Delaware St. John: The Seacliff Tragedy
Preview
Poor Del is having trouble sleeping again.
by Marcus Mulkins
previewed on PC
A Man In Desperate Search Of A Good Night?s Rest
Delaware St. John: The Seacliff Tragedy, developed by Big Time Games, Foster City, CA, and published by the Dutch company Lighthouse Interactive is Volume Three of a series of ten games that revolve around a young psychic named Delaware St. John. (With a name like that, it was a safe bet that there would be something special about him.) Del?s specialization is that he is haunted by dreams and visions of the deceased who, not surprisingly, have died prematurely, usually due to someone or something?s evil machinations. Essentially, it has become his lot in life to solve mysteries, thereby allowing the tortured spirits to finally rest. (And incidentally allow him to sleep without bad dreams cropping up every night.)
The opening story of the mystery decathlon was Delaware St. John: The Curse of Midnight Manor. In that story Del is drawn to a haunted mansion where bad things happened to a party of teenagers that decided to spend the night. The old ghost-stories-around-the-campfire type of fun that appeals to adolescents; that kind of thing. Unfortunately for them, the mansion was haunted and they paid the ultimate price for trespassing someplace where evil resides. In investigating their fate, Del learns that they were just the tip of a very deep iceberg, one where for many years people would go mysteriously missing. The story goes beyond simply hunting ghosts to such adrenalin-pumping action as being chased by hellhounds.
Obviously, Del survived Volume One and moved on to Volume Two: The Town With No Name. The story starts out when Del drops an atlas that opens to a certain page. When he picks up the book, he has a vision of a town icon on the map where there is no town shown. Driven by curiosity (or maybe just a lack of restful sleep), he decides to go to the location he had seen and discovers a town that had been abandoned in 1983. Not just abandoned: every notation of the town?s name has been systematically obliterated. Now, you just know there?s a story waiting to be told when you encounter something like that.
Tempus fugit and here comes Volume Three: The Seacliff Tragedy. This time around Del is looking into an amusement park that was closed four years ago because of a tragic accident. It seems that the park was constructed on top a huge mound by the sea that was riddled with caves that no one knew about. Accumulated stress from a plethora of carnival rides and about half the park collapses into the sea, taking about a hundred of the park goers with it. Apparently it took four years for the restless spirits to find Del and start haunting his dreams.
