DARK

[IamLEAM1983]

Vampires haven't had it easy in the interactive media. They're the darlings of genre literature, specialized channels are making decidedly big bucks from the spark in undead interest generated by the Charlaine Harrisses and, like it or not, the Stephanie Meyers of this world – but video games tend to have a bit of a hard time making them come to life in a manner that's satisfactory. Crystal Dynamics is well known for its Nosgoth trilogy, which spans time and space as the vampires Kain and Raziel try and unravel thousands of years of intricate mystery across two planes of existence. You get the Dark Fantasy part of the equation, sure, but there's not a whole damn lot of vampirism in a game that's supposedly all about vampires. Then there's Troika Games' licensed title, Vampire : The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which has gained cult status for being excessively well acted and putting a great deal of care into respecting and fleshing out the World of Darkness and its lore. It's a flawed and buggy gem, but it's one of the few role-playing and vampire-centric experiences you'll find on the market.

Then there's the Elder Scrolls series, which usually makes it a point to include vampirism and/or lycanthropy in the list of communicable diseases your character can end up with. Thanks to modding, your curse can be as harsh or as lenient as you'd like. In any case, being a vampire in Tamriel doesn't actually feel terribly different from the core experience. There's a few Sneak-oriented buffs, of course, but you don't really turn into Medieval Sam Fisher, either.

It still doesn't stop anyone from giving it a shot. I remember that shortly after Bloodlines' release and the announcement that Troika was tanking, a pretty strong wave of fan speculation had erupted considering how the vampire scene was in need of a pure-stealth actioner. I know I personally would've loved the idea of sticking to White Wolf's licensed property, only to see it through the eyes of a Nosferatu operative forced to slink around levels à la Splinter Cell or Dishonored. What I didn't expect was for a fairly middling publisher to try and take a crack at that.

Back when Splinter Cell : Conviction was making its first press rounds (that was around 2010), Kalypso Media started releasing press kits and general statements for a game they called DARK. The all-caps focus and single-word naming scheme caught my eye, but not exactly in a good way. Trying to summarize your entire experience to a fairly generic epithet didn't really feel like the kind of way to inspire confidence.

I mean, I can do that too, right? JAM. I've had JAM this morning. What kind of jam and on what kind of bread? You don't need to know, bub. I'm so freaking edgy you don't need to know.

Non-specific feels all over.

What doesn't help is the publisher's record. See, I've got nothing against AA gaming. A lot of forty-bucks-or-less titles I've played are things I'd consider to be seminal classics of their own genres. The Adventure Company used to push out a steady stream of solid puzzlers based on pre-rendered environments that wouldn't have looked out of place in 1995, but the gameplay was always solid and engaging. I'll take Benoit Sokal's Syberia dyptich over any upteenth Call of Duty sequel, believe you me, and I'm lucid enough to recognize that CoD is the better-looking series. Microids did the exact same thing, and I managed to squeeze a few hours of enjoyment out of quirky titles like Nikopol. There's a whole span of the industry that's not concerned with 4K televisions or output formats and that still works with precooked cinematics in the style of what you'd have found in the late nineties. Just dig around your local bargain bin, and you're liable to find plenty of very recent titles whose only sin is of not being the product of an insanely inflated budget.

Kalypso Media, though, never did quite as good as the other publishers I've named. My experience with them comes in the form of bad point-and-click fodder that usually ended up in the municipal library's Multimedia section, because of the place's strict no-violence and low-complexity rules. I remember I tinkered around their Atlantis or Titanic-based games, thinking that their puzzles were so esoteric and so desperately trying to feel Myst-like that all sense of place or purpose was lost. You were mostly looking at “eh”-calibre pre-rendered vistas shown to you in that horrid Fisheye Vision engine everyone and their mother was using, back in the early 2000s, getting the impression that the designers were somewhere around the back, screaming “You said you liked Myst! Why aren't you liking this?!”

Time passed, Kalypso absorbed more studios, and its play roster expanded. They're now the guardians of middling franchises like Tropico or Port Royale, and you consistently get the sense that they tend to be attracted to high-concept newcomers with very limited abilities in the way of how to flesh out what was part of their sales pitch. Tropico 4's Gold Edition brings more content and doesn't fix the fact that you're essentially playing a woefully directionless Banana Republic simulator, while Port Royale 2 drowns you in a flounder of interface elements because it's trying to be Sid Meier's Pirates! with less simulation and more miscellaneous stuff to do.

I hate saying this, but Kalypso regularly plays host to guys who seem to have the best of intentions, only to come up with something that falls disappointingly short of the public's expectations. I'm also reminded of Of Orcs and Men and of how most of us on this side of the Atlantic thought this would be a clever reversal of your average Fantasy setting – when all you're really doing is going through tag-team brawls almost endlessly.

Let's get to DARK, though. It's been developed by the same team that released last year's rather underwhelming Dungeons, which was aggressively marketed as a resurrection of the Dungeon Keeper formula – when it really isn't that at all. Their newest title, however, tries its hand at fulfilling that old “Supernatural Stealth Actioner” fantasy I talked about earlier. It also falls pitifully short.

You're playing as Eric Bane, an average guy who happens to be voiced by the same dude who lent his voicebox to The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia. They both share the same sullen lifelessness and general inability to convincingly react to anything, unsurprisingly enough. So when you wake up, groggy and dazed, in the back of a Gothic nightclub (of course), you can expect a rather complete lack of sincerely voiced shock.

Before long, you're thrust into the narrative. The vampires of this nondescript city follow a very Camarilla-esque set of rules. They don't show themselves to humans willingly, they suppress their existence by controlling the media and generally set up cultural hubs like the nightclub, Sanctuary, where they can indulge in their vices in secure enough confines that nobody's going to notice much of anything. The problem is, you haven't seen your sire, and you're told by the sexy undead boss-lady that you need to feed on your maker's fluids pronto. If you don't, you'll turn into a mindless ghoul.

Unfortunately, the plot immediately handwaves that by providing you with the laziest motivation possible. Turns out that you can avoid your fate if you feed on the blood of sufficiently ancient immortals, the Château Lafitte of undead Vitae essentially standing in for your sire's own blood. That's apparently all the motivation Eric needs, which isn't surprising considering how blearily blazé he appears when he first discovers his supernatural abilities.

DARK's world wouldn't have looked out of place in the midst of early Oblivion-era graphics, in that they're essentially cel-shaded so the devs would save a few bucks and hours on texturing and modelling. Everyone here is flat and stiff, everything is suitably dark and, well, goffick, to steal a bastardization from My Immortal. A little more and you'd swear you're looking at rejected décor proposals for an unproduced HD World of Darkness title. There's dark marble everywhere, heavy drapes hang every few feet, the sky's a weird black-to-seafoam transition that would make an aurora borealis cry in shame, and whatever lights you'll find tend to be purple.

So it's either a visual representation of Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way's “bestest goffick” designs or a poor man's remix of the Third Streets Saints' visual cues for the milder ends of the BDSM crowd.

Of course, each of the six areas you'll visit are guarded, and these guards follow predetermined paths. The meat of the game is therefore spent on the task of slinking behind a bevy of conveniently chest-high walls and objects, waiting for Goon Number 456 to turn his back on you. Wash, rinse and repeat with an occasional neck nibble until you get enough experience points to unlock one of several abilities.

At its core, DARK wears its love for Sam Fisher and Corvo Attano on its sleeve. The problem is it just isn't very good at executing what it wants to. Each unlocked ability gets four uses per level – and only four – no matter if you've recently fed in order to regain health. Considering how health is also regenerative, you're also largely better off not feeding at all as there's absolutely no benefit to it.

Our bleary-eyed, stiff-gaited and cel-shaded fledgling is billed as the “ultimate killer”, and his toolset is largely cribbed from the better-suited and better-looking types from the above two examples. Shadow Leap enables you to teleport across short-to-medium distances, regardless of the elevation difference, while a special Hunter's Sight outlines absolutely everything in eye-shattering purple haze, while enemies become glowing red clusters of nice and lambent juicy goodness. It's murder on the eyes after a few minutes. You can't transititon between two close cover items and can't accelerate your pace while crouched. The only way to go fast is to run, and the more silent alternative of walking leaves you plodding along like a lethargic snail.

Thankfully, a brick would be smarter than this game's enemy AI. Leaving exactly one corpse out in the open confuses most goons and soldiers, who seem to become stuck in a loop of affected shock and resumed patrol habits. The problem is that their AI routine always picks up the nearby corpse, so they essentially never drop out of their initial state of alert and never actively look for you.

It's also a game dominated by cheap deaths. Seeing as no challenge could be gained out of successfully stealthing a run, enemies are indeed stupid as bricks, but they're also ruthless sharpshooters. Eric Bane, who definitely deserves to be placed alongside Cypher Raige as unfortunately named types, can't possibly hope to take more than a single gunshot.

Otherwise, what's cheap is the way these stealth mechanics are so rigidly implemented that they clash with the art direction. Frosted or acid-etched glass walkways and balconies are virtually everywhere in all of the stages you'll visit safe for one – and absolutely nobody sees you through the chest-high and frosted railing. When you're hidden, you're effectively invisible – no matter if the guard that's right in front of you is looking right at you and should, for all intents and purposes, see you.

Dig a little more and you'll find another offender, which is the dialog. I know Kalypso and most of its devs are based out of Germany and Eastern Europe in general, but if you're going to put a game for the American market, make sure a native speaker reviewed your dialog tree first... There's a few nuggets in the game I'd stick right along Barry Barton's “master of unlocking” comment in the first Resident Evil.

Take the first few lines uttered by Lifeless Badass McCoolname, for instance :

“I awoke to a world of pain. There was nothing but darkness. A throbbing sensation pounded inside my head.”

Throbbing and pounded in the same sentence, less than two words apart. Both words are used to describe a headache, implying that a single word would have sufficed. Not-Geralt is seemingly unable to pick the appropriate tone for any situation, seeing as his first Shadow Leap doesn't trigger more than the most noncommittal and mildly inquisitive display of shock I've ever seen.

I mean, come on : some idiot you barely know introduces you to the world of the undead, expects you to digest thousands of years of history in mere moments – and then shoots you in the head to prove that you've got powers. You then find yourself uncontrollably dodging the blast faster than any human could or should have done – and all you can muster is the kind of faked shock I bring to the table when my grandmother reiterates on a bit of trivia she's already told me a dozen times?!

What the actual fuck, Actor Person? Man up a little!

Granted, the game fails at establishing any kind of pathos whatsoever. It's basically a case of “Go suck neck with six elder vampires you've never met before or there's no game to be had. Kthnxbai, we'll be here for the rest of the game, standing awkwardly in place and being ready to give you absolutely insipid bits of lore using the boring cousin of Mass Effect's Conversation Wheel system.”

That's pretty much right up there with RAGE's opening in terms of how to absolutely fuck up an in medias res introduction.

So you'll die a lot, it's boring as fuck and it's cheap as Hell. Thanks, Kalypso Media! It's definitely the kind of game you'd buy if you're the asshole type who knows someone who got themselves a refurbed console or an old beige tower PC. It wants to play with the big boys of AAA gaming, it superficially looks like one – but it sure as fuck can't quack like one.

It's like those poor old relatives who end up buying Asylum mockbusters because they get confused between Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter and Abraham Lincoln : Zombie Slayer. Which one is an Asylum mockbuster? Think fast...

Oh, and here's another reason not to buy the game : DAT SONG. DAT MOTHERFUCKING SONG. It's the only song the DJ in the nightclub ever plays, it's been featured in the game's single trailer, and it feels like someone went on an Evasnescence bender after going on an EDM trip and decided to crap out the most generic piece of shit ever so the surface-level goffick types would get their dose of anger, sorrow and misery.



It's passable if you give it exactly one listen, but anything more made me cringe.

So yeah. Thanks, Uncle Who Shall Remain Unnamed, your flair for Shitty Bargain Bin Cruft remains undisturbed. That game should've been called LAME, honestly.

Or actually, no. I'd call it DARK, because it fits with the one place where the disc for this is likely to go – the darkest part of the storage-slash-water heater room, where it shall be forgotten. May none disturb its wretched slumber, and may all those who awaken its horrid lifelessness live to experience the wretched tedium I forced myself to endure out of even greater boredom.

#firstworldproblems, I know, but I like writing these. Deal.