You start out exploring what seems like a sewer and move on to city streets, abandoned hospitals and moving trains. Levels also each have their own specific themes as well. The models show beautiful craftsmanship all the animations sport more polish than many triple-A games. The feat only becomes more impressive when you take into account the huge redesign the game went through.ĭarq Review | Carefully Laid Plans The ways in which you solve puzzles usually relies on perspective, which can have interesting results.Ī lot of careful thought and detail went into the level design. Clearly, the small team of developers put in a lot of work bringing out Darq's beauty. On top of all that, Darq contains a considered thematic structure and insane levels of polish. The monsters you come up against are all creepy and unsettling in their own unique ways and require you to be careful when dealing with them. The puzzles are all interesting and require you to really think about the different perspective mechanics that you have available to you.
Excusing some moments in the late game, these deaths never seem to break the flow of gameplay too much.įor the most part, the gameplay in Darq comes out very much in credit. In fact, there is actually a puzzle that you can't solve until it kills you. Whenever you die you seem to come back to life in almost the exact same place. Luckily death isn't exactly much of a drawback, possibly because of the whole 'dream' thing. The first time you come up against an enemy, you have no warning and they'll likely kill you. You will probably find yourself dying quite often, or at least you might find that to be the case. While it might make sense in a dream for a watch or compass to grow to enormous sizes, it doesn't necessarily give the puzzles logical solutions.ĭarq Review | A Relationship With Death Darq relies heavily on stealth when encountering monsters since they're usually able to just rip you in half in seconds.Īnother interesting factor in Darq is its relationship with death. Objects changing size is possibly the biggest culprit for poor implementation. For the most part, these dream-like mechanics work pretty well with a minor exception here or there. Shifting perspectives to walk on walls and ceilings, objects changing shapes and sizes and severed limbs acting independently all feature as puzzle solutions.
Mechanically the most unique thing about Darq is that it uses the strange qualities of dreams as methods of solving puzzles. Even the 3D models and animations support this, sporting a decidedly 'stop motion' style. The main character is clad in black and white stripes, a favorite of the director, and the drawn thin features of the different humans only go on to add to the similarities. In fact, Darq has a particular 'Tim Burton-esque' quality to it. That translates to a rather desaturated environment filled with horrific parodies of human beings. The entire game takes place in a dream world. It has a certain amount of horror elements to back it up. Darq has a few unique features which make it stand out against the sea of indie puzzle games.
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