Tweet
Gloom with a view.
The concept for this eerie WiiWare puzzler could have come straight from a meeting of the Silent Hill school board. Our young hero - described as "emo" in the game blurb, thus saving us the effort of establishing his character - is trapped in school. At night. Oh, and the school is haunted, infested even, by a strange malignant darkness. Contact with the dark results in immediate death, as spectral hands claw through the murky miasma and pull him to his doom. There are 30 rooms of nocturnal menace to negotiate before escaping, and working out how to keep the shadows at bay forms the core of the gameplay.
Viewed from a top-down perspective, your resources are limited. To begin with, you just have a torch. Now, logically speaking, this should make things a doddle - simply point the beam of light in front of you and start walking. Having created this apparently challenge-free situation, the game then immediately bends its own reality to stop you exploiting the obvious. Yes, you can use a torch, but you can't use its light to create a safe haven from the dark.
Instead you must rely on whatever objects are in the room, using your torch to locate useful items but not to reach them. A desk lamp, for instance, creates a pool of radiance when switched on. Find slingshot ammunition and you can switch to an over-the-shoulder aiming view to break a window, letting in a shaft of much-needed light. Televisions and computers can also be used to create smaller, sometimes unreliable safe-zones. Should your torch battery run low, you must recharge it by shaking the remote - a fairly perfunctory and intrusive use of motion sensing that adds nothing to the game but inconvenience.
Read more...
More...
The concept for this eerie WiiWare puzzler could have come straight from a meeting of the Silent Hill school board. Our young hero - described as "emo" in the game blurb, thus saving us the effort of establishing his character - is trapped in school. At night. Oh, and the school is haunted, infested even, by a strange malignant darkness. Contact with the dark results in immediate death, as spectral hands claw through the murky miasma and pull him to his doom. There are 30 rooms of nocturnal menace to negotiate before escaping, and working out how to keep the shadows at bay forms the core of the gameplay.
Viewed from a top-down perspective, your resources are limited. To begin with, you just have a torch. Now, logically speaking, this should make things a doddle - simply point the beam of light in front of you and start walking. Having created this apparently challenge-free situation, the game then immediately bends its own reality to stop you exploiting the obvious. Yes, you can use a torch, but you can't use its light to create a safe haven from the dark.
Instead you must rely on whatever objects are in the room, using your torch to locate useful items but not to reach them. A desk lamp, for instance, creates a pool of radiance when switched on. Find slingshot ammunition and you can switch to an over-the-shoulder aiming view to break a window, letting in a shaft of much-needed light. Televisions and computers can also be used to create smaller, sometimes unreliable safe-zones. Should your torch battery run low, you must recharge it by shaking the remote - a fairly perfunctory and intrusive use of motion sensing that adds nothing to the game but inconvenience.
Read more...
More...