Also carried over from the original game is the inventory interface. A special hotspot (in the shape of a wrench) indicates when an item can be used, and simply clicking on the proper object utilizes it. It's unusual, but works for the most part, though it can lead to random clicking when it's not obvious what use a particular hotspot represents.

That's not usually a problem, though. In reality there aren't that many puzzles in the game, and those you'll encounter are both logical and well-embedded into the game world. There's a reason that some doors are locked with codes, and the solutions are usually to be found in the most likely of places. Most of the gameplay is spent in pure exploration—learning the rules of the strange worlds Parker finds himself in—and then applying what you've learned.

From the beginning, Lights Out seems to have a more concerted effort towards a single, strong narrative than The Journal. Most of the original's story was told via a loose web of information: diaries, notes, letters, computer files. While the station contained several sets of stories, spread over the entire history of the site, the main character remained something of a cypher—an anonymous observer whose only connection was the fact that one of the station's visitors was his or her brother.

By putting the player in the shoes of Parker, the game immediately gains a sense of context that the first Dark Fall lacked. But in continuing that context, it may have lost some of the open-endedness that made the first game so great. Having played the game, I have to say that while there are some wonderful moments gained from this change, I'm not certain it was worth the price.

The initial portions of the game are the most frustrating: completely linear and generally confined to two small areas (the village and the lighthouse), which are, in turn, connected by a one-way road. Parker encounters his benefactor, who tells him that the lighthouse has gone out and he must find out what happened. The NPC is handled in an interesting way, from a technical perspective. Rather than dealing with the technology to lip-synch voices, the author has simply placed the character's mouth out of view. The extreme close-up is rather disconcerting, but fits with the initial claustrophobic setting.

The next paragraph reveals some minor spoilers about the beginning of the game. Those of you who wish to enter the world of Lights Out untainted may wish to skip it.

As the game opens, Parker heads to the lighthouse and encounters a set of puzzles that must be solved before the game can continue. I was incredibly disappointed at this point, thinking that Boakes had decided to change the wide-open nature of the first game. After jumping through several hoops, Parker finds himself at the lighthouse on Fetch Rock in the year 2004. The lighthouse has been converted into a museum, centered around what happened that night in 1912—events that you, the player, have just experienced. For me, this part of the game worked incredibly well. I felt a sense of anger and frustration and, for a moment, I was Parker, ill-used by history. It was amazing to walk through a museum about myself, reading about my background, and what various historians thought of me and the mystery of the place.

As the game progresses, the game finally opens up in the way that the original game did, with puzzles, information and stories being presented over a wide range of locations. Each time a new section opens, the game gets subsequently larger and the background more detailed, revealing such diverse locations as an extensive underwater research complex and a primitive settlement. But again, I'm not certain that this expansion was worth the price. While the railway station of Dark Fall was small, it was consistent and coherent. The restaurant was beside the inn, which was, in turn, part of the station. In expanding the game to include such diverse locales, the game loses something of its consistency. The new areas became something like the Ages of Myst - interesting in and of themselves, but not feeling like a coherent whole. Worse, it's this expansion that ultimately affects how scary the game is. The first Dark Fall felt real, immersing me to the point that when the lights went out and the voices started, I squirmed in my chair. The surreal time travel of Lights Out distanced me from the action to the point that when the scary moments arrived, it simply felt like one more weird thing that was happening.

I also found the story's climax and ultimate resolution to be disappointing. Where the first game left several important questions unanswered, Boakes attempts to jump genres from pure 'haunted (light)house' to science-fiction in his explanation for the happenings at Fetch Rock. Fans of the second genre may enjoy the shift, but in the end the storyline didn't work for me, particularly since the story's "scientific" explanations felt rather vague. In all honesty, I would have preferred an unexplained mystery.

Lights Out is very much a sophomore work, an artist's attempt to expand his repertoire while still trying to hold on to the magic that made his first effort so great. Some of Boakes' experiments work wonderfully; those first few moments on Fetch Rock in 2004 were incredibly immersive and strange and exploring the same location throughout its long, twisted history was a great experience. But ultimately, the new directions the game goes in dilute the qualities that made the first Dark Fall so great, and it ends up being much less immediate, real and frightening than its predecessor. Still, this slightly lesser Dark Fall still contains a deeply realized world that's definitely worth the effort of exploring.