Dark Fall: Lost Souls

I have a soft spot for games built by a single person working in the dark, and Dark Fall: Lost Souls is almost uncomfortably literal about that origin. Jonathan Boakes wrote it, designed it, programmed it, voiced several of its characters, and co-composed its soundtrack, all while working alone. That solitude bleeds through every corridor of the derelict Dowerton Station and Hotel. The place does not feel like a game level. It feels like somewhere nobody was supposed to stay. You play as The Inspector, a disgraced former officer who tampered with evidence in the disappearance of a child named Amy Haven and has never moved past it. Returning to the site of his failure on the anniversary of Amy's vanishing, he finds the buildings further decayed, stranger, and distinctly unwilling to let him leave cleanly. The structure is built around freeing a series of trapped souls, the hotel's long-dead guests, each imprisoned by a creature called a Life Leech. Every ghost has a story you piece together through objects, timeslips, and dialogue, and the act of freeing them one by one gives the game a satisfying rhythm that its contemporaries in the horror-adventure space often fumble. The timeslip mechanic, where a room physically shifts you back into 1947 mid-exploration, is used with genuine restraint. It never outstays its welcome. The whole thing runs on point-and-click movement across static, 360-degree panoramic scenes, close in spirit to classic Myst-style exploration. Your main tool is The Inspector's mobile phone, which doubles as a flashlight for the many unlit sections, a save system, a difficulty toggle, and a message inbox where a mysterious contact named Echo drops cryptic guidance. The environmental detail is exceptional for a solo production: scissor-covered walls, children's drawings, mannequins in the dark, flickering bulbs over empty platforms. The sound design, co-crafted with Matt Clark and scored with Ben Gammons, is the game's single greatest achievement. Play this with headphones and expect to pause more than once. Where it stumbles is where single-developer adventure games often stumble: puzzle logic that lives entirely inside the designer's head. Some solutions require a leap of inference that no amount of note-taking fully prepares you for, and the game does not log clues for you automatically. If you drift away for a few days, returning cold to a half-solved puzzle sequence can be genuinely frustrating. Steam's user reception sits at a mixed 62%, and that number mostly reflects players who wanted genre comfort and hit obscurity instead. Critics were warmer, landing it a Metacritic aggregate of 75, with Adventure Gamers giving it Best Sound and Best First-Person Adventure for its release year. The story itself is somewhat impressionistic rather than tightly plotted, which reads as atmospheric to some and vague to others. If you treat Lost Souls as a horror atmosphere piece that happens to have puzzles rather than a puzzle game that happens to have horror, the experience holds up. It is compact, it knows how it wants to end, and the dual-ending finale carries more weight than the threadbare interface suggests it should. This is a game made by someone who genuinely loves this place, and that love is visible in every peeling wall and whisper in the static.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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