The Stack

There’s a clunkiness to interacting with Dark Fall. It’s mostly just the clunkiness endemic to Macromedia Director mystlikes, of waving the cursor around to look for hotspots, and of not being sure whether clicking on a journal page will turn the page or close the journal. But it’s also got some clunkiness all its own as well.

Mainly it’s about hotspots going away. Let’s say you find a desk. You click on the desk and it goes to a close-up view from which you see a drawer. Click on the drawer and it opens, without leaving that view. When you’re finished looking in the drawer, you might try to back out to the main view of the room, only to discover that you can’t. As long as the drawer is open, the hotspot to leave the desk is gone. You have to close the drawer first. Most games of this sort would let you back out and, as a consequence, close the drawer automatically (by forgetting that it was open). Even weirder, there’s one close-up view I’ve seen where there are two drawers visible, and you can only open one at a time. If you open the left drawer, you have to close it in order to open the right drawer.

It makes it seem like most things are modeled simply as a graph. Moving from place to place in an adventure game usually means moving between nodes of a graph, and in a first-person game with discrete and unmoving camera positions, each camera position is a node on a graph, including the close-up view of the desk. But here, opening a drawer or examining a newspaper also moves you to a new node on the same graph, no different from walking into another room. Not everything is modeled this way; there exist a few machines and combination locks with multiple twiddlable controls. But they’re pretty sparse.

One other peculiar thing about the UI: its treatment of inventory. There is some small number of inventory items displayed at the top of the screen, which I suppose means it’s not a pure mystlike, but then, neither was Myst by that standard. And there are environmental objects that are clearly flagged as things you use inventory items on — when the cursor is over them, it changes into a stylized wrench. But the UI doesn’t support clicking on that wrench area with an inventory item. Instead, you just click on an item in your inventory, and if it has a use from your current camera position, it will be used. The wrench cursor looks like it’s a hotspot highlight, but it’s not. Perhaps this is another example of the graph-node mindset. Even the inventory is treated as links you can click on to transition to a different node.