![]() Half-naked women with lamp shades on their heads, creepy wall clambering children, shambling zombie creatures with bags for hats it’s a hodgepodge of ideas pilfered from much scarier games and films. What isn’t so fun, is Darq’s tedious obsession with trying to be a psychological horror. You’ll find monsters from the ‘trying hard to be Silent Hill’ school of design lurking around each level. One highlight challenges the player to race around a train carriage’s floor, walls and ceiling to use Lloyd’s body as a conduit to ensure a fuse keeps on burning on route to detonate a stick of dynamite. Level with too much collecting items to use for unexpected purposes drag, whilst others that challenge you to rotate the world around you in ever more complex patterns are great fun. The final puzzle type is much more traditional and anyone who’s played a few video games will be a deft hand at wiggling levers, panels and cranks to join together puzzle pieces.Įach short level utilises combinations of these puzzles to varying effect. No spoilers here, but these cryptic conundrums provided many a fist pump when the puzzle finally clicked for me. There’s some outstanding puzzles that utilise both these mechanics to push the boundaries of your brain. Things become increasingly complex when Lloyd uses mechanisms that enable him to rotate the side-scrolling world, revealing elements that were hidden and allowing access to new paths. ![]() The best puzzles incorporate this mechanic to force you to think outside of the box – a seemingly inaccessible section can be easily reached if you come at it from a different angle. Meet a wall and Lloyd can walk up it with a tap of a button, the level rotating to a new normal as he does so. Then there’s the puzzles that allow you to traverse the environment. With no dialogue to lean on, the game can’t clue you in to what you should be doing, meaning dumb luck is the order of the day here. I mean, I know Darq is set in a dream world but really? These puzzles are the low point of the game and are solved through the tedious method of just trying every item you’ve collected until something works. Take a wrist watch that can inexplicably be used as an impromptu bridge. The first are most accurately likened to a point and click adventure explore the level, collect random items, then try and combine said random items, in random ways with random objects. There are three types of puzzles that make up Darq. This is a game that, at its best, is an intensely rewarding puzzler and, at its worse, a complete slog. This is going to be easy.” Now, at the end of the game and with a very sore and tired brain I can tell you how very, very wrong past me was: Darq is a mind meltingly obscure and occasionally painfully confusing experience. After a few minutes of staring blankly at the screen, waiting for something to happen, I hesitantly nudged the thumb stick – causing Lloyd to lumber off in the instructed direction. You are left to your own devices, with no tutorial, context or scene setting to speak of. Your character, Lloyd, emerges within a dark, dingy and sepia toned apartment building. It’s proper weird, then.ĭarq begins with little to no explanation. It’s like Inception if Christopher Nolan’s finest had actually been directed by Tim Burton in the ’90s. ![]() You know that bit in Inception when Ariadne and Cob are strolling through the streets of a city in her dream, the one where Ariadne alters the dream and folds the world at a 45 degree angle, allowing the pair to walk up the brand new wall that now exists? Well, spooky puzzler Darq is a bit like that.
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