Missed Classic 122 - The Last Half of Darkness II (1992)

Written by Morpheus Kitami

It's October again, or close enough as makes no difference, and you know what that means. Horror games.

Come, let us stare inquisitively at skeletons

We've got a suitably creepy selection of games this year, starting off with continuing the saga of The Last Half of Darkness. William R. Fisher's long-running series of horror adventure games, which at this point had had been sort of abandoned for two years while he did Nine Lives of Secret Agent Katt. This, incidentally, marks the last time he would release an EGA game, making these three games fit together more thematically than his later titles.

Fisher, incidentally, seems to be somewhat infamous in his distaste of this game and the third game in the series. Whether this is because he genuinely dislikes them or because over the years people have taken to asking him about games he hasn't sold in decades is left as an exercise to the reader. At least that's what I'm able to grok from where he's mentioned online.

One complaint I have right off the bat is that you have to delete the game's configuration file before you can change settings. And for some reason, the guy who uploaded this game to the internet decided, hey, you know what's fun? Playing a point and click adventure game with the keyboard! I guess it wouldn't be terrible if it weren't so slow moving the cursor around. I should probably glad he didn't decide to whip out his joystick instead...

This is just the logo from the first game, but with the roman numeral II slowly doing a spray effect in. That's a San Diego area code btw, which tracks with what I know of the guy.

A staticy voice rings out over the title screen, welcoming me to the last half of darkness. Less creepy and more really low bitrate.

Last time, my aunt, a witch, had died under mysterious circumstance. The terms of my inheritance required me to continue her work in the field of magic, creating a potion she failed to complete before she died. I go in, somehow don't die thanks to the many, many ghosts that seem to inhabit my aunt's mansion, and complete the potion, a resurrection potion which brings back to life a girl who was in my aunt's mansion. Who was only dead to begin with because my aunt had a golem/zombie in her attic and apparently couldn't be bothered to tell anyone. Not that I would know that, since the only way to discover said golem/zombie is to die by the golem/zombie.

If it is the same tree, I didn't take a screenshot of it then

Anyway, after resurrecting her in my aunt's secret dungeon, the two of us run away from yet more monsters in my aunt's house. The game begins with me waking up after blacking out. Somehow, the girl I resurrected has gotten separated from me, and now I'm in...uh...some other part of the house, that we couldn't reach last time. That seems to be the tree over the grave I dug up last time, so I'm not really sure on the spatial relations going on here. I can also only go down, which, if you remember what I just said, would likely lead to a dungeon I just escaped from. In which me and the girl ran from because more monsters were coming after us.

I can't do anything to that boarded up door yet, but there's a book in the bookcase, which is 498 pages of scribbles I can't recognize. The first page notes that it's Frank's book and presumably I find the page that has actual info on it later. I also start with a torch, I don't know why.

Going down leads me to the dungeons...which I just escaped from. The ladder I climbed down is apparently not too sturdy, but I can't do anything to it. I pass by a room with a red glow because I played the last game and know something terrible is going to happen there, and end up here. Just another passage, except for how the second I got here a voice cried out for help. Like an actual voice and not just the game saying there was one. That was pretty creepy. I suspect it's either a trap or my missing companion.

I guess I should go over this game's features, even though it hasn't really changed much. There's the screen on the left, the game world itself. Inventory in which various items slowly fill up the box, exits which show where I can go. (Assuming it's visible) The name of the location in the upper left. My commands on the right, and text on the bottom.

Next screen over, I find a stake. If you guessed there's a vampire in this game, well, I'm going to hope you haven't already played this game or seen the screenshot in which a vampire kills the player.

Doesn't that rather limit the number of people you can talk to? Then again, you are in a dungeon not too far away from a vampire, so intelligence isn't your strong suit.

The dungeon is actually a fairly big, albeit lazily rendered place, with many twisting corridors. Right of that first twist is...a beggar. Under my aunt's house. You know, if this takes place in Louisana like I think it does, I'd be well within my rights to kick this guy out of here for trespassing. I'll just do that after I evict all the vampires and demons squatting here.

I can't hit him. C'mon, you know I had to try it, it just does nothing. If I try talking to him, he speaks, as do my speakers. You know, I have to say, I wasn't expecting this game to have so much dialog, so much voiced dialog. If this is all Bill Fisher, he should have tried to get a job as a voice actor, he's pretty good. Anyway, I don't know his name and I don't have money for him...

Is this a horror game or a fantasy game that ate too much tomato sauce?

Going past him and down, I find myself in the familar blue toned walls of darkness the game is slightly famous for. There's this skeleton I can't do anything with, but gives me the impression that it's used for something later. Travelling down one path, I find this fellow. Despite jerking his sword around, he's not technically hostile. I can walk past him and everything is fine. He doesn't respond to talking.

Not a lot of blood for cutting through my heart.

I can hit him, and he performs a highly skilled feat of violence. Couldn't have him cut me in half or cut my head off, he has to somehow cut my heart open? Whatever.

 I suppose it's possible there are ghosts floating around here who don't want to kill me...

Going past him is a room with three exits, including one into a barred area with eyes looking out. Meanwhile, if I walk in, no eyes to be seen. If I'm a schmuck I can open that coffin, but there's only a weird snake creature in there, really lame looking. I can't even take a skeleton.

The final exit down here leads to a room with a skeleton lady in a chair and some books. If I try to take the books, she gets up. If I try to talk to her, nothing happens. I can't even hit her. If I walk in and out, she seems to disappear. So I try to take the books again.

It's easier to draw a creepy face than a woman with severed arms in her hands

Only for her to then kill me. Really? Why is her hair coming out of her eye and nose? This would be a lot creepier if this wasn't done up with the off-kilter spray/pixel effect that you can do in paint programs from around this time. Look unprofessional whenever you see it. Always makes me think of that one shareware fighting game from this time that isn't One Must Fall, that nobody played for more than 5 minutes because it was awkward to play.

There is no other point to this room beyond the skull. That painting is just an unimportant, damaged painting. It looks nice though

Finishing off the dungeon is this room. There's a nice-looking crystal skull here, that the game warns me about taking, so I take it...

Ah, clearly Coktel Vision ripped off this game, what with this game also having no ability to see character's mouths...

...and outside of being a jump scare it's not really scary. Yeah, it's got teeth, but it feels overly try-hard. This apparently links back into the same place I entered, only it works weird.

It's the same dog as the one from the last two games, but with a head in front of it.

I find myself staring at the caretaker again, that I killed for basically no reason last game. He's talking some non-sense...riddle? I die if I try to leave, but it's more or less the same death as the dog from the last game. Well, technically, Bill Fisher forgot to link up the death properly, so you just sort of sit there looking at a dog eating your leg. I guess I need to find three other heads to figure out this riddle? Taste of a ring? What's a food shaped like a ring? A donut? I say it to him and it doesn't work.

Examining the area more carefully, the place I entered the dungeon and the exit from the skull room are different. If I go through the grand gate in the entrance room, I find a corner with a map on it. Which I will never know about, because it asks you to print the map. Really. I can't do that, and I'm not really sure I want to waste the paper anyway.

I suspect this is a recolored version of the axeman from the last game, except shrunk.

So I go back to exploring on the other side, and find myself looking at an orc, possibly zombie looking axeman. I can walk back, but cannot advance, talk or examine to him. He's apparently an unimportant object. I can't even hit the guy...

This is creepier than the actual shot, the guy has a head like a T-bone steak.

I find myself looping around in weird ways. I'm not sure how the game is set up, but clearly the dog is at another t-junction which seems to link back on every area. That leaves the red area. And it's lamer than I thought. There's a vampire, obviously the guy who turned the girls from the last game, and I can open the coffin, walk in and out, and it takes me punching him for him to attack me.

So I use the stake on him. This gets me a purple flute...for which I have no earthly idea. An old purple flute, by the game's description. But another thought occurs to me, what if the beggar is Frank? Aha, he tells me to open the book to page 237 and this nets me a riddle and a dollar, "This page once found should long be forgotten, when opened again the dollar is rotten." It disappears if you open it again. You'd think you give it to Frank, but he says I need it more than him.

I figure out the flute is needed to distract something, and it turns out it was the orc/zombie thing that doesn't kill me. Which would be great, if that got me anything but a key in the path behind him. I haven't seen a lock in this entire game. Well, maybe the dead skeleton, but that seems to be a dead end.

This is somehow the most absurd thing to happen in this game, and that's saying a lot.

So I wander around a bit, not sure what to do. Running out of thoughts, and even trying to burn everything I can with the torch, I decide, well, let's punch that brick wall. And it works. There's the little girl I'm supposed to protect, somehow she got walled up there. How did that happen? She's not able to speak to me right now, but I can just pick her up and walk around with her in my inventory. Is this adventure game logic? And despite being chained up and having a padlock on her, I cannot use the key on her.

This feels like it had a lot more effort put into it than the rest of the game, but maybe that's just because the skull pile is animated pretty well.

At this point, I have no idea what to do. It's at this point that the game begins engaging in what's either a really weird glitch or an early bit of post-modernism in games. I don't know which. I get the idea that maybe I already have everything I need to deal with the dog, since it's a riddle I should be able to figure it out. The game does the usual bit of not properly connecting actions to the dog except the correct one, so clearly I'm missing an item and not a solution. So I try to use the torch on the dog, only that causes the light to go out. This doesn't actually result in my death like you'd expect, as instead I can wander around in the dark by feeling for the exits. Only I can't ever seem to reach an area where I can relight the torch. Considering that some corridors have torches on them, they should be visible.

But what's interesting is that this consistently seems to activate some weird situation where if I reload a save, suddenly I'm in a different room than I saved in. I get one action here, as soon as I do anything, a snake appears out of that pile of bones and begins ripping the meat from my skull, like the other snake. Well, if I try to move, you can't actually do anything else. If I save in this room and then reload that save...the game takes me back to the room I had the save I first loaded the weird room from in. But it all goes to normal after that, as in the save in the trap room is in the trap room, my other save is in the place I saved. I have no idea what to do here, either. I think it's a bit of early post-modernism, because later on I get a glitch where the room half loads, only the snake data and the exit from that room load.

Without any method of advancing, I find a walkthrough, it was a bit hard to find, but it has the answers at least. The area with the dog is actually a trick, the three distinct areas that seem to line up with where the dog spawns sometimes are actually three distinct areas. And this is an actual maze, which, if you don't play via savescumming, means you can't actually look through while you play. It's tedious even following the walkthrough instructions of just going right until you reach a door.

I suppose the only way to figure this out legitimately is to print out the map, but was it really too much to ask for another way of seeing it?

Timaz must be a really powerful witch...

This leads me to the wall of skulls which the caretaker mentioned that I shouldn't know because I have no way of surviving an encounter with him. I don't have anything yet, but this apparently leads outside. Left from there leads to a gypsy fortune teller, after a mysterious voice who tells me she is Madame Timaz. If I talk to her, she gives me this vision. I see we're doing the usual goofy horror thing of suddenly throwing in pirates for no reason. The boatman must be Charon or something, if I'm not supposed to give him money. Okay, I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with the ring since the heads are all the same, supposedly.

"It looks friendly." Have you been playing this game?

Right from the wall of skulls is a room with a pair of pilers and a candle skull, of which I can take the pilers. It's not an important item though, even though it allows me to remove the chains from the little girl. Up from there is this friendly fellow. Yeah, I believe that, he looks like he's going to strip all my bones. But I can't hit him and if I try to talk to him, he tells me 21 is played in the next room and I need to play it to get the ring. Sorry, 21? What American refers to it as 21 instead of Blackjack?

The only flaw in this blackjack I can see is that you can't split 10 cards that aren't of the same face, I.E., not splitting a mix of 10s, jacks, queens and/or kings.

Gather ye round ladies and gentlemen! Tired of getting brutally murdered in your horror games? Well, just take out that money from your wallet and play blackjack with someone who might just be Death himself. Frankly, even the speargun mini-game in Nine Lives of Secret Agent Katt, as thematic as it was, was goofy as heck. This is the entire game going bizarro on us. All I need is to win enough games to get around 50$ or so.

Like, it's competently done, you can even split cards of the same kind, but shouldn't the effort put into this mini-game be put elsewhere? I guess for a competent coder this should take a week or so to make, but that week could have been better spent doing anything else. There's so much here that isn't properly linked up, and all this is just random blackjack. There's not even some psycho gunslinger who demands I do this or get shot.

Friendly ghosts tear apart the fabric of reality, not you.

Afterwards there are now some spooky ghosts outside the blackjack room. Despite the game, these guys are friendly and tell you what words are inscribed on the ring. Outside, which is something I need to say to the skulls after I find the correct one, via trial and error to get outside. I walk across a bridge to see a figure on a river.

Really, you couldn't have slapped in another picture but with a heart in his hand?

So bootleg Charon, you know, this game is getting awfully Uninvited in it's monster designs. Anyway, this guy, like the rest, can't be attacked, I just have to tell him Timaz. There's actually no other way of doing this, since apparently I have no money anymore. You'd think if I was so good at blackjack I could win a ring, I could win a few more dollars.

And now I'm on a tropical island. What's the geography here? I'm generally under the impression this is the south, probably Louisiana, yet we're on an island with a volcano, and there are ghost pirates here. Eh, I'm probably thinking too much about this, bootleg Charon probably moved me more than I would think. This is another full-fledged area. There's a volcano with a virgin getting sacrificed, a ghost pirate guarding a ship who asks for rum, another ghost pirate digging up treasure and finally a ghost in a mansion who kills me. Fortunately, it only happens if I examine her, I can run past her into the kitchen...

Her hair is the same color as her skin, and by the way she's waving that knife around, it looks more like she's interested in hurting herself than me.

...where there's a woman, who, sorry, turns around and turns out to be a ghost. You can try to open some things, but if you examine anything she turns around. Funnily enough, this is the one enemy you can actually survive, just run away.

What I'm actually supposed to do here is go upstairs, take a bottle of rum, take a coconut from where I entered the island, mix them together, and give it to the ghost pirate on the ship, game won.

Gotta show off the beautiful screens in addition to the ugly ones, after all!

We get a trimuphant ending only to get a...or is it? Images of a dead woman who is apparently my aunt flash in my mind. Turns out I didn't win, I've taken the wrong girl. I'm not really sure how you're supposed to figure that out, or why for that matter cutting the chains on the girl doesn't kill you. Or why this isn't explained at all before the game ends. But there is an easy solution.

This is what happens if you take the chained girl first, because the volcano is sentient, eh, makes sense.

Chuck the other girl in the volcano. Why? Because the girl here is the girl your supposed to get. Just chuck that stupid girl in the volcano and get yours, because you're the good guy and everything you do is good? While I did kill the caretaker in the first game for reasons that couldn't be known until afterwards, he was still a ghost. Though I didn't know that at the time. In game, there's no way for you to figure that this is the girl you're supposed to save until it's too late. Logically, I would just get the death sequence, because come on, what asshat just lets a girl die on ghost island? Well, maybe I'd be cautious based on how many ghosts I've taken out, somehow. Granted, I realize at this point this game is a meta adventure game, where you primarily gather knowledge based on where you died rather than any in-game point of order, but eh...

This is in multiple stages, where there's a boat before you read that it got destroyed, and then no boat after.

This gets me the good ending. It's over...or is it? The pirate ship is destroyed and we're sent back to ghost island. Find out what happens in The Last Half of Darkness III. Will I play it next year? Who knows? I appreciate that unlike most games that pull out this stupid trick, this one actually has a reason to do it. Because you didn't win when it pulls it off the first time, and there's a third game the second time. The readme file for this game spoils the ending of this game. Whatever happens there is truly the end.

A couple of interesting bits before we leave.

Turning off the torch. You need to do this to get past the dog, lest you end up in a not properly done up death. To do this you use the lit torch on itself, though this only works in some rooms. If you were not save scumming, what would you do? Well, when you're wandering around in the darkness, you have to feel in the exit panel for the exits, as I explained. But I could never reach an area where there was a torch, somehow. Well, the game lies in what exits are available. The exits where there's actually any light don't show up. Perhaps this is a glitch, and the exits there are always supposed to show up. You just need to find certain sidepaths which contain light, like the candle/vampire room, or go in the blue passage. The area you entered the game in, and thus are actually liable to reach, does nothing.

Connecting to that, I have no idea if you're supposed to do anything to the dog. The encounter rate with the dog is random, sometimes you seem him, sometimes you don't, but it's clearly high enough that you can't reach the door out without seeing him at least once. 

Saying Timaz is also broken. You can say it anywhere in the game and you'll get teleported to the island. As you don't need to remove the little girl's chains, this means you can beat the game in under 2 minutes.

Looking through the text contained in the game's executables, I can see that quite a few more things should be examinable than they are, but otherwise nothing is missing from what was in-game. It sort of blows my mind how lackluster this felt in terms of things to do, something which will probably be reflected in the rating.

Total Time: 4 hours 00 minutes

Puzzles and Solvability

Most of it is okay, nothing exciting or offensive, but I do have an objection to the maze. Since there's no way to get rid of the dog, you have to either savescum or use a system which doesn't work very well. On the other hand, I kind of like how non-violent some of the puzzles are in the best sense. How do you get past a raging skeleton? Walk past it. A orc? Blow out his eardrums with a flute. Get on a pirate ship? Just give the guard some booze. Compared to the first game where we were murdering things almost as often as we were getting murdered, it feels a bit refreshing. You know, until I lob an innocent girl into a volcano.

2

Interface and Inventory

Well, it's much the same as last time. Even down to the game somehow glitching and making multiple cursors, various bits being broken and animation moving too fast. It does seem slightly better in being able to click on things, but perhaps that's just because the system now expects something roughly akin to the default DOSbox experience.

3

Story and Setting

None of this logically makes any sense. I can buy that there's a dungeon under the house, but the rest of this is non-sensical. Monsters in this game just let me live? Really? The monsters in my house? A beggar is in this dungeon? I guess he's a ghost, but really? The monsters put the girl in a wall and/or on a volcano miles away? How do these monsters work then? Questions, questions, questions.

I will note that the one way this story would make sense is that if this is all a game of pawns being played by powerful witches. My aunt was secretly assassinated by an evil witch, who is now trying to kill me, only Madame Timaz is another powerful witch and is trying to keep me alive. I'll actually give points to The Romantic Blue or some future Last Half of Darkness sequel if it does something that reveals this game actually makes sense like this in some way.

0

Sound and Graphics

Outside of the intro theme, the otherwise mentioned voiceover, and a few sound effects, no sound. But graphics we get in spades. It looks pretty good. Well, when Fisher is trying as opposed to using the spray can tool again. You know that guy who kills you and has a skull face? Trick question, there are four of them. They're all the same, except different colors. Which isn't getting into how that's kind of a crappy skull to begin with, with the detail basically just being the spray effect used a few times to make it look like there's depth. That sort of thing works with lichen and plants, maybe stone, but not so much with...anything else.

4

Environment and Atmosphere

The game is shockingly bare-bones and ruins the atmosphere of the previous game by making half the game grey stone walls. The funny thing is, if you remove the maze, make the rest of the dungeon walls blue, it's just a slightly questionable game, much in the same vein as the first. But, you know, there's basically nothing to interact with, even the things you should be able to interact with. 

6

Dialogue and Acting

Well, it's not especially important dialog, but the voice acting is a nice surprise. Even if it's low quality and sounds like the same microphone the astronauts used on the Apollo 11 mission. I don't just mean the same brand, I mean the same one. So even though it's not that great, and sometimes the game gets annoying and has voices randomly pop up, but it's interesting.

2

2+3+0+4+6+2=17/0.6=28.33, or 28. I'll be generous and give it another point. So 29. Or in total some 6 points less than the original.

As I said before, this is the last EGA game from Mr. Fisher. From now on it's spray painted VGA. I played Death by Dark Shadows (1994) briefly and think his remaining DOS titles are going to be mightly fine. But that's the future. I may play the third game next Halloween, maybe not, don't really want to abuse the 1993 missed classics too much until we actually finish the mainline games. The same can be said for the VGA remake of the first game.

You know what I like after playing a gorey horror shareware adventure game coded in BASIC? Another gorey horror shareware adventure game coded in BASIC. Here's another hint, it's the first game from an author whose work has been featured on the CRPGAddict's blog before.