The Arid Lands - book review

 Ten years ago I reviewed Kate Kelly's first novel, Red Rock, in the January 2014 issue of Fortean Times. A fast-moving conspiracy thriller aimed at young adult readers, it was overflowing with great ideas - as this excerpt from my review shows:

The governments of the world are puppets controlled by a secretive, authoritarian space agency, which is hiding the truth about what lies on Mars while pursuing a sinister agenda of its own. There are hints of a powerful new form of energy ... pursued with equal vigour by our heroes and the evil space agency, while a mysterious order of Maltese monks will seemingly go to any lengths to prevent either party from succeeding.

Since then, I've reviewed two other novels by Kate Kelly, both on Goodreads: The Sleepers (2022), which is a conspiracy thriller aimed at an older audience, and more recently The Arid Lands (2023). The latter is less fortean than Red Rock but just as imaginative, so I thought I'd put an expanded version of my review here, where I can go into a little more detail on a couple of points (and even work in a bit of retro-forteana at the end).

While the first two books were issued by mainstream publishers, this one - a variation on the "climate-change dystopia" theme - is self-published (not because there's no market for this genre, but, I suspect, because the market is already saturated to breaking point). One interesting feature of the book is its cover - a literal rendering of an early scene from the novel, which Kate produced using an AI image creator. It was reading about her experiments in this area that prompted me to play around with AI image creation myself - something that's featured in several of my recent videos as well as a book cover  of my own.
 
As a thriller, The Arid Lands is just as intriguing and exciting as Red Rock and The Sleepers. Like them, it combines an original and well thought-out scenario with an intricate, fast-moving plot that never quite goes in the direction you expect it to. This story is set further in the future than its predecessors, at a time when war and climate change have significantly altered the geopolitical landscape. But the book cleverly avoids all the obvious clichés here. For one thing, the "Arid Lands" of the title have nothing to do with global climate change, but result instead from a purely local phenomenon (which, as I've just learned from Kate's blog, is based on a real historical occurrence).

Another cliché the book avoids is the idea of a "post-apocalyptic" future that's equally dire all over the planet. Instead, the global community has become highly fragmented, with some places maintaining a relatively comfortable 1950s-ish level of technology and social structure, while others have reverted to a pre-mediaeval subsistence culture. I'm not sure how credible this is, but I found it a fascinating scenario even so. In any case, there's no time to worry about whether it makes sense or not when our protagonist has just a few days to work out what's going on and save the world!

Another thing I mentioned in my Goodreads review (and which provides the retro-fortean connection I promised earlier) is the way the plotting echoes a particular video game genre I'm fond of, namely puzzle-focused "point-and-click" adventure games (which I've discussed previously on this blog). I've lost count of how many times such games feature a young female protagonist thrust into a totally unfamiliar environment in search of a missing friend or relative.

The point is, that's pretty much how The Arid Lands works. It's full of other standard adventure game tropes too, such as locked rooms we have to escape from, a posh walled house we have to covertly break into, characters who won't help us or give us information until we do something for them, and even a pile of garbage we have to hunt through in search of something useful. So if you're a fan of such games (or if you like this kind of storyline in general) you'll probably enjoy The Arid Lands just as much as I did.

The picture below shows three particularly fortean examples of the genre I'm talking about, from the days when I bought such games on disc rather than Steam. Two of them conform to the "female protagonist in search of missing relative" stereotype I mentioned earlier. The exception, NiBiRu: Age of Secrets, is the earliest of the three, dating from 2005. But it's pure retro-forteana, the title alluding to the hypothetical planet Nibiru associated with the ancient alien theories of Zecharia Sitchin, but here tied in with a Nazi plot to take over the world using an extraterrestrial artifact located inside a Mayan pyramid.

The first game I ever played in this genre was Secret Files: Tunguska (2006), which I assumed would be something like The X-Files. It is, in terms of subject matter - which includes alien artifacts, mind control, a secret Antarctic base and the eponymous Siberian impact event - but not in terms of characters, centring as it does on a young female motorcycle mechanic desperately searching for her father and other kidnapped scientists.

A young woman searching for a kidnapped relative - in this case an uncle who's an archaeologist - also features in Chronicles of Mystery: The Scorpio Ritual (2008). This begins with a prologue showing what appears to be the Knights Templar carrying the Ark of the Covenant - both eminently fortean themes, of course - but it turns out it's actually a different monastic order, the Knights Hospitaller, and a different, though equally powerful, artifact. Coincidentally, in light of what I said about Red Rock at the top of this post, much of the action takes place on the island of Malta (and these really are just coincidences - after I posted my Goodreads review, Kate told me she'd never played a point-and-click adventure in her life!).

 

50 Years of Fortean Times

Having got this blog back up and running, my next problem was to think of new things to write about. Since this month sees the 50th anniversary of the first issue of Fortean Times, it seems an obvious place to start.

Actually the magazine only carried the name "Fortean Times" from issue 16 onwards - prior to that, it was simply called The News. When its first issue appeared in November 1973, I was just short of 16 - i.e. old enough to have been interested in it if I'd known about it, but as it happened I was blissfully unaware of it. I believe the magazine's founding editor, Bob Rickard, was a member of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group, which I also joined around that time, so maybe I saw him there without knowing it (though I did get a brief but nice email from Bob many years later, as documented further down this post).

[Just as an aside before I forget - I did have one encounter at the BSFG with someone who, though now forgotten, was a big name in the fortean world at the time. This was Professor John Taylor, who was one of the first mainstream scientists to carry out laboratory experiments on Uri Geller and other people who displayed seemingly ESP-like powers. I attended a talk by him at the BSFG in April 1976.]

In common, I suspect, with many other people, I only really became aware of FT's existence in the early 1990s, after copies started to be distributed more widely to British newsagents. My first few issues (starting with #67 in February 1993, more than 30 years ago) are shown at the top of this post. Notice that the magazine's covers - by the brilliant and inimitable Hunt Emerson - were a lot livelier and more colourful in those days than they are today!

Over the years, I've made enough appearances in Fortean Times to consider myself a "regular contributor" to the magazine. To keep track of them (for myself if no one else), I've put a list of contributions on my website. So far they amount to 18 articles - mainly 1 or 2 page Forum pieces - and 46 book reviews, as well as 12 "letters to the editor", the first of them appearing way back in January 2001. But my personal high point came in June 2019, when FT printed David Clarke's interview with me about my time working in the Ministry of Defence (when I was peripherally involved in their UFO/UAP research). Here it is, complete with a photograph of me talking to a Russian scientist in Red Square (top picture on the right-hand page):

Returning to the subject of FT founder Bob Rickard, he's been mentioned quite a few times in previous posts on this blog, including a couple in the context of comic-book homages. The first (Fortean Agent of SHIELD) actually predates the founding of Fortean Times, coming from issue 12 of Marvel's Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, cover-dated May 1969. That particular issue's creators, Steve Parkhouse and Barry Windsor-Smith, were friends of Bob at the time and named one of the story's characters "Robert Rickard" after him.

The other comic-book connection I wrote about, in The Department of Fortean Events, relates to a 2000 AD story called "Shamballa", featuring the Judge Anderson character. Written by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, the story is reprinted in book form in Judge Anderson: The Psi Files volume 02. As I explained in that earlier post, "Doc Rickard" - an obvious homage to FT's founder - is a paranormal researcher at the "Department of Fortean Events" (which doesn't really exist, but ought to).

I mentioned earlier that I once received an email from Bob Rickard, and I'll get onto that now. Back in February 2011, I put a short video clip on YouTube showing a scene from a video game which namechecks FT. It's from a Sam & Max episode called "Night of the Raving Dead", in which Sam, inspecting a complicated-looking piece of equipment, says "I'd bet my lifetime subscription to the Fortean Times that that's an alchemy machine".

I sent the video link to FT editors David Sutton and Paul Sieveking, and one of them must have forwarded it to Bob - because shortly afterwards I received an email from him saying "Great - my kids loved the first Sam & Max adventures". Here's the clip in question:

There's another connection between FT and video games that I'm aware of, which I mentioned on my other blog in May 2017, shortly after this one went into hiatus. It's a cameo appearance by a (sadly fictitious) magazine called Freaky Times, in the game Barrow Hill: The Dark Path by my favourite team of adventure game developers, Matt Clark and Jonathan Boakes. In case the magazine's oddly familiar cover design isn't enough of a giveaway, Jonathan himself once described it as "a little nod to the Fortean Times". Here's his cover mock-up from the game:

 

Contradiction - the All-Video Murder Mystery

Here’s another great adventure game that should be of interest to retro-forteans everywhere. Steam has it listed as “Contradiction: Spot the Liar” – which almost put me off buying it, because I assumed it was all about politicians. But the official logo says “Contradiction: the All-Video Murder Mystery Adventure”, which sounds much more promising! It’s not an old game (it only came out last year), but it has a nice retro feel – a cosy, puzzle-style detective story set in a small English village. And there’s plenty of fortean stuff going on in the background, as I’ll explain later (no spoilers – I promise).

Contradiction is an unusual sort of game, certainly in comparison to other recent adventure games I’ve played. Generally I hate cut-scenes and dialogue, because they slow things down and hardly ever tell you anything you need to know to solve the puzzles. Of course, they’re important if you want to follow the plot – but in most adventure games the plot is about as sophisticated as a Saturday-morning cartoon. Contradiction is completely different. It’s at least 90% cut-scenes and dialogue – but you have to pay close attention to them, because the whole point is to spot contradictions in the various characters’ testimony. And the plot is absolutely first-rate – it would be worth watching even if there wasn’t a game to play.

Another thing that makes Contradiction such a pleasure to play is its seamlessness. Perhaps it’s my computer, but in most games of this type I’m used to sitting through long pauses while the next scene loads (another recent detective mystery, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, was almost ruined for me by that sort of thing). But there’s none of that in Contradiction – everything runs as smoothly as if you were watching a film on TV. That’s true of the professionalism of the video-making too, with things like lighting and camera angles, and the authentic country village locations. And the acting is perfect for the context, too.

The most famous actor in Contradiction – for people of my age-group, anyway – is Paul Darrow (top left of the screenshots above). He played Avon in Blake’s 7 – which was a brilliant series, even if everyone wasn’t able to appreciate it. People who missed the point often criticized it for “ham acting” – but that style of acting was absolutely essential to match the over-the-top, space-operatic plots. And Contradiction needs exactly the same kind of calculated, deliberate ham acting – not because it’s a space opera, but because it’s a video game. That’s particularly noticeable with the protagonist, Detective Inspector Jenks (played by Rupert Booth, top right). He had to record the words “And what do you know about this?” (and sundry variations thereof) literally dozens of times, in different settings and with reference to different objects. And you can tell he enjoyed every minute of it!

The most fortean character in the game is James Wilson, played by Stephen Mosley (bottom left). In fact, he comes across as pretty much the archetypal Fortean Times reader. A former student of plant science, he now ekes out a meagre living selling scrying mirrors and specialist herbal tea (you know the kind – made with ingredients like Salvia Divinorum and poppy pods). James is convinced the government is spying on him, and that anyone with a lot of power and/or money must be a practicing Satanist. All in all, James is the most normal and likeable person in the village.

At the opposite extreme – and much more interesting – is Ryan Rand, played by John Guilor (bottom right). The son of Paul Darrow’s character, Ryan is a posh millionaire who runs an unorthodox training course for business executives. Surprisingly, there’s a fortean element here too. Ryan’s gimmick is to mix the usual management bullshit-bingo with a heavy dose of New Age nonsense. There’s trance-like meditation and doll-burning, triple goddesses and third eyes, and role-playing exercises that border on pagan rituals. The ultimate aim of the training course is to transform ordinary people into ruthless and ambitious business leaders. And Ryan delivers it all with such over-the-top sincerity you end up believing it might actually work! Ryan Rand has to be one of the greatest video game characters of all time – it’s worth playing Contradiction just for his scenes alone.

But I’m left with a nagging doubt. I can’t help thinking that if they’d put all the same ideas on a DVD, and marketed it as a straight management training video, they would have made a lot more money than they’ll ever get from this game!

Paranoid Conspiracy Death Cult

I found another really good retro-style adventure game on Steam last week (I got it at an 80% discount, but I see it’s back up to full price now). It’s called Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting, which is a rather weird title – but then it’s a rather weird game, from the minimalist gameplay and graphics (see screenshots above) to the disturbingly psychotic storyline. Personally I liked both these aspects, but not everyone will agree about the style, so I’ll start with the story (and I’ll keep it as spoiler-free as possible).

To start with a general comment – there’s something very odd about conspiracy theorists. The theories themselves are pretty odd, of course – especially the ones that involve shape-shifting aliens infiltrating world governments with a view to eradicating homo sapiens and taking over the planet. But it’s even odder that, having discovered this terrifying truth, all the conspiracy theorists do is talk about it on the internet. When France was occupied by the Nazis in the 1940s, the underground resistance fighters went in for things like sabotage and assassination. Why don’t conspiracy theorists do the same, to save Earth from the threat the rest of us are too stupid to see?

In a nutshell, that’s the idea behind this game. It’s played from a first-person perspective, with the player exploring a now-deserted underground complex that until recently was occupied by a small cult with a very strange belief system. In this case, the supposed threat isn’t from shape-shifting aliens, but from an ancient race of “demons” that can take people over at random. But the effect is pretty much the same. The cult members believe they can detect demon-possessed individuals (although a cynic might think they just pick members of the public at random), who they bring back to the complex to be dealt with. I won’t say exactly what this entails, partly because it would be a plot-spoiler, but mainly because it’s too horrible to think about. If you play the game, you’ll find out – if not, then count yourself lucky!

One of the outstanding things about Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting is its characterization, which is excellent and chillingly believable. That may seem an odd thing to say, because you never actually come face to face with any of the cult members. However, you get a very good picture of them from their writings and audio recordings. There are six of them in all, four of which you get to know really well. Essentially they’re all social outcasts with deep-seated grudges against humankind in general – so it’s rather ironic that they consider themselves to be humanity’s saviours. Also ironic is the fact that they all hate each other, to the point of working to subtly different agendas. And they’re all head cases. One of them is a psychopathic sadist, another is a paranoid schizophrenic, another suffers from a chronic inferiority complex.

Worst of all is the cult’s charismatic leader, who is the ex-CEO of a large pharmaceutical corporation and the only one who knows what’s real and what isn’t. I won’t say too much on that subject – except that one of the two chemicals the demon-hunters use to “immunize” themselves turns out to be a harmless placebo, while the other is a fear-enhancing hallucinogen… and the whole narrative about ancient demons (and how to neutralize them) is taken from the rambling notebooks of a mad psychiatrist in the 1950s.

The first-person point-and-click gameplay is reminiscent of Jonathan Boakes’s Dark Fall games, which I’ve enthused about on at least two previous occasions (here and here). But Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting was released in 2012, ten years after the first Dark Fall game, and if anything its user interface is even more minimalist. That gives it a strongly nostalgic feel (and when you get to my age, that’s never a bad thing). Like the Dark Fall series, this game is pretty much the work of a single creator – in this case Daniel Lee Peach. Like Jonathan Boakes he’s British, but unlike Jonathan’s games this one is set in America (I spotted a few British spellings and the occasional little-endian date, but apart from that I thought the American setting was pretty convincing).

Point-and-click adventures always tend to emphasize the cerebral rather than the visual, and Corrosion: Cold Winter Waiting is an extreme example of this (if you’re wondering why I picked those four screenshots at the top of the post, it’s because they were the most exciting ones I could find). Personally I wasn’t too bothered by the minimalist graphics, but I did find the gameplay a bit too obscure in places. I ended up having to consult a walkthrough at least half a dozen times, in most cases because there was some non-intuitive action I had to perform on one of the in-game computers. Having said that, if there’s ever a sequel, I’ll snap it up as soon as it comes out (and happily pay full price this time).

Green-skinned nostalgia

Here are three Hulk-related oddities I accumulated over a period of 15 years or so. If the period in question was 2001-2016 that would be little more than the blink of an eye – but actually I’m referring to circa 1970 to 1985, which was a very long time indeed. As most readers of this blog will be aware, time used to pass a lot slower in the 20th century than it does nowadays.

The earliest of the three items is the paperback book, published by New English Library in 1967. It contains black & white reprints from the original (1962) Hulk comic and from Tales to Astonish. According to the copyright page, it was previously issued in the USA by Lancer Books. I think I acquired my copy in 1970, possibly in a “swap” with a schoolfriend. At one time I also had a similar Spider-Man paperback, but I couldn’t find it when I looked for it last week.

The medallion is inscribed “The Incredible Hulk – World’s Strongest Mortal” with a copyright date of 1974. I probably bought it that year – via mail order from The Mighty World of Marvel or another British Marvel comic. It came in the form of a bolo tie – a type of neckwear that was briefly popular around that time (Isaac Asimov was wearing one when I saw him in Birmingham in June 1974). You can see it in the photo at the bottom of this post, which also shows the “tails” side of the medallion. This depicts Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk, together with the quote "Within each of us, ofttimes, there dwells a mighty raging fury”.

The third item in the top picture is a Hulk video game for the Commodore 64. This is dated 1984, but I didn’t get my C64 until the following year, which must have been when I bought the game. By that time I was working in Oxford as a postdoctoral research assistant, running computer simulations on a “grown-up” computer (a VAX 11/780 – which invokes a completely different type of nostalgia). According to the user guide, the game features Doctor Strange and Ant-Man (Henry Pym) as well as the Hulk. The background info mentions that “Among Pym’s more dubious accomplishments was the creation of the mad robot Ultron” … which is perfectly true, of course (despite any nonsense the youth of today might believe about Ultron being created by Tony Stark).

Back to the Future

The “future” in Back to the Future Part II equates to 21 October 2015 – only 3 days in the future as I write this. People tend to focus on the way things didn’t happen the way they were supposed to (e.g. we have Facebook and touch-screen smartphones instead of flying cars and hoverboards) – but there is another aspect I find just as fascinating. What would it be like to suddenly find yourself 30 years in the future? I suspect most readers of this blog are old enough to remember 1985 pretty well, so you can ponder the question as well as I can.

You don’t even need to invoke time travel. The same thing would apply if you were stuck in a block of ice for several decades, like Captain America. When I first encountered Cap in 1968, the story was that he had been revived in 1964, after just 19 years on ice. I don’t think the culture shock in that case would have been too difficult to deal with. Planes were faster, cars were more streamlined, TVs were bigger and radios were smaller… but those were just continuations of trends that Steve Rogers would already be familiar with: evolution rather than revolution. The sociological changes of the Swinging Sixties would probably have been as confusing as the technological ones, as indicated in the panel above (originally from Captain America #122, dated February 1970, but this scan is from Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium by Reitberger and Fuchs – the first book about comics I ever bought, way back in 1973).

It’s different now, of course. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Cap was frozen not for just under 20 years but for almost 70. His “contemporaries” are not people in their 40s, but people in their 90s. He missed the entire duration of the Cold War, the era of 33 rpm records, transistor radios and VHS tapes, the Moon landings and the Space Shuttle. He not only has to get to grips with a new present – everything from cell phones and social media to hypersensitive political correctness – but a whole new past too. Personally I don’t think this would be possible in the timeframe portrayed in the movies, even for someone with the super-soldier resilience of Steve Rogers.

What started me thinking along these lines wasn’t Back to the Future or Captain America, but a first-person video game in which the player hops between four different time periods. I mentioned a year ago that I’d finally got a working version of Dark Fall: Lost Souls by Jonathan Boakes. I enjoyed it so much that I immediately went on to play the two earlier Dark Fall games. The second of these, Dark Fall: Lights Out, is the time travel story. It dates from 2004, and it already has something of a retro feel. The graphics are 800x600 resolution, the user interface and gameplay are fairly basic, and it doesn’t have the depth of characterization and atmosphere you get in Jonathan’s later games. But in terms of storyline, it’s one of my favourite games – so much so that I played it through again last week.

The action starts in 1912. The playable character is a young cartographer of that period, who is sent to investigate an inexplicably abandoned lighthouse off the Cornish coast. In the role of this character, you spend a while exploring the small rocky island and the deserted lighthouse. Hidden in one of the rooms, you find a hand-drawn map showing the location of a small cave. You follow the directions to the cave – in the gloomy light of a full moon peering through cloud cover – and go inside. There isn’t much to see, so you go outside again… to find everything changed. It’s daytime, the sun is shining – and it’s 2004, the year the game first appeared.

On both occasions I’ve played the game, I found this genuinely disorientating. You’re so immersed in the world of 1912 that “the future” seems strange and confusing. The lighthouse is now a tourist attraction (albeit one that appears just as mysteriously deserted as its 1912 predecessor). Depending on which way you turn when you first exit the cave, you either come to a Discovery Centre featuring a historical display about WW2 (which is still pretty futuristic from the point of view of view of your character), or a café and public toilets. Then there are the steps up to the lighthouse, which are noticeably more health-and-safety compliant than they were in 1912. At the top, the entrance to the lighthouse has changed completely (see the picture below). What would the young cartographer from 1912 make of all this? Would he realize he had slipped into the future? After a while this becomes obvious, once he gets inside the reception area of the lighthouse and reads some of the books for sale in the gift shop. But how does he get through that glass door? Would he realize the buttons form some kind of combination lock?

If you go back down the steps a short distance, you come to a viewpoint with a touch screen display. The display is blank, though, and there is no indication the screen needs to be touched to activate it. For someone from 1912, there is no precedent for dealing with this. Technology in those days consisted of telephones, phonographs, box cameras and silent movies. Nevertheless, if you do accidentally touch the screen and bring it to life, you would probably grasp its workings pretty quickly. But before long something really unexpected happens – the computer crashes and an error message pops up (in all the 20th century fiction I’ve read about futuristic computers and thinking machines, no-one ever predicted the annoying instability of windows-based operating systems).

The error message is pretty cryptic, including the phrase “Current Entry Code / Last 2 Pin: ##64”. The modern-day player may realize this is the second half of the combination needed to get into the lighthouse, but I don’t think our man from 1912 would – not right away, anyhow. If he goes back down to the bottom of the steps, there’s a landing stage and ticket booth for incoming tourists – much more comfortably familiar to early 20th century eyes. Pinned to the wall of the booth is a handwritten note, which shows a sketch of the door buttons and the first two digits of the code. Our character would probably understand the significance of this – and maybe, if his wits were really sharp, he’d put two and two together over the cryptic error message.

So thinking like someone from 1912, it’s hard enough just to work out how to open the lighthouse door! Once you’re inside things get even more bewildering. In the gift shop and museum, you discover that you’ve gone down in history as a triple murderer. You’re not quite the only person in the lighthouse – there’s also a female paranormal investigator, but she’s gone into hiding because she thinks you’re a murderous ghost. You find portals to two other time periods, one further in the future and one in the prehistoric past. Eventually you do manage to solve the mystery of just what the heck is going on… but you solve it using a 21st century mindset, not one of 1912.

Lost Souls of Dorset

I belatedly finished Dark Fall: Lost Souls – another great game from Jonathan Boakes, creator of The Lost Crown. I originally bought it on DVD four years ago, a few months after it first came out. But after playing it for several days, and getting about half-way through, the game suddenly refused to load. Several attempts at uninstalling and reinstalling failed to cure the problem, so I guess I must have damaged the disc or corrupted the licence file or something (there’s also an alternative paranormal explanation, which I’ll get to later).

A couple of weeks ago I saw Dark Fall: Lost Souls on special offer on Steam for just £2.49 (a temporary reduction from the normal price of £9.99). Needless to say I snapped it up – and I’m glad I did. It’s only in the second half of the game, which I’d been prevented from playing, that the high strangeness really sets in (I still had all my savegames, so I could pick up where I left off). I’m not saying the first half is weak, but it’s essentially just scene-setting. Apart from the wonderfully atmospheric graphics and soundtrack, it’s pretty much a run-of-the-mill point-and-click adventure. But once you’ve found your way up to the hotel’s guest rooms (which is the point I’d got to four years ago) the game really comes into its own – Boakesian weirdness at its best.

As with The Lost Crown, part of the attraction of Dark Fall: Lost Souls is its decaying small-town setting, replete with nostalgic reminders of the simpler world of the mid-twentieth century. What makes it even more interesting for me is that it’s set in Dorset, right on my doorstep. The name of the town, Dowerton (which also featured in the original Dark Fall game, which I haven’t played) is fictitious, and doesn’t have an obvious correspondence with any real Dorset location. The town doesn’t seem to have a beach, yet it’s large enough to have an 18-room hotel. The 1947 rail route (see top-right screenshot above) indicates that it was on a branch line of the Great Western Railway from Dorchester, but I don’t believe there ever was such a thing. There was a GWR branch line from Maiden Newton to Bridport, however – and using that as an analog would put Dowerton ten to fifteen miles south of where I live. That’s what I’d like to think, anyhow!

Dowerton is a town that has seen better days. The train station is abandoned, as is the adjacent hotel. The youths of the town have turned to Satanism, and the hotel is reputed to be haunted. Associated with the occult since the 1950s, the place took a nosedive in 2005 with the disappearance of 11-year-old Amy Haven – a disruptive child who had become obsessed with the paranormal.

The action of the game takes place five years after Amy’s disappearance. It’s played from the first person perspective of a retired police officer known only as The Inspector. “Retired” is a euphemism, actually – the Inspector was fired for fabricating evidence against the chief suspect in the Amy Haven case. This was a sleazy middle-aged man named Mr Bones, who had befriended the child and initiated her into the ways of the occult. Bones denied having harmed her, claiming Amy had voluntarily chosen to pass over to the other side.

The Inspector is still driven to discover the truth about the case. Amy’s ghost has been seen lurking around the old station, so one night he decides to go there and investigate. As he does so, he receives a series of anonymous text messages on his phone, from someone or something that clearly knows a lot about the case.

As I’ve already said, the action starts fairly normally – although exploring a disused train station that has been used for Satanic rituals is always going to have its spooky moments, especially in the dead of night. It’s when the Inspector gets inside the hotel, though, that things really start to get weird. He encounters the restless ghosts of various former occupants who died by committing suicide, and he experiences timeslips that take him back to critical turning points in their lives. He is able to change history, thus freeing the ghosts from their torments. But do things like that happen in the real world? Some aspects of the action have a distinctly dreamlike (or nightmare-like) quality, and on a couple of occasions the Inspector briefly finds himself lying on a hospital operating table while medics fight to resuscitate him.

The Lost Crown was open to a whole range of interpretations, and Dark Fall: Lost Souls is no different. One extreme view would be that the resuscitation scenes are the only objective reality in the game, while the rest is a kind of near-death experience (and I do mean near death – the suggestion at the end, to my relief, was that the Inspector would pull through). In this interpretation, the Inspector is driven by his curiosity and feelings of guilt to re-examine the facts of the case in the form of a lucid dream – hence most of the game is nothing more than a hallucination.

In another extreme interpretation, the operating table scenes would be the only hallucinations, while everything else is objectively real. In this view, the Inspector would end up the villain of the piece – a callous murderer – while Amy and Mr Bones would be innocent victims. But that doesn’t accord with the personality of the Inspector as it comes across in the game – the compassionate way he deals with the ghosts, and his genuine desire to learn the truth. Amy, on the other hand, is not a nice child – although a lot of this may be down to Mr Bones corrupting her impressionable young mind. Anyhow, the ghosts all blame Amy’s presence in the hotel for prolonging their suffering.

My own view lies somewhere between these extremes. I think it’s true that the only physically objective reality is the Inspector lying on an operating table in hospital. But rather than a hallucination, I believe he undergoes an out-of-body experience. His astral body really does travel to the hotel, where he really does encounter the spirits that live there, and he really does free the “lost souls” from the torment Amy is holding them in.. At the same time, other aspects of his experience – the SMS messages in particular – are superimposed on events by his own self-doubts.

But that’s just my own view, because – to put it bluntly – I really liked the Inspector and I really disliked Amy and Mr Bones. I’m sure other people will have their own interpretations!

When I resumed playing the game after the lapse of four years, I started a little way back from the last savegame so I could ease myself back into it. And I noticed a really spooky coincidence that may (if you like paranormal explanations) be the real reason the game broke at the exact moment it did.

When the Inspector arrives at hotel reception, he finds his name written in the guest-book together with the date at which the action is supposed to take place – November 5th, 2010 (see the first screenshot below). As British readers won’t need telling, this is Guy Fawkes Night, and in the outdoor scenes you see fireworks exploding in the night sky over Dowerton station. The Inspector’s arrival time is given as 8 pm, and I played for perhaps an hour and a half after that point before the game suddenly refused to load.

And what is the time-stamp on my last savegame? As you can see from the second screenshot below (zoom in on the bottom left-hand corner), it was “5.11.2010, 21:26”. This uses the 24-hour clock, so 21:26 means just before half past nine in the evening. And it uses the British day-month-year convention, so 5.11.2010 was... November 5th, 2010!

The Lost Crown

There aren’t many computer games that have the author’s name on the cover, but in the case of The Lost Crown it’s well-deserved – Jonathan Boakes created the whole thing virtually single-handed. I originally bought the game in September 2008 – only a couple of months after it first came out, and long enough ago to have forgotten most of the details. But that didn’t stop me from entering the Lost Crown quiz that Jonathan ran on his blog a couple of weeks ago.

I approached Jonathan’s quiz in the true spirit of adventure games, which are all about resourcefulness, after all. I know “resourcefulness” isn’t precisely synonymous with “cheating”, but it’s certainly consistent with using Google when your memory isn’t quite up to the task. Even then, there were a couple of answers I wasn’t sure about... so I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I was among the five lucky winners (picked at random from the ten people who got top marks in the quiz). My prize was a free key for the newly released Steam version of The Lost Crown.

Although the details had faded, the general atmosphere of the game is impossible to forget. In a sense, it’s stretching things to call it a “game” at all – it comes across more as interactive storytelling. The Lost Crown is almost unique in that respect. In most point-and-click adventures, the narrative is simply a convenient vehicle to get you from one puzzle to the next. The interest lies in decoding cryptic messages, or putting unlikely objects together to construct even more unlikely objects, or whatever else you need to do in order to progress through the game as quickly as possible. The playable characters don’t get emotionally tied up in the plot, and a die-hard gamer can safely ignore all those boring grown-up things like characterization, subtext and back-story.

The Lost Crown isn’t like that at all. It contains very few traditional-style puzzles, and when they do crop up you can whizz through them pretty quickly. It’s really much more about slow, methodical exploration and perseverance. That may sound dull – and I guess it would be dull for the kind of gamer who just wants to... well, play a game. But if you think of it as being immersed in your own personalized horror movie, then The Lost Crown really comes into its own. The evocative black-and-white settings, the bizarre cast of characters and the atmospheric soundtrack all help to create an emotional depth and a sense of genuine mystery that is much more than “just a game”.

The plotline of The Lost Crown consists of multiple interwoven threads, but all those threads are Fortean in one way or another. You’ve got conspiracies and paranoia. You’ve got ancient legends. You’ve got timeslips and other paranormal phenomena. And you’ve got ghosts... lots of them.

The story starts with the main character, Nigel Danvers, attempting to escape the clutches of his employers – a sinister high-tech corporation called Hadden Industries. It seems that Nigel, either inadvertently or deliberately, came across some computer files that were above his pay grade (“Danvers has seen and heard too much! He knows about the chasm, and D Labs. He could have seen the experiment.”). Nigel takes the train to a small (and entirely fictional) town on the coast of East Anglia called Saxton. An isolated and strangely old-fashioned place, it looks like the ideal hideaway for Nigel... but there’s always the sneaking suspicion that Saxton is precisely where Hadden wants him to be.

The official Lost Crown website quotes the Fortean Times review as saying that “a sense of unease and isolation develops similar to that evoked by the film The Wicker Man”. In some ways that’s a good comparison – certainly the creepy feeling that everyone in town except the protagonist knows what’s going on. Nigel wasn’t expecting to end up in Saxton, but it seems that at least some of the Saxton residents were expecting Nigel.

The subplot of the “lost crown” itself is based on (or perhaps it’s more accurate to say inspired by) the M.R. James short story “A Warning to the Curious”. The key idea here is that a crown dating from Anglo-Saxon times is buried somewhere on the East Coast. According to legend, the crown protects the country from invasion. If you believe the legend, you’ll leave the crown where it is. If you don’t believe the legend, you’ll seek out the “treasure”. Nigel, of course, can be counted on to make the wrong decision.

There’s another homage to M.R. James in a scene featuring a young hippie couple named Karswell – after the villain in the brilliant short story “Casting the Runes” (and the equally brilliant 1957 film Night of the Demon based on it). This scene is significant in that it’s the one unambiguous case of a timeslip in the game. Nigel later learns that the Karswells died more than 20 years earlier – and not only that, but the house where he had dinner with them burned down at the same time (unfortunately, you can’t go back to the Karswells’ house after you discover this – I would have liked to see with my own eyes that it was nothing but a decades-old burned out ruin!).

I referred to the Karswell house as an “unambiguous” timeslip because there’s explicit documentary evidence within the game that the house burned down before Nigel visited it. But if you want “ambiguous” temporal anomalies, The Lost Crown is full of them! Nigel arrives in Saxton (or Sedgemarsh, to be pedantic) on a steam train – something that strikes him as odd, but doesn’t seem to bother the station master. The barmaid refuses to tell him what year it is. Present-day newspapers contain antiquated-looking advertisements for goods priced in shillings (which were phased out in 1970). The villainous Ager brothers only exist as ghosts today – but there’s conflicting evidence as to just what century they lived in (18th? 19th? 20th?).

The first time I played the game I spent a lot of time worrying about these anomalies. The second time around, I just took them in my stride. I don’t think there’s any profound significance to them – they’re simply part of the vaguely surreal nature of Saxton. In some ways the place reminds me of the village in the Prisoner TV series – you just have to take it on its own terms, not try to apply logical analysis to it.

The Lost Crown’s subtitle is “A Ghost-Hunting Adventure”, and it certainly lives up to that. Despite the homages to M.R. James, the various ghosts you encounter tend to be closer to “real ghosts” than those of traditional ghost stories. And by “real ghosts” I mean the kind of ghosts people who believe in such things claim to encounter in the real world! There’s a strong sense of realism in the way Nigel goes about ghost-hunting, too, with orb photography, EVP recordings and a satisfyingly jittery EMF meter – gadgets that would have baffled M.R. James, but are the stock-in-trade of the modern paranormal investigator.

Nigel is supported in his ghost-hunting activities by a psychology student named Lucy Reubans – arguably Saxton’s only non-creepy resident! The juxtaposition of believer Nigel and skeptic Lucy is an obvious echo of Mulder and Scully... and the game’s mixture of supernatural and man-made horror is also reminiscent of The X-Files. The most genuinely frightening scene in The Lost Crown is the one where you discover where the town’s cats have been disappearing to – and it’s got nothing to do with ghosts! I don’t think that’s a coincidence, either, because deep down you know that ghosts can’t hurt you... but a psychotic with a butcher’s knife can!

One of the great attractions of The Lost Crown for me is that you spend hours exploring the kind of places I like to explore in the real world – old churches, caves, coastal paths, a quirky museum, an old railway station, an antique store... even a New Age shop! I’ve never been to East Anglia, where the story is set, but the actual locations were filmed much closer to home, in and around Polperro in Cornwall.

The good news for Lost Crown fans is that Jonathan is putting the finishing touches on a sequel, called Blackenrock. Personally, I can’t wait!

Fortean Times in popular culture

Towards the end of my mis-spent youth (about three years ago) I was sleep-walking my way through a rather tedious video game called Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space when I was jolted awake by a reference to my favourite magazine! At the cost of reliving some of the tedium, I've just replayed that part of the game in order to extract a video clip. When the player clicks on the object labelled ALCHEMY MACHINE the character Sam says "I'd bet my lifetime subscription to the Fortean Times that that's an Alchemy Machine!"