travel through locations finding and picking up clues and solving puzzles.

If you like point & click games and you like mystery and horror, you will find a good combination here.
It's a good game.

First off: You have to love point and click games to enjoy this. Second: It's an old style horror game, so no jump scares or scary monsters chasing after you. Its a calming kind of terrifyingly creepy game. I personally thought it was good. It can get confusing and there is A LOT of reading just to understand the basics of the story. The soundtrack and scenery is spooky and generally pleasing (do remember this is an old game so graphics aren't stunning).

I did have to look at a walkthrough for some of the answers, especially if it required a certain order. There is a lot of hidden secrets so it's replayable and the achivements are nice. Especially right after a difficult puzzle.

So, if you like point and click games. I would suggest this one.
If you want a modern day horror game, don't even think about it. Go play Outlast or something.

Darkness Within 1: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder is a horror adventure developed by Zoetrope Interactive.


Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder tells the story of a policeman plagued by nightmares. The private sniffer Loath Nolder is believed to be responsible for the violent death of a certain Clark Field. The more the hero finds out about it, the deeper he gets into a vortex of ancient secrets, occult practices and deadly madness.


+ sinister plot
+ based on motifs by H.P. Lovecraft
+ creepy texts
+ well chosen puzzles
+ Thinking aid helps with combining
+ disturbing music
+ Achievements


- awkward operation
- Objects difficult to see
- weak cutscenes


Darkness Within 1: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder offers you a gruesome adventure to shudder.



Darkness Within 1: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder ist ein Horror-Abenteuer, welches von Zoetrope Interactive entwickelt wurde.


Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder erzählt die Geschichte eines von Alpträumen geplagten Polizisten. Der Privatschnüffler Loath Nolder soll für den gewaltsamen Tod eines gewissen Clark Field verantwortlich sein. Je mehr der Held darüber herausfindet, desto tiefer gerät er in einer Strudel aus uralten Geheimnissen, okkulten Praktiken und tödlichem Wahnsinn.


+ finstere Handlung
+ nach Motiven von H.P. Lovecraft
+ gruselige Texte
+ gut gewählte Rätsel
+ Denkhilfe hilft beim kombinieren
+ beunruhigende Musik
+ Errungenschaften


- umständliche Bedienung
- Gegenstände schwer zu erkennen
- schwache Zwischensequenzen


Darkness Within 1: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder bietet dir ist ein schauerlichen Abenteuer zum gruseln.

I've read most of Lovecraft's works and I love lovecraftian horror. This game has lots of it, I daresay it's at least as lovecraftian as Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the earth. Especially in the beginning you can barely make a step without finding a Lovecraft or even a Poe reference - a madman who escapes from an asylum, a town called Wellsmoth, a protagonist called Howard, a poet called Pickman, a book with incredibly lovecraftian short stories and poems which was probably written by the developers (amazing work!), darkness, fear of the unknown, a secret cult, a raven, a "volume of forgotten lore" and a detective story. Seriously, it can't become more lovecraftian than that.

But then there's the gameplay. Most of the riddles are ridiculous. You sometimes have to find hints by reading (very long) documents and underlining the right info. Sometimes you don't even know what you are searching. Sometimes you have to come back to a document you read 2 hours before, because you can suddenly underline information you couldn't underline earlier because you haven't triggered it by finding information in another, completely unrelated document (at another place) you didn't even know you had to find. You can't even take these documents with you - that's backtracking at its worst. Sometimes you don't even find these documents because you can't click them even though you are standing right in front of them - because you aren't standing at the right position.
I also had a bug where an item vanished from my inventory, so I had to edit my savegame to be able to progress any further.

I really don't see how one could be able to finish this game without a walkthrough. There is an activatable hint feature, but it usually only gives you hints when you don't need them or they are just plain useless. "There must be something in this house that helps you find the solution" - thank you, but in which of the 10 rooms did I miss something? Reading long, boring texts over and over again without even knowing why isn't fun at all, even though it's quite the charm of being a detective.

Talking about being a detective, the story disappointed me a lot.
You have investigate in the case of a man who was found dead shortly after descending into a well under his house. According to the info you have he found something and wanted to get rid of the house immediately - so obviously the game starts by finding the well and climbing down. Oh, and there really is something, and shortly after the "real" story starts because you don't know whether you are mad, whether you are dreaming, whether you are a sleepwalker, whether you are whatever. You get suspended, but you keep investigating in the case.
You keep meeting people and finding information that make you think "Damn, I really want to know what this is about!"

Well, none of these question get answered. You don't find the resolution of the case, you don't find out who these people are, you don't find out what the thing in the well was, you don't find out what happens while you are unconscious (which happens several times), you don't find out what your nightmares are about, you don't even find out what's the matter with Loath Nolder.
I know it's part of the charm of Lovecraft's works that several things stay unresolved, but this game doesn't resolve anything at all. And this is why I don't recommend this game at all, because after the struggle with these horribly designed riddles I'd at least expect a good ending.

If you love Lovecraft as much as I do, give it a shot, but don't forget looking for a good walkthrough before you do. Otherwise you probably won't be able to enjoy the partly exciting story which is almost TOO lovecraftian.

An excellent surprise from a small independent game development studio of only three people.

Released in 2007, Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder has aged pretty well. The graphics are a bit pixelated on high resolution but nothing major. The character models on the other hand are very outdated unfortunately. They are pretty rare but can break the immersion for a little bit.

The strongest point of the game is its atmosphere. Along with the story they give the eery sensation that you can have when you read some of H.P Lovecraft's work. It deals with the same themes of blurry frontier between natural and supernatural. With madness often being a better outcome than trying to comprehend what lies beyond human perception.

The story is mostly in written form. Plenty of books and notes to read and re-read to understand all that the game has to offer.

There are two gameplay mechanic that I mention below which I found interesting but also very frustrating at times. It is a warning of some sort:

The first mechanic is the ability to combine not only object but thoughts. Thoughts are short description of major and minor events, which can be obtained by clicking somewhere important or underlining phrases in texts. It can become overwhelming since you can combine from 1 to 6 thoughts and/or objects. It can be a very heavy game of trial and error.

The second mechanic is the underlining of important clue in books or notes. It can be partially disabled in easy mode but it doesn't show hidden clues (if there is one) in a text. The hardest mode give no hints but you can underline any text (as opposed to a select few). In a book with more than 3 pages it is quite difficult to find them. The interface does not help by requiring one click for switching cursor to underlining at the far left and then clicking on the Think button below it after the underlining on the text in the center. On books with many topics, finding the one that the protagonist care about with such a system can be frustrating.

The object bar is classic and doesn't get in the way which is nice.

This game is also kind of a preface and first chapter to the second opus which is completely different in its gameplay.

Recommended, mostly for the atmosphere. Difficult game but rewarding with the right mindset.