Okay. the darkness
I hate to burst anyone’s bubble who likes snarky reviews about bad old video games, but the darkness is actually pretty good. Decent, at least. Its no half life two but its way better than i thought it was going to be.
The darkness is a mobster drama based on a 90’s image comic starring the author of said comic dressed up like trent reznor. Its not stated that its mark silvestri as the main character, but the 3d model looks exactly like him wearing a trent reznor cosplay for his outfit in the video for the perfect drug.
The darkness starts out in a big car chase/ shootout sequence in what i’m assuming is the holland tunnel and while its scripted its genuinely a great way to start a game. It is a little jarring when the car crashes in a construction site and then you’re greeted to cut scenes of two mobsters wearing armani suits, wrap around shades, and slicked back hair and then one bassist for a death metal band, but if you can get around that you start going through some corridors and shooting bad guys. The game was released in an interesting time where the gears of war step by step cover based shooting gameplay hadn’t completely taken over gaming yet, but level based games with no interconnected worlds were considered too old fashioned to be triple A. Thus, the darkness has a really token open world aspect where you walk through completely empty streets of new york with absolutely no interactable features or any other purpose to it besides being able to say the game is an open world on the back of the box. Every once in a while a few enemies will spill out from the level into the streets, but this is also usually connecting two levels and could be considered another level with confusing layout. The game also lets all of the dead bodies stay in the open level for the entire game unless theres another occurrence outside of that building, so while traipsing back and forth from area to area you’ll see a perplexing amount of dead bodies that apparently lay in the streets for weeks at a time in downtown manhattan.
The gameplay has quite a few issues. First off. The walking speed is impossible to ignore at literally any point in the game. Apparently jackie really *has* gotten in a bad situation with the mob, because his feet seem to be encased in concrete. You plod inch by inch painfully slow. The only thing i can compare it to is when i was really into playing tony hawk games and then when i would switch to any other game where the character had to walk i felt like the other game was in slow motion. During the actual built up levels this isn’t so bad because the levels are laid out for that type of walking speed. But during the parts where you’re walking through downtown manhattan it feels like you’re having one of those nightmares where you can’t outrun a monster that’s chasing you, and does absolutely nothing to make the open world feel any less empty. Except when it isn’t empty and you have to leave the area and get to a safe zone while a helicopter chases you firing machine guns, which made me almost turn off the game for good and took something like 3 days of playing to finally pass.
Also there are some imp type creatures you can summon which you can use to attack other characters or solve puzzles. Except this is an xbox 360 game before ai in games was any good, so 90% of the times the characters will either walk directly into line of fire and be instantly powderized, or walk into an empty room and check their phones while you battle 700 guards by yourself. The puzzles are even worse. Not all of them require the imps, but when they do the answer is usually completely out of left field. For example. The end of the first level you get into a shoot out in a cemetery. Before the final wave of bad guys comes in you’re given an instruction to summon your first imp. Then after the shootout is finished, absolutely nothing happens. There’s no doors, there’s no features that seem to be doing anything. So i spent the next 20 minutes or so walking around in circles trying to find a single thing worth doing, rubbing my imp on every surface and talking to the single npc over and over again seeing if he had anything new to say. Eventually i tried stacking boxes to climb over one of the walls, which then made the imp go “presto!” and open the gate on the fence i had already tried to open 600 times by that point. Those are the sorts of puzzles the game has.
Now the main story involves jackie estecado, who is an orphan who was taken in by a mobster named uncle franky. Apparently something happens where some money goes missing and Franky blames jackie for the whole thing and goes on a murderous rampage. The other thing about the story is that jackie has a demon type thing living in him, called the darkness, which is sort of like a parasite that’s passed on from generation to generation of his family on their 21st birthday (not physically given, it just appears like a curse). The darkness will help jackie with all kinds of powers while also keeping him alive so that he can eventually take over the host and make them do whatever his bidding is supposed to be which i don’t think ever gets explained. These show up as grabby tentacles, the ability to creep around in slug form, and eventually shit like creating black holes in the middle of the room. Also, the darkness is literally fueled by darkness, so you need to keep in the shadows as much as possible or eventually shut off or smash the lights with your grabby tentacle. This is the point where i mention the most powerful gun in the game is a darkness power, which doesn’t work if you have any lights shining on you and only works after you’ve methodically cleared out the room of any lights by smashing them, which you can only do without getting killed after clearing out the room, meaning i literally never killed a single character with it.
This review is coming off kind of negative, but the story and atmosphere is where the game starts to really shine. What starts off as a typical mobster movie plot eventually starts spiraling out of control when the darkness becomes more powerful and the mob storyline starts having real stakes. A turn is taken when (spoiler) jackie gets killed in the first act. It turns out the darkness can also keep jackie alive and will send him to this nether realm where hes a warrior in some sort of horror version of world war 1. You’ll meet one of jackie’s ancestors who also had the curse, and try to beat it together inside of this nether realm by having all of these symbolic battles against the zombified (in an interesting, 90’s mary shelley’s frankenstein way) central power forces. And while in writing this i can imagine this could come off as played out as an annoying “world war 1 as world war 2 analog” type setting, instead its set up that these men are ghosts trapped in an literal endless war even past death, which is much closer to what world war 1 was like from what i understand (i wasn’t there myself to report).
The nether realm really ties up the plot and characters. The darkness demon thing comes off as really silly in the beginning, not helped at all by Mike Patton’s voice work, which is a little too smeagol and mr bungle’s wackier moment adjacent to not take me out of the game every time he speaks. Once in the nether realm you see how powerful the monster is and it, once again, really ads stakes to both the monster plot and the mafia plot. The monster plot because he’s so powerful he can *deny* you death, and the mobster plot because not only have you been killed, but you come back from the dead stronger.
I’d also say this is where the setting started winning me over. The new york they’re portraying is accurate from the broad strokes, but as someone who frequents new york city, it is bizarrely wrong. For example, chinatown and downtown look pretty accurate, i mean, sort of, fulton street is in the financial district, so the rows of houses belong a little farther north in tribeca, but they do in fact look like houses in the area, and new york neighborhoods are so close together that it’s not hard to pretend you walked the two minutes it takes to get to the right spot. The subway stations are also pretty well done. The issues are everything else. The empty streets don’t help. The graffiti that greets you at fulton station saying “fucking posers” when you get off of the train for the first time field goal kicks me directly out of the game. First off, The subway system has been coated in paint resistant chemicals since the mid eighties and i’ve literally never seen graffiti on any of it at any point in my life. It makes sense in an artistic way, but walking into a subway that’s supposed to be in the late 90’s covered in graffiti with people carrying around boom boxes and saying fhaghedaboudit is like playing a game in modern day kansas city where everyone still rides horses and mines for gold. also, fulton station is in the financial district, as mentioned. Its by things like wall street and the world trade center (rip). I know for someone in sweden, where i think the game studio is from, that’s cool and edgy and they’re yelling at all of the empty suits of capitalism. But posers aren’t bland capitalists, they’re trust fund kids who are larping as artists in the shitty parts of brooklyn and driving up the rent for the locals. The fidi is so underwhelming even the people that work there don’t want to go. I have a friend who used to work there and when he was carrying out boxes to move offices people on the street were literally stopping him and congratulating him for leaving. Writing fucking posers on the wall of that train station is like writing it on the side of buckingham palace.
I know i’m harping on a minor detail, but you can imagine how if they’re getting something so famous so wrong builds into every aspect and starts feeling a little like trolls 2. However, jankiness has a way of charming me after a while. Sort of like how when you watch a local theatre production you start off being weirded out by how artificial the costumes look and how the people are acting, but then eventually you start enjoying the hyperrealism and spirit of the presentation more than you’re taken out of it by the fact that people are slathered in stage makeup and standing in front of painted canvas backdrops. I started liking the fact that all of the old men jackie is working with to take back the mob kept reminding me of my uncles and friend’s parents and laughing at how the street signs will say things like “the orphanage your next mission is at” instead of things like “downtown”. And the pacing of the game is really well done. The subways are hub areas with no combat and mission briefings. There’s also a mechanic where you get extra collectables and content in the form of random phone numbers you find. So after every mission you sit there for a few minutes at a phone booth calling these numbers and listening to random answering machine messages. Some of which are cryptic flavor text about the story, but most are like, chinese restaurants and other businesses. It lets this game, which is taking itself so seriously and trying to present this grand operatic story and gives the writers and actors room to fuck around for a while. It also means it has moments like when we help an old lady reconcile with her dead husband from beyond the grave and then she hands you a phone number that, when you call it, is a young woman saying to leave a message except for her ex boyfriend who she then goes on a rant for several seconds about how he has a small dick and cheated on her. Why this old grandmotherly lady had or would even want to have you call this number isn’t mentioned, but this was still the days when ridiculous incongruencies like this weren’t workshopped out of games and they could still be weird and unintentionally hilarious in a way that something for the ps5 will never let happen.
This means that while the combat is kind of rote, its fun enough but kind of tiring with the weird bad puzzles and horrible walking speed, and the setting is bare bones and unconvincing, they play off of each other in a way that doesn’t let either of them start to annoy and instead rounds out the experience to make something pretty enjoyable. I initially set out for all of these reviews to be of the first five hours of the game, but i couldn’t stop playing and eventually finished the whole thing. I got immersed in the mobster revenge story and started to worry about jackie estacado while his agency slowly started melting away and the darkness took control more and more, and the combat is rote but by no means bad. The shooting has that frantic bioshock energy where every room or so feels like you’re scraping by on the skin of your teeth and it only upsets the apple cart when you either have a save point too far away from where you died or have to outrun a fucking helicopter again. And as a gamer i appreciate a game that can be dumb because the people making it were making weird choices as opposed to because there was a giant management team beating people over the head with brand guides and market research charts. Or for that matter because the two dorks in a basement were too busy filling their indie “we’re above traditional forms of gameplay” clickfest with meta jokes and amiga references to remember to take their hands off of the wheel and let me have some fun on my own. The darkness is like late 90’s busta rhymes. Its not so old that its leader’s of the new school new york era rap anymore, but its also got enough of those sensibilities that the music matters more than the cell phone ad in the middle of the music video.
I’ve heard the darkness 2 is a much tighter game, so while this gets a tentative recommend, its mostly because its playable on xbone for like 2 dollars. If you were alive during this era of gaming you’ll enjoy the nostalgia of the late ps2 early ps3 gameplay style, and its short enough that you wont be playing it for the rest of eternity. However. If you weren’t alive for this stuff you probably wont get much out of it honestly. Its okay but there’s probably not enough different about it from modern games to stand out, and what is different is usually more quirky than better. Even if you’re the kind of kid who plays xbox 360 games you’re going to have a better time playing stuff like bioshock and grand theft auto 4 than a game that has elements of both and not enough of either. But for what its worth, the darkness is miles better than it had any right to be, and if you do decide to play it the little annoyances are easy enough to ignore and wont ruin a fun game you can blow through in a weekend or two. If this was a review from when it came out, i would probably say something like “rent instead of buy”, but its 2024 so instead i’ll tell you to put it in your steam library when its on sale and then never open it even once.
*author’s note. The darkness isn’t on steam, i just don’t know how to end reviews properly yet
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