The most successful part of its aesthetic is its transitory animation. I feel like I’ve seen this before, and not in a good way. This is especially true for its main monster: a bandaged woman in a wheelchair. It almost works, like the sheer weirdness of a man that’s half-tuba, but usually it’s uninspired. It’s a difficult thing to balance, making something dreamlike but not to the point of cartoony. People with lamps for heads could be scary, but giving them old-fashioned dueling pistols is silly. They aren’t very scary and can remove intended terror. Where this flounders is with monster design. It’s expected and gets the job done, working as expected with the settings you traverse. Like the other horror games in this style, DARQ is all about muted color palettes. Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 660 / ATI Radeon HD 7850.Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 260 / ATI Radeon HD 4870.Playing through DARQ isn’t a challenge or chore, but it doesn’t feel as mind-bending as its premise would have you believe. It will grab you enough to play through a single 2-3 hour playthrough, but going through it numerous times to find a collectible isn’t interesting. I couldn’t find one and it was hard to feel compelled to search for them with its flavor of horror. There are also collectibles to be found, specifically pages of a dream journal. Since each chapter is a small vignette with straightforward solutions, there isn’t a lot of difficulty in its challenges. These puzzles can turn cruel, but those moments (like its jump scares) are fleeting. This can include using a snake as electrical tubing or turning a watch into a bridge. While straightforward, dream logic comes into play. It’s a novel approach to 2.5D, forcing you to violently shift the world and adding to its dreamlike nature. Levels also come with levers, pulling you into the foreground and background or changing the direction of the world. Rather than jumping, Lloyd can walk on walls, shifting to solve puzzles and explore places. After all, why interpret what you see when it’s not engaging?ĭARQ might fit the mold of notable puzzle platformers, but it is more accurate to forgo “platformer” in its description. It’s an insecure horror, uncomfortable to let its setting do the heavy lifting. There are some spooky moments that are earned, but the majority can be removed from their context and change nothing. Recurring monsters aren’t scary because of design or narrative, but simply because loud noises are unpleasant. This means the game’s most upsetting parts feel inconsequential. While there is skill and craft in perfecting a jump scare, the majority of DARQ’s follow a simple formula Loud strings and a temporary loss in player control. Jump scares alone aren’t the problem, I’m not against them. The biggest problem with DARQ is a simple one: it’s not that scary and focuses a lot on jump scares. It can get to the point of sensory overload, but I can only imagine how drab the game would be without it. The parts that are scary are definitely emphasized, so it would be weaker without it. It works overtime to add chaos to the game, especially at the game’s finale. The world is industrial, full of cacophony, which the game’s harsh sounds like to remind you. From abandoned theaters to run-down hospitals, there is a desire to explore the morbid in a way that is implied and open to interpretation. It’s a straightforward premise, especially as part of gaming’s obsession with puzzlers about kids in spooky worlds (Limbo, Little Nightmares, Heart of Darkness, etc). Trying to finally wake, he is forced to explore industrious settings and deal with the monsters that plague his nightmares. DARQ is a story in seven chapters about a boy named Lloyd trapped in perpetual dreaming.
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