In Pursuit Of Loath Nolder: The Darkness Within Review

**WARNING. MILD SPOILERS AHEAD.**

The last time a game gave me nightmares, I was 14 years old. I had just played halfway through The Blair Witch Project: Rustin Parr, and I woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming of being stranded in a haunted monochrome forest.

Needless to say, I’m a bit of a poon when it comes to getting frightened by movies and games. This in mind, though, it’s been quite some time since a horror-themed game has come around that could really rattle my cage.

But now, 8 years later, I’m happy to say that I have once again shat the proverbial bed thanks to Zoetrope Interactive’s adventure game, In Pursuit of Loath Nolder: The Darkness Within. OK, I may not have made pee-pants, but I definitely dreamt of a lot of creepy skulls that night – way more than the usual amount.

Darkness Within is a game about madness, about the uncanny, and about what happens when extraordinarily weird and shitty things happen to a good person. You play as Howard Loreid, a  detective in the sleepy rural countryside of England, who is tasked with hunting down Loath Nolder, (a man with the fakest-sounding name imaginable) who has escaped from a mental asylum. During the course of the game you will break into houses, witness a suicide, do drugs and go pretty much insane.

Darkness Within utilizes CPAGE (Complete Panoramic Game Engine), which was developed by Zoetrope Interactive, and looks and plays in the grand tradition of first-person puzzle-solvers such as Myst. Fortunately, however, Darkness Within is less driven by obscure puzzles than it is by its intensely dark and interesting story.

That’s not to say that Darkness Within is bereft of puzzles. There’s the stock offerings of swively locks, gears that need to be aligned, and other intricate and overly complex obstacles that prevent you from opening doors in any simple fashion. For the most part, Darkness Within plays completely logically. At other times, it can be a mothertrucking pain in bedonk. The main culprit here lies in the creative, albeit mentally exasperating “inventory” section, which is split between the grid of objects that Howard is carrying, and the metaphysical sandbox section entitled, “Howard’s mind.” In this latter section, the player chooses between a number of thoughts that are stored in his psyche, and has to combine the right thoughts in order to access plot-advancing information and revelations.

For example, Howard might have one thought that says, “I really have to drop a deuce” and another thought that says, “there’s a public toilet in the back of a Starbucks on 9^th Street.” By dragging and clicking these two thoughts into the “thought/item combiner,” and clicking “combine,” you would thereby be treated to the story-propelling realization that, “Howard should make a dookie-stop in the back of the Starbucks on 9^th street.”

The ostensible goal of this “thought” system in the game is to make the player feel even more connected to Howard. Most of the time, however, it only serves to distance the player from the protagonist. Some of the necessary thought combinations needed to advance the storyline are so vague and loosely correlated that you are left wondering how the hell Howard could even make the slightest inference based on co-examining the two ideas. At other times, the player will hear a piece of dialogue or read a document in the game that leads to a sudden realization of an important connection, while Howard remains blissfully clueless of the event’s significance until you combine the proper thoughts for him.

Although the “thought” implementation doesn’t pan out as the developers planned, the game doubtlessly succeeds in making me feel attached to Howard’s character and emotions. In terms of immersion and empathy for Howard’s plight, Darkness Within hits the nail on the head: you can literally feel the madness and confusion that Howard Loreid begins to experience.

Loreid may be a cop, but he’s exceedingly human, which makes the strange and inhuman events that he begins to experience all the more haunting and disturbing. He’s not some chiseled, square-jawed, squint-eyed renegade police man with a lit cigar clenched between his teeth. He’s a normal sounding middle aged police officer who lives alone, doesn’t have that many friends, and enjoys poetry and Easy Listening music. He’s very susceptible to fear, and just like any normally instinctive person, feels intensely uncomfortable being alone in the dark in strange, damp places.

You’ll even play through a mental breakdown in which Howard has to be hospitalized. In one particularly poignant part of the game, following his hospitalization and release, the game shows a rare third-person perspective of Howard lying pathetically in the bed of his small apartment, dazed, medicated, haunted, and alone. He asks, “what’s happening to me?” and doesn’t even have the strength to pick up the phone when he receives a call.

In dark creepy places, where strange noises are heard, Howard may say, “I’ve got to get out of here right now!” or “I don’t want to stay here for another minute!” Combined with the game’s first-person perspective, this character trait and gameplay tactic ends up making the experience much creepier for the gamer. Have you ever been trespassing or out in a creepy place at night with your friends when you were little? At the peak of adrenaline, when your buddy whispered, “Dude! This is too freaky! Run!” then you can bet your reaction was to get the fuck out of there and not hang around another second.

When Howard experiences surreal and horrific events, he doesn’t just spit out a toothpick, reload his shotgun and growl, “somebody better give me some fuckin’ answers!” Rather, far more realistically, his grip on reality starts to crumble along with his psyche.

The game opens with a very well chosen quote from H.P. Lovecraft (the author whose stories greatly inspired the game): “men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal.”

This quote encapsulates the entire mystique of Darkness Within. This is an ingeniously crafted game with loads of detail painstakingly embedded into its storyline. If you replay the game after you complete it the first time, then reevaluate and dig deeper into Loreid’s case, you find that there is exactly as much evidence supporting the idea that Loreid is simply going insane as there is evidence that the horrible beings and visions that Loreid encounters may actually be real.

The true mark of Darkness Within’s success is that both of these possible explanations are equally terrifying. Howard may or not be truly losing his sanity, but regardless of the truth behind his circumstances, his life is irrevocably ruined. He has done and seen things that render his past life, identity, and personality impossible to return to. That right there is the Horror genre’s most potent weapon and its scariest prospect: its ability to make comforting normalcy inaccessible, for both the character and the player.

Go check out this fantastic game right now, and prepare to wake up screaming in your own warm ectoplasmic residue.

Stay tuned for news on the upcoming sequel: Dark Lineage.