Dark

You know something is up with a game when you hear the lead character's voice and you go "That's Geralt!" and you look up Geralt's voice actor's IMDB and there is no reference to the game in question. Hum. It's not even sort of vague, it's like they told him straight up to play Geralt. Either that or it's another voice actor very explicitly instructed "Geralt. EXACTLY like Geralt. Also the dialogue will sound like Geralt. Good. Good."

Actually you know something is up when a game asks you to login upon starting, while being a single player game. It doesn't press you about it, and then it does have a proper decent settings menu, so it's almost immediately conflicted.

Shortly after I got through the early dialogue, the hat trick was in the back of the net. I was sent to do the tutorial. Actually, I should point out the tutorial is entirely optional, it doesn't appear to be forced.

The weird 'head of security' character tells you there's some, you know, thugs hanging around the club. Maybe you should take care of them? God, why is this dialogue so weird. It's interesting realizing this is very, very much an over the shoulder stealth game with cover mechanics and neat sounding vampiric powers to interact with stealth and leaping through shadows, not a stagger around a club while Geralt whimpers about his headache simulator as it implied in the first twenty minutes. On the other hand, ten minutes later and I'd murdered a bunch of what is very apparently a bunch of homeless people.

That is the best name you could come up with?

I don't even know how to describe this game other than that completely weird contrast. There's the core of something good, immediately, someone talented worked on it. But then you're just casually murdering hobos and it feels all so entirely out of whack. I mean I guess the hobos had guns, but that just seems out of place as well. I mean it goes Why am I murdering hobos? oh because the hobos had guns wait who is arming the homeless like so...?

I was warned this is a bad game, but it's almost jarring how good/bad it is. It's not like Blood Knights, where the game is just so upfront about being ridiculous, but more ... Just bad, but still clearly a production people put effort into. The engine actually runs fairly well, and I don't think I've seen this art style applied to vampire/stealth games before, but it looks quite nice...

Who is this Tom?

Even moreso than Blood Knights, which was pretty innately a bad game, Dark is a bad game. However, it's not really a bad game in its core ideas, which is what makes the game brutally frustrating. Dark is a stealth game, and the core theme wrapped around that is actually one I quite like - You're a vampire, so all the stealth "things" that we take for granted in stealth games are vampire powers with talent trees and a pool of energy refilled by drinking blood. These are good ideas, and vampires doing things in the night works thematically very well. You don't start this game off thinking you're going to hate it. You think, oh, it's a budget thing, but the core concepts are good.

Your brain just goes yeah, of course, vampires being sneaky and nefarious, that just clicks. Super powered takedowns, unnatural stealth, flitting through shadows, you're already describing vampires and you just didn't realize it. You're also describing Witchers, and uh, man it is hard to forget about Witchers when Geralt is chittering in your ear about how the night is his friend.

But then the bad of the game sets in, and it sets in incredibly fast. Like being hit by a car fast. Or ... A bullet through your brain! As I said, the engine is good and the game looks fine. I like the color palette, and while the main character looks a bit goofy in his silly get up at the start of the game, then he's in a stealth game and it makes sense. The UI is alright, and the audio direction is ... A thing, but it's not outright bad at all times, if a bit painfully janky in parts. Weirdly the enemy quotes and quips sound good, but the voice acting feels like it wasn't scripted properly and doesn't flow.

This is Tom. Seems legit

It has been a while since I played stealth games in any amount, I think the last being mark of the ninja, though if I have it is written somewhere in my record of games playing that is this blog. That being said, Mark of the Ninja got the crucial element of stealth that this game doesn't. Well, ok, it got like lesson one through thirteen, which this game doesn't. Actually it forgot lesson zero, which was "actually envision a situation in which the player enjoys this". Wait, that's lesson -1, lesson zero is "try to convey something to the player through gameplay".

In case there's any confusion: MoTN was a good game. It took stealth to new, interesting places for me. Dark is a bad game. Dark is like playing a urinate in your briefs simulator.

welcome to the vomitarium, domain of all true vampires

Right off the bat the game just instantly drops you into levels with way, way too many enemies and offers no real perspective on how stealth can be accomplished. Not should be accomplished, but straight up enemies standing with their backs to walls staring at your only point of ingress. Is there some trick to this? I have no idea. The game never really tells you. You go from murdering hobos to fighting special forces in about four minutes.The UI is reasonable about explaining how quickly enemies detect you, which is nearly instant, and quick to let you know something has happened but it never explains what the different somethings are. So lesson one, right off, is a failure. You have no time to really study how the AI works, you're just immediately engaged with piles of dudes. You one shot kill them, but the second problem comes in immediately.

Stealth - or more sneaking, it barely seems to do anything -  is controlled by clicking the movement analog stick; it's an on-off switch, and good lord it is awful. There's just nothing natural about the motion, so when you get detected you don't naturally (or god forbid, automatically, like WoW did in I don't know, 2004?) slip out of stealth, you remain in your 'creeper' mode even while enemies are blasting you in the face with automatic weapons, and they'll usually slip away from you if you were detected at the last second. So stealth feels jarring to move in and out of, and you're given no time to really nail down how to get the sneaking working and put in situations that feel like you're missing something.

Admittedly the "something" might be a "Reason to play this game". And by that I mean no, don't play this game.

I mean, the other thing is you're supposed to, I guess case the joint and figure out what you're doing ... But it's slow and tedious, and rooms are huge with so many enemies wandering around it just becomes boring way too quickly. Stealth and stab gaming works by giving you the innate variety inherent in the design. Easy parts can be done well, like a ninja, but they can also be scrapped by or done in a feisty way. Dark is just staring at the rooms wondering what the hell the level designer was thinking. Was he making a FPS game?

no pls don't make me talk to Tom

Because it seriously feels like I'm playing a FPS game, except I'm not. Why aren't I playing Wrack? Wrack looks cool. (Wrack actually makes me nauseous. Welp, indie devs, sometimes you're just not very good) There are so many enemies and so often the rooms are laid out for firefights. It doesn't help that combat is really aggravating.

As an aside, whenever you trigger an alarm, there seems to be a chance to spawn enemies. They just appear in the room. They don't run in or come from elsewhere, they just appear. In a game where stealth was a more complete option, this ... Is dreadful and makes absolutely no sense. Enemies becoming more dangerous because they're alert, sure, fine. Enemies magically appearing? No, this is awful. You will get detected out of nowhere and suddenly there are enemies on top of you. Stealth just isn't a great option here. Here's an example: I am forced through a narrow room where I have two enemies standing side by side, right by the door.

Given how dodgey and crap the stealth is, you sanely elect to kill one of them. The second one is alarmed, and a third enemy magically manifests in the room. There is no excusing a design choice this bad. If the enemy ran in, sure, I guess I could forgive that.

Also holy good lord. Just ... Just seriously, please bear with me for a moment. Cutscenes to explain a room. Fine. And you haaaaave to do this for every single room. Fine. Limited number of save slots to ... Something? Difficulty? Why? But fine. The game doesn't allow you to save scum because the designer of the game didn't understand what he was doing. He thought he was making a game as a punishment for prisoners in a new age prison, not something for people to have fun with. Fine.

The game's autosave is before the cutscene. Do you ... Do you actually have like ... Is there a progressive way to imply the person's brain who designed this must have shards of glass buried in their frontal lobe? Like I'm sorry. I can't convey design choices this poor without implying they're a lobotomy victim.

You have to burn up one of your save slots to skip the terrible, disjointed and jarring cutscenes before entering the room. Were save slots an IAP for the mobile version of this game that never got made or something? What possible reason would you have to punish the player for making your terrible cutscenes? You can not possibly have playtested this. How could a decision that stupid possibly pass through any sort of QA process? Often, there will be multiple cutscenes, so at some point you're going to have to sit through something as you try to struggle with the inept levels.

The whole saving thing is an interesting idea, but in execution, Dark is so tedious and finicky with such absurdly poor enemy placement that the limited save idea just turns it right around. You want to save scum, because repeating the same dumb motions over and over as you try to figure out where the moron level designer hid the next enemy who will instantly spot you. Dragging bodies is slow and irritating, and everything just devolves into tedious. The game isn't good enough that you want to repeat parts. Actually, the game isn't good enough that you want to play it at all. If I could save scum I might have managed a little further, but it's just asinine and untested garbage.

I mean, yes, the game gives you access to vampire vision and co-opts the Dead space crumb button, but the vampire vision is blurry, painful to look at and doesn't on any level replace good level design. I'd rather have levels laid out to demonstrate enemy paths than be dumped into a room filled with chest high walls and watch red blobs on a shimmering purple background glisten at each other.

blerg

The Dead space crumbs button was a rapidly moving laser line that pointed you toward your destination. It allowed Dead space to have some really wacky, almost real world environs that you didn't ever get too confused at. Oh, it was a bit bad in parts, but it's a good idea if you're going to do things like turning gravity on and off. It's something I wish was in other 3d games, since fighting with the directions is not something all that pleasant unless it's a part of the core game play.

Dark co-opts this feature and ... Makes it terrible. It sort of gradually squirts out of your vampire, but only in vampire vision, which is this hazy purple vomit wagon view of the world. It also doesn't really make tons of sense in a stealth game, but it is nice to see the feature back anyway. I'm glad they took the time, even if the game doesn't point out its there and the effort put in to put it there.

One of the things that always gets me about modern game design and I guess "where it becomes bad" is that voice acting or rather proper voice direction is a bridge you don't really have to cross. I mean, of recent games that weren't voice acted, I found that maybe Dungeon of the Endless should have had some. But I didn't play through Shovel Knight wishing direly that it did, or feel like Final Fantasy 8 which has a comparable amount of dialogue needed it. Having someone verbally flail into a microphone doesn't offer that much to the gaming experience. Dark wanted to have voice acting, which I guess is sort of important to the stealth genre, but I think back to MOTN and I swear it did everything about stealth better without voice acting so...

Dark is, without a doubt, truly a  truly terrible game. I will give credit where credit is due - I'm honestly not certain where things break apart. The game's engine is good, and the mechanics don't really feel like they should be quite so bad. I've loaded up lots of indie gam
es and found they just suck or feel awful to even look at, but Dark isn't like that. If you watched a video, you wouldn't instantly hate it by looking at it.

The level design though is just baffling. It really feels like someone was designing a sweet fps game, and then they just re-wrote it as a stealth game. That being said, the levels don't look bad, they would actually have been a really cool fps game. I mean this seriously, I wish someone would take Dark and make it into a stealth fps game. I didn't finish the game, but the levels I did would have been cool for shooting hordes of demons.

If the enemies were a bit more active and placed in smaller numbers, without the ridiculous spawn in nonsense, the level design might have been passable. The problem is the rooms, as you can see in the screenshot, don't really make a ton of sense when looked at through vampire vision and require your meticulous plot their movement and sight paths. I never really felt confident in the stealth and just ended up slugging it out in a lot of the rooms, which came off as especially boring. The combat isn't good, and the designers should have been reluctant to throw a lot of difficult to stealth through situations into the game early on.

I honestly didn't get the impression that you were supposed to be able to no-kill clear through rooms. A lot of them just had armed guards staring at the exit. I seriously have to ask what the point of a stealth game you can't stealth through is, but again, it is ultimately the level design that ruins this game.

the hell

The limited saves nonsense really hampers the game. It's not really hard, but you're expected to be incredibly patient - enemies will stop and remain stationary while having long, dull conversations where you need to them to move to do stuff. You become bored, and you make mistakes, and you're not allowed to save. Coupled with the absurd "saved before the cutscene not after" moronic design choice that makes you burn a save slot early, it just becomes nauseatingly tedious. I don't really want to trial and error a puzzle that makes my eyes hurt to look at. I gave up after I finished a large room that of course cascaded into just murdering everyone, and then there's no check point. I died to an instantly spawned in enemy when the game's usual nonsense tripped, where you're given no point to 'sneak' an enemy and instead have to walk up and punch them unless you want to stand around watching their patrol paths. The other enemy appeared out of sight and gunned me down.

I just can't muster the energy to repeat the previous six minutes of gameplay. It's boring. There's nothing else to really say about Dark that really defines it more than the fact it is simply rather dull.

I do think the core idea of a "vampiric thief" could be a cool one, and I wish the story wasn't so damn stupid about it. The plot writes itself nothing but excuses - you need to do this. Because of the process. Which also gave your amnesia and special powers. You don't really feel drawn into ERIC BANE's world, since he's just a jerk with amnesia and the other characters don't tempt you into their world, they just tutorial a la exposition at you. If ERIC BANE was forcibly conscripted into the vampiric ranks to accomplish something somewhat less dramatic and forced into the situation, he might have felt like something instead of just a gullible nitwit. As is, he's the usual bumbling anti-hero grumbling about his own methodology while complaining there was no other way as he happily murders people.

I honestly think you could take the core elements of the game, put together a more casual and interesting story about someone being enslaved by vampires and forced to work with other vampiric slaves (using the same goofy cast) and then make a good game by improving the levels. Nothing in Dark really stands out as truly bad, but somehow the sum of its parts is one of the most excruciatingly unpleasant gaming experiences I've ever struggled even a few hours in.