The Dark, a spoiler-free game review
When game designer/developer Eric Koziol announced the release of The Dark on Twitter, he wrote, “Get your graph paper ready!” He wasn’t kidding. The Dark is an old-school styled dungeon crawler with a twist – upon entering the dungeon, a “whisper enters your ears” and blinds your hero. Instead of the typical first-person perspective, you see nothing but a black screen.
The controls are simple: use arrow keys to move forward or change direction. There’s a button for attacking and a button for using a healing herb. That’s it.
I played my first few attempts by blindly stumbling around the dungeon. Take a step forward, hear the sounds of a monster pounding on the hero, press the attack button until it stops. Keep moving forward until I hear a “thud”. Guess I have to turn now. I quickly found myself completely lost (and completely dead).
I dug through my drawer to find an old notebook full of graph paper. I used to practice writing out Hiragana and Katakana tables in it every morning. After the nostalgia trip, I flipped to a blank sheet. I picked a square in the middle of the sheet, about three quarters of the way down and wrote an “S” in it. That is where the dungeon starts. Now the game can begin for real.
Staring at that lonely “S” in the middle of a sea of grid squares made me appreciate the “blindness” concept in a different way. The hero really has no idea what is around him. He could be in the middle of a large, underground colosseum; or he could be trapped in a dungeon cell the size of a single grid square. The grid is a way of visualizing the unknown, but, until you start to fill it out, the hero’s world is nothing but the unknown.
Being an old-school crawler, you move in just four directions. I move forward. A monster. Kill it. Write an “M” on the grid cell adjacent to my “S”. I keep moving forward until I hear that “thump”. A wall. I draw a line at the top of a grid cell. I turn, and then proceed to walk and write until I die. I start over, but this time I am not facing a complete unknown. There’s that monster right in front of me. There’s that wall a little further up.
Speaking of walls, I have never been so happy to run into so many walls. You step into a new grid cell, but you don’t really know what’s around you unless you turn around and try walking in other directions. Really, it’s those fruitless “thumps” that flesh out the map more than anything else.
In addition to monsters and walls, there are various items scattered throughout the dungeon. If I have one complaint about the game, it is the items. To be blunt: I don’t know what they are. I know where they are all located, but I have no idea what it is the hero is picking up. This was the only part of the game where I felt the “sound-only” mechanic fell short.
I can honestly say I’ve never played a game the same way I played this one: one hand on the keyboard, one hand on a pencil, and head looking down at a piece of graphing paper. I didn’t even realize I was doing it until I started to write up my thoughts on the game after a few more plays. I made a note that the game should tell you what the items are when you pick them up, only to note shortly afterward that, maybe it does, and I just never looked up to read it! (It doesn’t, though).
It’s a short game, probably an hour or two of content depending on how you play it. I’m guessing Eric had a gameplay idea and just ran with it. If that’s the case, I’d say it succeeds. It feels like a short, complete game rather than a tech demo or prototype.
I am most intrigued by the idea of having to draw out your own visuals for a game. I have played older games where taking notes / making maps is essential to winning, but never something like this where it’s all you’ve got. I don’t know how else the concept could be applied, but I do wonder if Eric had any other ideas in his head that didn’t make it into the game.
The programmer in me says he should make a version with procedurally generated dungeons. Give me a code that acts as the random seed so that I can replay the same dungeon until I beat it. Something like that. I can replay the game to a certain extent now (to see how fast I can beat it, etc.), but I can’t replay the whole “map making” part of it, and now I have a craving for that.
All in all, The Dark is a short game with a unique mechanic that makes it 100% worth the time investment. You have nothing to lose but a sheet of graph paper.
I played the Windows version of The Dark on Linux via Wine.
Eric Koziol is on Twitter at @revenantkioku
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