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The Darkness Of Raven Wood is a horror themed graphical text adventure (Aka. Interactive Fiction) with an impressive number of illustrated locations.

Set in 1862. You receive a letter from your childhood friend Raynard who now lives in Raven Wood a neighboring village to the one you both grew up in. The new head of Raven Wood manor, Lord Elgan Wood, has recently arrived to carry on his dead father's legacy. Since his arrival, strange things have been happening. Several children and a priest have gone missing. Strange creatures and a snow storm have beset the village. Raynard's last message pleaded with you to return and help him. When you arrive snow is falling in July, the villagers are staying indoors and Raynard is nowhere to be seen.

As with most text adventures to play it you need to know various commands to travel around, manipulate objects and interact with people in the game world. This game uses the compass directions, UP, DOWN, IN and OUT for movement. You can USE, EXAMINE, GET, TAKE and DROP items. INV brings up your inventory. SAVE unsurprisingly saves your game, but there's only one save file you can use. You can also TALK to people. The parsers vocabulary is much larger than this but finding the commands you need to use is part of the fun.

The Initial title screen has two options (1) Instructions and (2) Play the game. On pressing (2) a secondary title screen appears with two more options to either (1) Play a new game or (2) Load a saved game. I'm not sure why there wasn't just a single title screen with the three options together. Anyway, on pressing (1) the game does actually begin. You start off outside The Bleeding Wolf Tavern, Not quite The Slaughtered Lamb but it might as well be. It's snowing and your carriage is there but the driver's done a runner. Cheers pal. You can go in the tavern where there's a barman, villagers and beer. On attempting to chat with people it seems you're better off interacting with your beer rather than anything human.

I left the tavern and ventured east where there was a village square containing a fountain and an equally talkative stranger. The square was a crossroads. After examining a few things I decided to go South. Another crossroads on a trail. A graveyard west, the trail continuing south and a forest east. I had to check out the graveyard. Turned out it was an abandoned church with a creepy guest lumbering around outside. I decided not to hang around for dinner and went back east.

I went further south along the trail and eventually somehow ended up in a dark forest where some wolves were sniffing the air. I waited for them to go away. Turns out I'm not exactly Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, and ultimately paid the price. So this game plays just like all those fabulous text adventures I played aeons ago. A fantastic nostalgia fix. There is a slight pause when you move from one location to the next but it's not surprising when you learn that the game has 50+ locations all with illustrations and the code fits into just one SSD file. This is thanks to some incredible compression and decompression of the illustrations by Lurkio and Tricky.

The illustrations themselves are absolutely gorgeous. Photoshop with a tablet was used to create them. They were then converted to BBC format with Image2BBC. In some places the same illustrations were used. This is not something I'm a big fan of, even if it is supposed to be a maze that's easy to get lost in. Location descriptions are excellent giving the adventure a solid, creepy, hammer horror style atmosphere. There are no music or sound effects, which is not exactly shocking for this genre. The silence actuals lends itself to this type of game. Things are even more spooky when all you can hear is the sound of the computer loading in data.

The atmosphere generated by the location descriptions and back story is excellent. The quality of the illustrations is top class and it's great that every location in the game has one.

The characters in the game are not quite as alive and interactive as say The Hobbit and those duplicate location illustrations are a personal bugbear that I just can't shake.

A thoroughly enjoyable old-style text adventure with remarkable illustrations, to accompany the text, both in quality and quantity. Recommended, especially for lovers of interactive fiction.