With these binary ratings from steam it is getting hard to say until that point you can recommend a game. The Last Crown is by far the most ambitious game from Jonathan Boakes, a guy I credit with the beginning (or part) of the indie game explosion when he released the Dark Fall, a game that he basically did from scratch. He is specialised in (point n click) adventures, usually first person, with non gory horror elements, all based, more than on the classic British writers, on the later TV and film adaptations that kept us who are now in our 40s awake with fear. Dark Fall really scared me when I played it the first time, Dark Fall 2 had interesting elements, did not quite get into Dark Fall 3, and I loved and was irritated by The Lost Crown to bits.

At its core, it is a mix of different ghost stories that happen on a town that is based on different places around Cornwall. The Lost Crown has a great, thick atmosphere where you can understand the appeal and the magic of those places, where you feel the warmth of the pubs and the coldness of the barely maintained old houses by the sea. The story is developed through several days where you investigate around the town, the forest, the trees, haunted churches, haunted houses and the rest of British haunting realness galore. And this game is one of the few point n click adventures that frightens me, that really scares me, that keeps me tense (there are some parts of it that I consider the most terrifying: I hate jump scares, I usually quit games as soon as they have one easy jump scare, and I love every second of the scariest part int his one).

But The Lost Crown, being a celebration of the local folklore and the local help ends up being a bit of a narcissist trip. The main character is voiced by Boakes himself and it is so much a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu if you wish) that sometimes I wish another character was the main character. The voice acting goes from the irritating to the absolutely atrocious, speaking slowly, really slowly, getting on your nerves. The game itself goes slowly, the character walks slowly, and there are oh so many empty screens. The puzzles themselves are a bit on the obscure side, and these two last cons happened so often in the 00s with the developers that moved their games to a third person perspective (hello Syberia) where you can clearly notice that some design fits better the first person.

There are first person parts, though, and they are a glorious equivalence of the found footage horror films (that I love). I mean, this game, again, scared me, this game redefined what an English church is to me to the point that I always think it twice before entering them now. And it is a long game with a lot of ghosts.

Pity that it ends with so many unresolved plots, on the other hand. But anyway, an ambitious, literate, sometimes pedantic, sometimes lovely, definitely scary, experience.

Two more points on the technical side: graphics are lovely though sometimes the perspective gets weird, and the sound design is of the highest quality.

EDIT: changed the 439043432 times I wrote "the game" to leave it at 3. This is what happens when you write a review during several days