Dark Fall: The Journal

If You've Ever experienced the kind of fear that slowly runs a frozen, clawed finger along your spine, as it gently strokes your stomach and whispers in your ear, daring you to turn and look it in the eye, you'll know what playing this game feels like.

Basically, Dark Fall scares the living shite out of you. I played this in a brightly lit room, while builders were smashing and drilling holes in my flat's walls, and the game still had me frozen in terror. Dark Fall is a flick-screen adventure, in a similar style to Myst. You jump between locations solving puzzles -ranging from simple jigsaws to mind-bending maths and logic riddles - to find out why and how your brother and his friends vanished, while working at a mothballed, and haunted, railway station and hotel. And boy, is it haunted.

Each scene is beautifully rendered, down to '40s period posters and food tins, and the devs have used simple tricks of flickering lights and whispered voices to terrifying effect. Dark Fall is a game from a bygone era. There's no action, it forces you to think, and doesn't let you go.