Last Half of Darkness

It was 1991 and I was sitting in a room with a sheet over the window because it was thirty degrees outside, and I voluntarily launched a game that was supposed to give me goosebumps. Last Half of Darkness from SoftLab Laboratories pulled it off despite the fact that there was minimal graphics on screen by today's standards.

You're the heir to a manor after your deceased aunt. It sounds like the opening of a cheap horror rental from the video store, and that's exactly the feeling the game intentionally builds. No big story in cutscenes — the backstory was hidden in the included text manual, so anyone who didn't read it could feel somewhat lost. Today those files are part of the distribution on archive servers, so you can track them down. It's worth a few minutes.

Gameplay stands on the classic point-and-click adventure with VGA graphics that certainly didn't look like an art exhibition back then, but knew how to create atmosphere. Static screens with meticulously drawn rooms, a minimalist interface, and most importantly silence interrupted by sounds that Sound Blaster delivered with strange conviction. Logical puzzles aren't overly brutal, rather conventional — you collect items, combine them, move forward. You can die, and sometimes quite unexpectedly. Save your game.

What keeps the game in memory isn't so much the mechanical side as the artistic and sound design. SoftLab Laboratories was a small studio and Last Half of Darkness was born almost as a garage project — and yet, or perhaps because of that, it has the right kind of unpleasant intensity that big studios rarely nailed back then. The graphics aged exactly as you'd expect from VGA adventures — pixels are pixels — but the dark color palette works even today. What I can't forgive, however, is the sometimes unclear logic of the puzzles. A few solutions are just brutally unintuitive and without a guide you won't figure them out without tearing your hair out.

Today the game will appeal to fans of old horror adventures — those who ran Alone in the Dark back in the nineties or flipped through Sierra game manuals. You can run it in a browser via DOSBox on archive.org without any problems. Half an hour to explore, an hour if you get a bit lost, two hours if that weird atmosphere grabs you and you want to see it through to the end. It's not a masterpiece, but an honest horror adventure from a time when choosing the right colors and sounds was enough — and the player filled in the rest in their own head.