Ah, here we are with yet another series of games that I had never heard of before receiving an email about it from a PR contact of mine. The Lost Crown is a PC adventure/mystery game that was originally released by Darkling Room in 2008. The game has received generally-positive feedback on Steam, but fans were hankering for more. Well, on October 29, a bridge game (taking place before their upcoming full sequel The Last Crown: Blackenrock) was released which tells a short 3-4 hour story within the town of Saxton in England.

I’ve only played around an hour total of Midnight Horror, but so far my opinion of this game is pretty favorable. I enjoy the black-and-white presentation the game has, where only certain items are colored. It’s odd, yet it works pretty well for the tone the game wants to set (and in some ways, I think about Betrayer and how that game had an option for black-and-white play). The cast is memorable, quirky, and entertaining. The dialogue is well-delivered. And what I’ve seen so far of the puzzles the game has, they are enjoyable and make sense.

In a world of faced-paced games, this one might not be everyone’s cup of tea. If you are a fan of point-and-click puzzlers like Myst and The Seventh Guest, or if you enjoyed third-person horror games with a good story (though this one is more of a horror-themed mystery), then I think you’ll be right at home with Midnight Horror.

One thing is clear to me, though: while you can enjoy this game without having played the 2008 prequel, I would recommend that if you like what you see here you track down The Lost Crown on Steam. It’d probably give you a nice perspective and give some more depth to the characters seen in this one and the upcoming Blackenrock.

The one thing I find odd about the game is its 4:3 presentation (the game natively wants to render in a 1280×960 window), but this could provide more of a feel of watching the events from CCTV cameras (if that was the intent?). Other than that, I do feel like the menus could be a bit more navigable (or perhaps some documentation that explained how to play the game could have been included), because I spent around 20 minutes trying to find the inventory screen in the game, only discovering it by accident when I moused over the bottom-left of the window. Odd, right?

Anyway, as of this article, Midnight Horror is $4.99 USD on Steam.

I’ve enjoyed the game so far, so I’d rate it as:

“GOOD”