The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure (PC DVD)
 RRP £19.99 Lowest New Price £18.50 
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Lighthouse Interactive Release date: Friday 18th of July 2008 |
RRP: £19.99
Excellent game in almost all aspects.
Review date: 2009-01-06 Rating: 8 out of 10
In many ways this is a truly excellent game. I rate it as the second best adventure game of 2008, after Overclocked.
It has superb graphics (at first I thought that I was not going to like the choice of a monochrome setting, but I quickly changed my mind), very atmospheric sound, and a great storyline. I honestly did not find it really scary, though. Not like the Dark Fall games or Scratches or such.
Other things that are good about The Lost Crown are that it is really long, which is somewhat unusual for a modern game, and that it seems to be free of bugs, also unusual.
Unfortunately, there are a few things that prevents this game from being a real classic. First of all, like it was in the Dark Fall games, the writing is severely below par. Grammar and spelling errors abound, and to me this is very off-putting since it would be so easy to fix. I surmise that this is what happens when one person is creating all parts of a game--there is always some aspect that will not be as good as one would have wished.
A few other things I did not like was that it was so easy to notice that the same voice actor had done almost all male characters, and more importantly that the story really became cliché toward the end. Indeed, I found the end of the game to be quite lacking.
Still, this is a game that is well above average compared to others released the last few years and I can recommend it to everyone.
Reviews
Yikes!
Review date: 2008-12-30 Rating: 8 out of 10
I got this for Christmas and I'm still playing it and having a great deal of fun and sleepless nights in the process! This game is truly spooky, I have leapt out of my skin several times and the hairs on the back of my neck have stood up on more than one occaision.
The only reason I haven't given it full marks is because the voice acting is really awful. The accents are all over the place and Nigel constantly puts the emphasis on the wrong words in a sentence, it's laughable! But apart from that it's a great game, pretty darn hard, but it's good to feel challenged.
The Lost Crown
Review date: 2008-11-18 Rating: 8 out of 10
A not bad effort from the creator of Dark Fall.
The plot itself is not half-bad, even if there is a non-sensical and silly back story to the main character.
Throughout the adventure I felt very much compelled to carry on and see the story to its conclusion, even more so when things got genuinely spine-tingling towards the end.
For the most part the game follows a decent pace and I found the play time to be just about perfect. In all it took me about four days of solid play to finish, which is practically epic in this genre.
The puzzles are of a decent quality and are all logical and well placed. I only really found myself stuck once, but it was my fault for missing a vital clue (which in fairness is easily done). Some of the puzzles certainly left me feeling smarter for solving them, which is a sign of good adventure game design IMHO.
Although the voice acting of the main character is utterly dire and his dialogue even worse, I still felt myself bond to him in some way.
On the plus side, the rest of the cast is virtually flawless in the way they deliver their lines and the conversations are easy to follow and all make sense in context.
A minor gripe I had was with a couple of silly 'action sequences', one of which sees the player fending off evil spirits with what appears to be a magic fork!
Although the change of pace was nice, the game engine was obviously not designed for this type of play and the whole experience left me feeling more 'amused' than excited.
Still, these sequeces are very few and far between, so largely ignorable.
Graphically Lost Crown delivers with real world locals and actual photographs making up a majority of the scenery. Although for the most part the scenery is in black and white I still found myself absorbed into the game world.
Overall a highly decent example of adventure gaming and well worth a look for fans of the genre. Doubly so if you're interested in the paranormal too.
Good 'starter' game!
Review date: 2008-10-14 Rating: 10 out of 10
This game is 36 hours long and is quite scary in parts. The real attraction is the fact that there is a FREE walk-through available on the 'net. Ideal if you are a beginner at this type of game...and very necessary in certain parts of this intruging game. Good luck.
Excellent conception, not sure about the execution...
Review date: 2008-10-05 Rating: 6 out of 10
I'm a huge fan of Jonathan Boakes and the Dark Fall series, so I was waiting impatiently for this game, and mostly I wasn't disappointed.
Let's get the gripes out of the way first. As other people have said, the ending is a bit of a letdown. Also, Nigel Danvers, the main character, as voiced by Boakes himself, comes across as a pompous prat played by an amateur actor from the planet Pluto. This is odd, because Boakes has done quite good voice acting in his other games and in Matt Clark's Barrow Hill. There are two problems here; one is the eccentric acting, the other is that I think the character is *meant* to be a pompous prat (he wears a tweed cap, for goodness sake) and that makes him harder to identify with.
Another minor problem; the exteriors were photographed in Cornwall, but Saxton is supposed to be in East Anglia. Anyone who's seen both areas will know that this is incongruous, and I'd have just set it in Cornwall anyway myself.
I had no problem with the slow pace of the game. I don't need things to go at ninety miles an hour to keep me awake, and watching Nigel glide/walking through the very pleasant if monochrome scenery was no hardship at all. It is possible to get through transitional scenes more quickly by double-clicking if you really want to. I loved the depth and scope of the game world, the treatment of the exteriors, and the puzzles, and the storyline itself was excellent up to, as I said, the ending, which was perfect for an M R James story but not so good for a game.
All in all, I found it very enjoyable, with the caveats listed above, and I'm still a huge fan.
Product Details/Specifications
Recording label: Lighthouse Interactive
Manufacturer: Lighthouse Interactive
EAN: 8717662270628
Binding: DVD-ROM
Release date: 2008-07-18
Platform: Windows VistaWindows XP
Brand: Lighthouse Interactive
Tech info, cast and quotes/trivia when available. Exclusions may apply with free delivery. Price and availabiltity subject to change
