Dark Fall: Lost Souls is the third installment in the Dark Fall series which sees you return to two familiar locations: the Dowerton Station and adjoining hotel encountered in the original Dark Fall: The Journal.  This time you are playing as The Inspector, a deeply troubled man who is searching for a girl, Amy, who disappeared some years before. 

Dowerton has changed somewhat since the first Dark Fall encounter.  When we first saw it, it had clearly been abandoned and left to rot for many years.  Now, however, it's really been transformed from an eerie location to a truly dark and malevolent place.  Bizarre graffiti lines the walls, rooms have been destroyed or grotesquely transformed and strange shadowkin can be encountered in many of the rooms.  Add to that blood, barbed wire, scissors and hypodermic needles strewn throughout the hotel and you could be forgiven for assuming that you’d landed on the set of a Saw movie.

This is a distinct change from the earlier Dark Fall games.  Previously quite subtle in their approach, they were eerie and at times frightening but always seemed to rely on the suspense.  It wasn’t so much what you did see that kept you feeling unnerved but rather the thought of what you might see.  Such subtlety is somewhat left behind in Dark Fall: Lost Souls and a combination of ghostly apparitions, gruesome encounters and regular contact from the spirits that lurk at the hotel and station will certainly keep you on edge and no doubt provide more than a few jumpy moments.

The puzzles in Dark Fall: Lost Souls take a very similar form to previous Dark Fall games, although I did find them a little harder.  As in the previous titles, you are expected to make note of important things yourself, rather than being provided with a self-updating journal, so it’s important to keep a notebook and pen to hand.  You’ll certainly need them.  Given the variety of rooms and locations available throughout the game, it had the worrying potential to see you wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do next.  However, this is overcome by providing you with regular text messages from ‘ECHO’ which, whilst not always pleasant, provide some hints about what to do or where to go next.  That said, despite these text messages, it wasn’t always clear what had to be done next and it’s fair to say that a certain amount of legwork is required at times.  A new element to the game – and one which caught me out several times – is that you can use the hand icon to both pick up and select objects but also to move items by clicking and dragging.  By and large it is usually obvious when you need to do this but it can be easy to forget that this option is available to you, leading to much frustrated clicking.

As with its predecessor Dark Fall: Lights Out, this game has an element of time travel, although what differs this time is that you actually have the opportunity to play as some of the characters who have stayed in the hotel and who were first introduced in Dark Fall: The Journal.  This is a nice opportunity to revisit some interesting characters but also a good opportunity to see parts of the hotel fully restored and escape the ghoulish settings of present day Dowerton for a short while!  Interestingly, despite the fact that this game offered a return to previously used locations, it managed to avoid feeling stale, even though I had only recently played through Dark Fall: The Journal.  The rather disturbing makeover that the hotel and its rooms have received give the impression that you’re almost playing in a brand new setting and some original rooms remain hardly used in this title whilst new areas have been made available.