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and slow, and he grunts in pain with each step, at least until you find a first aid kit and splint his leg.

That's right, different types of injuries need to be treated differently, and have different in-game penalties. Broken legs keep you from running, gunshots and other wounds slowly bleed, etc.

Another unique feature of this game is sanity. H. P. Lovecraft's stories often featured insanity, and this game is very faithful. As your character is exposed to greater and greater horrors, he starts to lose his grip on reality. This can be avoided by taking time to calm down after a particularly harrowing experience, and not lingering too long on dead bodies or eldrich horrors.

Jack's mental state is shown using subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, clues. You can hear Jack's heartbeat as you play, and a rumble pack allows you to feel it as well. If you look down from a rooftop for too long, Jack begins to get vertigo, and the screen distorts. And as Jack seriously loses his grip on reality, he can start to hallucinate, hearing voices and seeing things that aren't there.

The story is very faithful to it's source material, and extremely well researched. In fact, it is probably the best adaptation of a Lovecraft story I've ever seen.

Of course, I have to admit that this game DOES have some weak points.

When it's first started, Dark Corners takes a very long time to load. It only does this the first time you start it up, so I suspect it's decompressing a lot of material off the disc to the X-Box itself. In game, there is SO much detail that there are some long-ish loading times, although after the first one they are not anywhere near as bad as the loading times for some other games, such as, say, Morrowind.

Also, although not actually a fault of the game, there is a major hurdle that may take getting used to: the setting. Lovecraft wrote in the pulp era, which is to the say the late 1920s, and this game is set in the same decade. This is an era that, to modern Americans, may seem like a walking stereotype. In particular, the accents and clothing of the characters look like they've stepped straight out of Film Noir. However, this is in the interests of accuracy, and is not a flaw per se.

As for voice acting, it can sometimes be a bit hammy, although it is usually better than average.

Of course, these are minor points. In fact, the game only has one serious problem: Save Points. You can only save at the star-like Elder Signs.

This approach to building dramatic tension is a hold

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