The Last Crown: Midnight Horror

Oh what fun! As we wait for the next in the magnificent Lost Crown series to be published, Jonathan Boakes has given us a nice little game that fits between the first and the much anticipated next game, Blackenrock. This isn't just a five-minute teaser, like the little Halloween Haunting gamlet Jonathan gave us a couple of years ago. This is a real game, with real puzzles and a real adventure, and it takes several hours to play. You can get it on Steam, or here: the Midnight Horror!

A little aside: for those who missed it (I was one of them. For whatever reason, I could not download the Halloween Haunting "game" in 2013 and always felt I had missed something important.) I found a YouTube playthrough of it. Here it is, the whole thing: Link to YouTube Halloween Haunting. (Sorry, I could not get the video to embed.) The only thing that it appears I missed was the first mention of the word "Blackenrock" and the voice at the end. Who is that? No doubt we will find out!

Anyway, this is more than just a little teaser! This is an actual game! With puzzles and people and moving around in Saxton! 

Yes! Nigel Danvers is still in Saxton! Even better, WE are back in Saxton!

And all our old friends are there too. Lucy and Nanny Noah (with George the doggie) and Rhys with Mr. Tibbs, and Station Master and Bob Tawney and Morgan Mankle. We seem only to be missing Mr. Oogle. Most of the action takes place inside the Bear, although we begin in Harbour Cottage:

Looks pretty good!

Nigel appears to have had a bit of a facelift. But then, time isn't exactly fixed in Saxton, is it? Notice that we still have our black and white with splashes of color. I still think that is just a brilliant, unique look that contributes massively to the atmosphere of these games, and I think it has a purpose in the games, too (if my theory about what's really going on is correct).

Of course, it's a short game so there aren't too many areas we can access, but those areas all looks really detailed and atmospheric. The village square has annoying children chanting and running around on Halloween. Harbour Cottage looks even more dilapidated than usual, after Nigel smashed through the wall in the last game. The mess has not yet been cleared up. (Golly, that happened on May Day and it's now Halloween! Ah well--time slips around in Saxton.)

Hmmmm. The street seems a bit wider here than previously!

So we have Station Master guarding the door, making Nigel solve a nifty little puzzle with masks in order to get in. There's Morgan behind the bar, of course. And right across the way is Rhys with Mr. Tibbs. (Rumor has it that Mr. Tibbs will be a real character in Blackenrock. I'm looking forward to that!) They are sitting by a marvelous fire:

Complete with burnable items. You did burn one, yes?

We get to see lots more of The Bear this time, including upstairs, with a nice little tease about rooms occupied by "The Boss." It's all prettied up with party flags and balloons and pumpkins!

Looks pretty much the same as before

Nanny Noah is plying her trade with some psychometry puzzles. We get five cards with portraits on them, and objects to match up with the cards. Here, clearly, we see that this little game is meant for Saxton veterans. Everybody in the cards, except two, is a character from The Lost Crown. Two are new, and I wonder if they're going to show up in the next game.

Do we know everybody here?

Station Master, once his door duties are done, moves in to run the Halloween Triathlon, which consists of three games that we can play as many times as we like. We have Pin the Tail on the Black Cat (just keep trying until you get it). We have Musical Statues, which I found kind of challenging, although I think I finally did win. But the major one is Guess the Ghost, which gets the ball rolling with our little adventure.

Of course, Guess the Ghost, in Nigel's case, turns out to be an actual ghost. With advice from Nanny and help from Lucy, Nigel must discover who the ghost might be and what happened to him. That mission is accomplished in several stages with one pretty good puzzle about identifying some herbs. Nigel will have encounters not only in Room 2, but out on the Harbor Wall, giving us some really good nighttime scenes of Saxton, with a full moon and drifting fog and splashing waves, all very nice effects.

Saxton Harbor. See Nigel on the wall?

So even though it's a small game it really is Saxton! 

There's even a little subplot involving Rhys, who gets into a spot of trouble. Don't worry--Mr. Tibbs remains safe throughout.

Quibbles, I have a few:

One thing I didn't like: you cannot examine anything in the inventory except your portable "case file" of ghostly encounters. I hope that will not be the case in the big game that's coming. Perhaps it would have required a more robust engine for this much shorter game, so it wasn't included. However, because of that I wasted abundant time trying to find an item needed early in the game. I had it, I just didn't realize it. 

(Ahem. Of course, I succumbed to my usual fault in adventuring: I get in my head the thing that I think ought to be the item, or where something should be, or how a puzzle should work, and I freeze my progress. Had I, in good adventuring fashion, just started clicking all of my items on the hot spot I would have found the right thing in no time. It was only by peeking at the official walkthrough--on the Midnight Horror link, above--and seeing the name of the item there that caused me to instantly realize what I already had.)

The game kind of fooled me with the "Halloween Triathlon." I kind of thought those were going to be the whole game! Silly me. But I bogged myself down in those for far too long, thinking that I had to win them to advance in the game. Finally I realized I could move around more than was instantly apparent, and that nudged me out of my frustration. (That, of course is not a quibble, but my own fault.)

And the games are winnable by the way. They can all be replayed ad infinitum, which I did at first. Ad infinitum.

I also quibble about the fact that Rhys, when we need to find him, might or might not, randomly, appear. On my first try he stayed hidden, and I traipsed to literally every possible area in the game trying to find him. I had cleared out the obstacle to finding him (there is one) long before. He stayed hidden the second time I went to his area, too. Once I looked at the WT he appeared, drat it.

Oh and um, maybe an obscurish in-game clue about the books and the multiple rums might have helped. Really, the reason for all those rums can't just be plucked out of the game. But hey, what's an adventure game without some frustration! It's supposed to tease, although too much frustration can ruin a game, so there's that. The WT saves us, but I hate having to use those (even though I often succumb).

But there it is! A real adventure game, just to tide us over while waiting for Blackenrock. And hey, this game is actually just about the same length as some of the newer games that have come out in the past few years, such as Serena (OK, that one's free) or Gone Home, or Dear Esther. True, you pretty much do have to have been to Saxton before to do the psychometry game and the real Guess the Ghost game, but I would expect that newbies could manage it just fine and perhaps become intrigued with the series.

Well! Anything that gets us back to Saxton is good by me! And this is a nifty little game, well done!

Have fun folks!

And thanks, Jonathan!

(And, I'm going to guess, "Blackenrock" has something to do with the mysterious, uncommunicative Dr. Black, whom we met on the Saxton shore. There must be a reason for him to have been there!)