Leadlight

This is a horror game with rpg elements including random combat. And it is a good one. There are lots of puzzles but they are all sensible, and the atmosphere is scary. The game comes with a very detailed user manual and hint sheet so you should be able to get through. Regarding combat, the game was fair, though I had to die a lot before choosing the right strategy. I did have some trouble near the end though, where multiple enemies were present at the same time. As a result I ended up with very few hitpoints left for the final battle, and so I had to save and restore a lot during that final battle. Despite that, it was a very good game with scary horror sequences.

About running the game:(Spoiler - click to show) I had feared that I would have to play around with emulator settings etc. to get the game working, but all I had to do was to download the windows version and double-click on an icon. Then the game was up and running. I can imagine that the mac-version is just as easy to run.

Certainly recommended.

This is a game where you battle zombies one at a time. The violence level is similar to The Walking Dead.

There is an RPG element which can be difficult, but this is balanced by the fact that you can use careful planning to give yourself higher chances of success. This basically turns battles into gating puzzles where you have a random chance of occasionally getting into a much further place than you usually would.

The emulator was much less of a pain than I imagined; I just downloaded the folder and clicked once and there I was.

Fans of One Eye Open will like this setting and story, and vice versa.

As soon as I'm given the basic premise of Leadlight I feel at home. I'm a teenage girl at a spooky ballet school? This must be Dario Argento's Suspiria. While it is not, in fact, a recreation of Argento's masterpiece, this familiar setting is enough to be content that we're in for a gore-splattered ride, and Clarke does not disappoint.

There are several instant-death spots, which will cost you final points to undo, so it is wise to save often - these, however, are good for adding the suspense factor that horror films do so well: if I hear a noise and proceed, will it be turn out to be innocent or will it be certain doom? The writing is mostly functional, rather than particularly pretty, but it keeps one going, and I never felt stuck for motivation. The back-story is also intriguing, if very much in the canonical horror style, and including a system of scoring for secrets found was a good impetus to continue poking around.

My main gripes were with the retro-parser: small niggles such as having to type 'examine' instead of 'x', for instance, and some instructions were slightly less intuitive than modern parsers allow for. Implementation was generally decent, however. I also found it somewhat jarring that while using a retro platform and old-school parser, Clarke lays out a world with iPods and iMacs - it would have been more fitting to place the action in the 1980s or before.

Unfortunately, I got stuck (Spoiler - click to show)going into the leadlight door, where every action I tried got me killed. However, the time spent playing before running into this wall was most enjoyable, and the game deserves a strong score for its fun factor.

When I first heard of this game, I felt celebratory. Someone made a game for the Apple II! Yes! There's even special IIGS features! So, I reacquainted myself with the pain of getting files from the interweb on to my IIGS, and some time later, I was ready to roll. The game installed on a single 3.5". While not quite as nostalgic as a 5.25" on which I played Zork and Adventure, it'd have to do.

Then, disappointment struck. The game was in 40 columns, instead of 80? The room description displayed every time you did something, like the all-time king of suck, The Mist? Oh noooo. I grit my teeth and played on.

It turns out that the game is a strange mix of technical competence and storytelling meh. Leadlight uses some kind of handrolled system, and that increases my respect for the programmer quite a bit. However, this system suffers from the fatal two-word parser disease. The color-changing background to match your status (only on the IIGS?) is a nice touch. The main menu, the ability to save games, and so forth demonstrate that the system was well-thought through and gives players the usual fundamentals. I especially appreciate the warning screen at the beginning; it's only fair to let players know what they are in for. Good job, for the most part.

Now, about the meh. The storytelling is ok, I suppose; it's not literary and it's not campy-disposable. However, it's not very revealing about the monsters that you face, and as a result, it's not frighting. The reason why you're at a private boarding school and your melencholy/disturbed nature is a gold mine to lay on the atmosphere and the psychological insights, but that opportunity was passed by. Overall, the impact is not even leaden. It's just present the way that a ham sandwich is present. Even the RPG-ish battles felt lackluster.

Now if this was all there was to Leadlight, then I'd walk away with a feeling of discontent; however, one item propelled my discontent into full-bore anger: the deathtraps. Leadight is a game where you *must* save early and save often, because the nonsensical deathtraps will get you every time. The warnings you receive are cryptic and compel further investigation, but you'd better not investigate, because then you'll die. That sucks. It all started to remind me of the bad DMs I had played with who delighted in punishing players through such devices, and a whole host of lame MUDs I'd played on. The rage and the disappointment I'd much rather forget, but this game brought it all back.

Upon realizing the pain that was in store for me, I gave Leadlight the old heave-ho.

When I found out that I had to install an Apple II emulator to play this game, my enthusiasm immediately waned. Partly just because one is lazy: why would I want to install an emulator when I already have Gargoyle? But mostly because the need for such an interpreter suggests that the authors wants to appeal to Apple II nostalgia, and I have no nostalgia for old computers -- certainly not for the Apple II, which I have never seen, but not for old computers in general. Computers simply get better, so why would I want to re-experience the glory of my first 1024x768 monitor, Pentium computer and constantly crashing Windows 1995? Or the even older and more dubious glory of my Tulip 286 with Hercules graphics adapter? And it's not just computers that got better; computer games got better as well. Oh, some of the oldies are still good (I replayed the 1996 game Heroes of Might and Magic 2 not long ago, which was excellent and made me realise what is wrong with the single player campaign design of all its successors). But in general, a game made in 2010 is simply better than a game made in 2000, which in turn is better than a game made in 1990.

But, somehow, Leadlight is fun. The limitations of the tiny Apple 2 screen might seem prohibitive, but Wade Clarke responds by writing terse prose that would simply look bad in a modern interpreter but just works here. It's all like (not an actual quotation):

Natasha is one of the brightest girls in your class. Sometimes, you admire her. She is trying to kill you with an ax.

Highly imaginative horror game that takes place in a girl's school.

I played this game with a friend while driving on a cross-country trip, with her reading the output and then us discussing the commands. For that purpose, this game was *absolutely delightful*, and maybe the highlight of the entire car trip. Would I have enjoyed it as much if I had played it on my own? Probably not. To be honest, I think I would have been turned off by some aspects of the random combat system and the prose at the beginning. Which would have been too bad, as there is a lot to this game and it repays getting into it. So, if you are in the mood to approach a horror game with a bemused and open spirit, this game could be great fun. Otherwise, you might want to wait for that mood to strike before taking this on.