Incline Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder now on Steam

[UndetectedButthurt]

Time to do an all achievements OCD playthrough?



Apparently it has "improved graphics"... I hope that means that text no longer gets cut off at high widescreen resolutions?

http://store.steampowered.com/news/14955/

A director's cut of part 2 incoming as well.

 

[Explorerbc]

So is this any good ? Looks interesting but a lot of reviews are not very positive.

 

[MaskedMan]

It's short and good.

Best part is the kind of dreamlike atmosphere and the mysterious stuff that keeps happening to the main character, missing days, nightmares etc. Exploring big, dark, empty(?) mansions never gets old. The story is kind of vague, with a lot of secret, optional parts; I had a look at the steam cheevo list (don't do that, it's spoilertastic) and there are references to a bunch of stuff that never came up in my playthrough. Even though I found some of the "secret" info in documents (one of the games primary mechanics is reading texts and underlining clues, some of which are essential, some secret) I only got one secret event, and a couple of secret rooms, which left me with more questions than answers.

I greatly prefer the Myst-style graphics of the first game to the wannabe Penumbra 3D of the sequel. It's been a while since I played it so I don't remember much about the puzzles, guess they weren't too horrible. :shrug:

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Yeah they screwed their own fanbase by moving to a 3D engine with DW2. I guess the success of Amnesia had something to do with that... Oh god... The 3D NPC models... Horrifying stuff.

What impressed me the most about the 1st part is how mostly static environments made for some very tense exploration. Sound design is really good in this game. Writing in-general, paired with some solid voice acting (for a budget title), seems quite good.

I wish they never included any 3D NPC models or any NPC interaction for that matter...

EDIT: Oh right, the one thing that seemed really derpy... The main character likes to think out loud quite a bit. When you consider that it's just him "thinking" then it makes sense. Some of the "thinking" lines are voice acted so it ends up sounding quite odd at times. Once I realized that these lines make more sense as "thoughts", the game didn't seem quite as derpy. TL;DR voice acting "thoughts" doesn't seem like a great idea.

 

[Untermensch]

What a coincidence. I've bee thinking about replaying it for the past few days.

I've also thought about making a thread here to ask people if the have any information about the third part? I've been searching for the past two years and haven't found any information.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

"Who knows, maybe one day there might be a ‘Darkness Within 3’, depending on the reception these two classics are given by the Steam audience."

HUEHEU BUY THIS STUFF GUYS OR YOU WONT GET PART 3 OK?!?!?

 

[trustno1code]

Well damn, about time. "Director's Cut" is exactly what the "obviously rushed ending" sequel needed; hope it'll actually contain some additional/cut content and not just graphics+Steamworks+wallpapers ohwaitI'mblind, "new puzzles and environments" sounds promising. In any case, glad they crawled out of their crypts and back in the saddle.

Yeah they screwed their own fanbase by moving to a 3D engine with DW2. I guess the success of Amnesia had something to do with that... Oh god... The 3D NPC models... Horrifying stuff.

Dark Lineage came out before Amnesia, "wannabe Penumbra" seems more like it. I'll take the original any day myself, but don't recall the 3D being that bad honestly.

Speaking of the sequel and secrets and derpy, ever tried to

Spoiler

inhale too much of that gas in that underground lab/cave/mine place?

They had a knack for incorporating secret/optional/easter-egg'ish stuff that was actually meaningful and worked really well I thought (apart from the "you found a secret" popups, which were kinda annoying... I guess the success of Steam had something to do with that).

 

[Jaesun]

Interesting. I really like this series.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Dark Lineage came out before Amnesia, "wannabe Penumbra" seems more like it. I'll take the original any day myself, but don't recall the 3D being that bad honestly..

Huh... I dun goofed.

I think it would be fair to say that adventure game nerds probably didn't have hardware good enough to run stuff like DW2 at the time. I remember it running like crap on decent hardware.

They really didn't utilize 3D freedom gameplay-wise. DW1 looks/plays much better too.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

So I decided to try this version out. The options menu has widescreen resolutions available and document text no longer gets cut off when going above 4:3 resolutions. They also included a new chromatic aberration filter in graphics settings... This and noise may seem immersive for some, but I hate that shit (i'm looking at you Outlast!). At least you can disable this stuff here.

 

[Jools]

?

 

[Zombra]

I got this free somewhere and have been hankering for a good horror game. Worth playing? A review I read said that with no guidance there's a lot of frustration, pixel hunting, and brute forcing puzzles. Was the guy just dumb or was there some justice in this analysis? Would it be best to play with a walkthrough close to hand, or can a reasonably below average intelligence have fun with it "cold"? Your thoughts below.

 

[Anthedon]

I got this free somewhere and have been hankering for a good horror game. Worth playing? A review I read said that with no guidance there's a lot of frustration, pixel hunting, and brute forcing puzzles. Was the guy just dumb or was there some justice in this analysis? Would it be best to play with a walkthrough close to hand, or can a reasonably below average intelligence have fun with it "cold"? Your thoughts below.

Both games have you searching documents for clues by underlining certain passages. This can be pretty frustrating as it's not always entirely clear what is important in a text (underlining everything doesn't work ofc, you have to be pretty specific). That aside, the games are great Lovecraftian adventures when it comes to the atmosphere/writing/etc. Probably the best since the Call of Cthulhu stuff from the 90's.

 

[Zombra]

Tried it last night. Had to look up how to open an envelope with a letter opener.

USE LETTER OPENER
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO USE THE LETTER OPENER ON?
ENVELOPE
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WITH THE ENVELOPE?
USE LETTER OPENER ON ENVELOPE
I DON'T SEE AN ENVELOPE HERE.

Then there was the crooked painting on the wall I wanted to check out, but I wasn't permitted to until I looked at a photograph of that same painting taken during a time when the painting was not crooked. I appreciate what they're trying to do, showing the detective figuring out why the painting is significant, but man! is the whole game like this? A constant battle just to be allowed to interact with it?

OK OK, I'm big enough to overlook an annoying interface for the sake of a strong story, but 30 minutes into the game I'd already found about 20 pages of dry documents to read, most of which I assume is for "flavor" as none of it seems related to what I'm supposed to be doing. A deluge of trivia is the opposite of strong storytelling. I'm happy to do some reading in a game, but front-loading that much filler in a story I'm not invested in yet makes for a pretty weak start.

HEY DUDE, HERE'S 8 PAGES OF LOCAL FOLKLORE TO READ. AND A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT SOME EARTHQUAKE. AND A HOMICIDE REPORT FILLED WITH TINY DETAILS ABOUT A TANGENTIAL CASE. DON'T WORRY, THE GAME WILL START REALLY SOON, I PROMISE. NOW GET READING! OR JUST IGNORE IT ALL - TOO BAD IF YOU GO PAST SOME PLOT-CRITICAL CLUE THAT YOU HAVE TO SPECIFICALLY CLICK ON TO PROCEED.

This stuff is the "trash combat" of adventure games. Why am I doing this? Is all this clutter supposed to intrigue me?

Really seems like the kind of game where I'm not solving puzzles most of the time, so much as blundering around trying to figure out where the puzzles even are, clicking through the same clues and environments looking for a combination I missed. Guess I'll search my office again! Still nothing! Time to slowly click through to some other room I've already searched 4 times! I applaud games that demand reading comprehension, but sifting through mountains of vague irrelevance looking for something that matters is not my idea of a good time.

tl;dr: Keep it concise.