This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.
Receiving a letter from an abandoned manor you find yourself at the centre of a mystery involving the house’s occupants, all dead long ago but their souls remain trapped. A supernatural entity controls the house and won’t let the spirits of the innocent people go. You must solve the mystery of Darkfall Manor and face this destructive entity if you are to free the souls who are at Grimm’s mercy. If you do not you will spend eternity as a lost spirit gripped within the hands of total evil!
Curse at Twilight: Thief of Souls (2012) is the kind of game you’ve seen before and seen again still. It follows the “sent to a haunted house and must solve quest so spirits can be free” template a little too well. The story lacks an identity of its own. It’s good then that everything else is more or less spot on. Each door in the manor’s corridor leads to a new themed world. The one I found was most successful in creating an atmosphere was Scarecrow Alley, a 19th century London style street where you have to solve a murder. In any other game with a better overall plot this diversion would be a nuisance but it provides at least something unique to Curse at Twilight. The graphics look as lovely as you’d expect from a game of this era and the music isn’t too bad with the Pirate world’s music most interesting in terms of being both haunting and having melancholy. Music library studio wins again! One criticism of the production values is that due to the budget the voice work doesn’t cover all the characters with only Isabelle and Sarah getting a (albeit cheesy) voice over, both characters voiced by veteran VO actress Melissa Hutchison. It does beg the question why bother? Hidden object screens come in three types: list, riddle and replace. A hint system is also available to use. The hub world ends up being the corridor with locked doors but thankfully backtracking is kept to a minimum as the game allows you to track your progress on a map and use that to return to various locations. The puzzles can be tricky at times as even with certain clues or using the hint system it’s not always clear what you have to do next. However, the puzzles for the most part are fine. The obligatory ‘Collector’s Edition’ wasn’t too bad, offering a much needed walkthrough guide, bonus gameplay integrated into the main game, wallpaper, the game’s soundtrack as well as concept art. By far the Collector’s Edition ends up the best version of the game to buy. Curse at Twilight leaves itself open for a sequel which never arrived; no doubt that sneaky Grimm is behind all this…
While there isn’t anything particularly wrong with Curse at Twilight: Thief of Souls with so many other titles available it’s hard to recommend. It follows the tropes of the “free the spirits” story too much for its own good. This would be at the time of typing the last HOPA put out by Amaranth Games. They had dabbled in the genre a couple of times and this effort wasn’t seen as enough of a success financially so the small team lead by Amanda Finch went back to what they did best: RPGS. The company would eventually close a couple of years later in 2015. As seen so often it’s tough for indie developers to leave their own mark on the genre and garner attention for it; which is a shame as the development team show promise here.… Expand
