It's never enough to have a great idea.
Hell, you have a whole list of great ideas.
They don't mean a thing if the brilliance of the concepts isn't matched by the brilliance
of their execution.
Deep is the grave of games that had great ideas, but nothing else.
Games that, beyond a few really cool concepts, did nothing right.
It says on the box that this is vampires done right.
In reality?
It's just another body for the grave.
It's fitting, in a sense, that a game about vampires would be so utterly lifeless, but...I'm
not sure that's what they were going for with Dark.
This ambitious new title comes from the team at Realmforge Studios, a studio best known
for the point-and-click adventure game Ceville.
And funny enough, that game was praised for its funny dialogue, its colorful art, its
memorable characters...
Apparently, this guy ate them.
And this little...bubbling chalice, of personality, is Eric Bane.
We meet Eric in some strange nightclub.
He has no idea where he is, how he got there...or even who he is, for that matter.
Long story short, you start seeing angels, obnoxious music, hot goth chicks...in case
you haven't figured it out...
Yeah, if only it were that easy, pal.
Thing is, he's not a full vampire.
Not yet.
And to become one, he has to drink the blood of the vampire who bit him.
Since he doesn't know who bit him, he just goes after every vampire in town.
As well as indiscriminately killing human, after human, after human.
He's the good guy, by the way.
Dark dresses this up as a question of survival versus morality.
The whole premise is that, if he doesn't get this blood he's after, he's screwed.
But you know, that's only an interesting question if the character is conflicted.
Eric's not.
And frankly, he's not an interesting dude period.
He's just this muted, mundane...monotone murderer.
"Memorable" starts with M, too, but...you'll notice I didn't use it.
Dark's pretense of morality and decision also appears in the form of dialogue trees, which
are revealingly limited and go absolutely nowhere.
But the bad execution is most evident in its core gameplay.
Dark's proposition of a stealth-based vampire game is a legitimately interesting one.
The idea of sneaking through the shadows to feed on unsuspecting humans, and using supernatural
abilities to move through your environment undetected...there's a lot of potential in
that.
Problem is...you don't hide in the shadows.
You hide behind boxes.
You see, Dark's stealth mechanics are fatally underdeveloped.
Eric moves less like a man of the shadows than a man at the bar, around 2:00 AM.
He's slow, stiff...all things the game's design seems to think he's not.
The stealth is never much fun, but frankly, the onus is even more on the level design.
They're mostly based on trial and error, they're never creative...and they're repetitive to
the point of frustration.
You know, Dark isn't a game you bury without remorse.
The game has a slick look, a cool concept...hot goth chicks...but like the humanity of a vampire,
they're lost.
You die a million times in Dark.
But like a vampire who hasn't discovered checkpoints, you always come back...way back, at the beginning.
Over and over again.
Somewhere along the line, you start to wish for mortality.