The Last Crown: Midnight Horror

About The Last Crown: Midnight Horror

The Last Crown: Midnight Horror is a classic point-and-click adventure from Darkling Room, written by Jonathan Boakes of Dark Fall and The Lost Crown, and released for Windows on 29 October 2015. It is a side story between The Lost Crown and The Last Crown: Blackenrock, with the same ghost-hunter, Nigel Danvers, and his partner Lucy Reubans, and it is played in English or German, both fully voiced.

It is Halloween in Saxton, and the veil between this world and the other side is at its weakest. Something is haunting the guest rooms above the local pub, The Bear, and there is a presence at the end of the harbour wall. You walk the town and the inn in third person, talk to the locals, collect ghostly evidence and turn your ghost-hunting gadgets on each room: a night-shot camera shows figures that are not there to the eye, a spirit board spells out answers, and photographs catch a sheeted shape in a corner. Nanny Noah, the local white witch, teaches you psychometry, and the pub runs a Halloween triathlon of party games such as bobbing for apples and pinning the tail on the black cat. You have to win one of them to move on; the rest add to your final score.

The game is drawn mostly in black and white, with orange jack-o'-lanterns, balloons and bunting picked out in colour. The fright is an old-fashioned ghost story, with a few apparitions and a lot of village humour. Reviewers found it lighter and smaller than The Lost Crown; GameBoomers called it quaint rather than scary and finished it in about two and a half hours, and Adventure Gamers called it a nice little snack for fans of the first game.

It suits players who like slow, story-led ghost hunts and an English village Halloween, and anyone who played the Dark Fall or Crown games. Newcomers can follow it, but The Lost Crown is the fuller introduction to Nigel and Saxton.

How to play The Last Crown: Midnight Horror

1. Buy it on Steam or GOG and run it on Windows.
2. Choose the 4:3 or the widescreen format at the start, and keep to it.
3. Explore Saxton and The Bear by pointing and clicking; arrows mark the exits.
4. Talk to the locals and collect evidence of the haunting.
5. Use your gadgets in each room to see and hear the spirit world, and join the Halloween party games along the way.
6. Solve the mystery before the night ends and the veil returns.

Tips

• Pick your screen format with care: the game plays in 1280 x 960 or 1280 x 720, and save games do not carry over between the two.
• Use the gadgets everywhere; much of the evidence only shows up through the night-shot camera and the other tools.
• Only one of the triathlon party games is needed to move on, so skip the others if they are not for you; they only add to your final result.
• Turn on subtitles and sound descriptions in the options if you want text for the voiced lines and the sounds.

Questions