Dark Fall: Lost Souls

Lost Souls is a first-person psychological horror/adventure game, which employs a simple HUD. A bar at the bottom of the screen serves as the inventory, storing items which the player has acquired during the game. The bar also allows access to The Inspector's mobile phone, from which the player can save their game, quit their game, or load a previously saved game. The mobile phone also allows the player to illuminate dark areas using the phone's flashlight, read any text messages received by The Inspector during the game, change the difficulty level, and turn on and off subtitles.

The game uses a basic point-and-click interface to move the player around and manipulate the game world. As the player moves the cursor around the screen it can change into different styles depending on the situation; neutral cursor (no interaction is possible), a hand (an item with which the player can interact), a finger (the player can move, turn or look in the direction indicated), a wrench (the player must use an inventory item to initiate interaction), a magnifying glass (an area which can be examined in more detail).

The game is set in the same abandoned train station and hotel in Dowerton, Dorset as the first Dark Fall game, and takes place on the night of 5 November. The protagonist of the game is "The Inspector", a disgraced former police officer who was dismissed from the force after tampering with evidence in the case of a missing eleven-year-old girl, Amy Haven. The Inspector was convinced a local vagrant known as Mr. Bones had killed Amy, but was unable to prove it, and so planted evidence.

The local newspaper broke the story, the case against Bones fell apart, and Amy's trail went cold, with her parents blaming The Inspector for the police's failure to find her. It is now five years to the day since Amy went missing, and The Inspector has come to Dowerton Station after local teenagers reported seeing Amy in the vicinity.

As with both the original Dark Fall and the sequel, Dark Fall II: Lights Out, Jonathan Boakes worked primarily alone on Lost Souls, writing, designing and programming the game, as well as voicing several characters, designing the sound effects (with Matt Clark), and composing the music (with Ben Gammons). Boakes has said he prefers working on the Dark Fall games without a development team as "the worlds of Dowerton and Fetch Rock are created from an informed imagination, using textures and sounds from the world around me. I think a little of that personality would be lost if tackled by a small team." Of Lost Souls, he felt working alone helped him establish the game's atmosphere of isolation; "working alone in the dim light of the Darkling Room is the best way to approach this game [...] It's an eerie, isolating experience."

In relation to why he chose to return to Dowerton for the third Dark Fall game, Boakes explains

Lost Souls did not receive as much attention in the mainstream gaming press as either of the first two Dark Fall games, garnering limited coverage from professional critics. However, what reviews it did receive were mainly positive. It holds an aggregate score of 75 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on eight reviews.

5 out of 10, praising the story and the detail of the game's milieu; "More impressive than the actual story is the way that it's told. Dark Fall's creator Jonathan Boakes was able to convey a lot of information using very simple storytelling techniques that fit perfectly within the gloomy world of the game." The game's sound design was also singled out for praise. Although they were critical of the obscurity of some of the puzzles, they concluded "it can be clunky, slow and frustrating, but offers up some better storytelling than many games with a hundred times the development budget.