be incapable of imprisoning it. The player enters the central chamber, resisting the Dark Fall, and recites the incantation, imprisoning it, and releasing the trapped souls. Timothy thanks him, and before he departs, tells him things may not have turned out as he thinks. All evidence of the spirits trapped by the Dark Fall throughout history disappear. The game then cuts back to the opening scene, as the player receives a message from Pete. In the message, Pete begins by saying he has something very important to tell his brother, but then forgets why he rang, and says the redevelopment of the hotel is going well, and he will be home shortly. Development and release Dark Fall was written, designed and programmed by Jonathan Boakes, who was working as a sushi chef at the time. He first got the idea for the game whilst exploring a real abandoned train station and adjoining hotel in Dorset in January 2000. The buildings were sealed shut with corrugated iron, but rusted peepholes allowed him to look inside and determine they had been quite opulent in their day, and had last been used in the late 1940s. Upon further investigation, he discovered one of the doors of the train station was so rotted, the weight of the iron had pulled it partly off its hinges, and he was able to get inside and explore the buffet room. Upon returning to his nearby B&B, he asked the owner, a man named Crabtree, about the hotel and station, but he knew nothing of their history, simply that they were there. It was this air of mystery that first led Boakes to consider a video game in such a setting. He was also inspired by the Sapphire & Steel serial "The Railway Station", which was set in an abandoned train station and featured "two existential 'time agents' [who] visited an old railway station to get to the bottom of a 'time rip'. Something was bringing the dead back into our world as embittered spirits." When he got back to London, he wrote a narrative outline of his proposed game, which he ultimately developed into an unpublished short story called "Dark Fall". At the same time, he started building locations for the game using macromedia software. On Easter Sunday, he returned to Dorset with a camera, a video camera and tin foil for collecting samples, determined to get