Waking up with no memory sucks. Waking up with enormous migraine pains between your temples is just icing on the crap-stained cake. I’m not sure finding out that all of this is brought on because you’re a Vampire makes this any better or worse. I guess it all depends on whether or not you’re a sparkly douche… or the real kind.
In Dark, you are thankfully more on the non-bedazzled evolutional tree in vampire lore. Dark‘s plot feels like it was put together in a rush, like the writer was pressed for time and took some shortcuts in the story creation. The game follows Eric Bane, a newly turned vampire suffering from amnesia. He learns that his transformation into a creature of the night will only be complete if he drinks the blood of his sire. Becoming a mutated, mindless ghoul awaits Eric if he doesn’t. The speed at which this info is conveyed is so fast that no time at all is given for not only Eric, but the player as well to process said info. What makes things even more strange is just how well Eric takes the news of being a vampire from Rose, the owner of the club Sanctuary. After a few questions about vampires and Sanctuary, Eric is more than happy to go kill whoever Rose points him to without the slightest hesitation. I know I would have a lot more questions before even leaving Rose’s office.
Dark is billed as being a stealth-action game, where the action part is hitting the restart level option multiple times per area. Other than that, there is essentially no action in Dark which gives it more of a stealth-puzzle vibe than stealth-action. There is no melee to speak of besides the one-hit close up kills you can do. As you earn experience from completing goals and kills, the skill tree opens up more active abilities that use Blood points (should have went with pints). I found only one active ability worth maxing out in the beginning, Obscure. Obscure partially turns Eric into a shadow, making it harder for enemies to see him. Combine this with the passive teleport ability, Shadow Leap, and you were pretty much a ghost. Since I maxed all but two abilities in the skill tree, there is no consequence to picking the previously mentioned powers to max first.
Level design did provide some hindrance to the powers for the creature of the night. Large, open areas with inherently funneling pathways riddled with what seems a never-ending supply of enemies ends up making all of my powers useless. It becomes a game of brute force to get past the multiple sections in each chapter. After multiple quick saves and quick loads, I finally gave up on trying to play Dark the way I expected the developers have me play it, and started looking for ways to break it instead.
The best example is in the chapter two boss fight with Vlad the Impaler. It’s a enormous level with very claustrophobic paths everywhere. By accident, I found out that the shrubbery was essentially bulletproof. I cleared out the entire army by alerting them, leading them to a section of bushes, then popping out to kill them one by one until the bodies covered every inch of the small area I was controlling. It’s pretty telling when finding ways to break a game is actually more fun than simply playing it.
My experience with the music in Dark can be summed up with this lovely image right here:
June, the DJ vampire, is lying her ass off. The song that was playing at the start of Dark when Eric enters the club is the same damn song I here every time I come back successful from a mission. I think June needs to lay off the drugs and glowing body paint and dig into the crates for more tunes to “mix.”
Speaking of body paint, the cel-shaded art stood out with the neon colors Dark uses. The purple was a little eye straining in Sanctuary. Gladly, that purple didn’t dominate outside the club into the rest of the chapters. The color scheme seemed to be toned down in terms of brightness which made the neon colors less harsh to the eyes, thus making the details of the environment more noticeable.
No amount of colors could hide the poor animations, though. When feeding on enemies to fill your active power bars back up, the animations made look unfinished and rushed. It looked more like nibbling on air than it did sinking fangs into the human juice box. Animations for enemies also felt like the animators didn’t have time to polish them. Enemies would pivot on an axis like they were on a pedestal. It felt like the enemies were imitating the tank controls of earlier Resident Evil games.
Even the voice work gives off that unfinished feeling. The jarring cuts from when one line ends and another begins hurts to sit through. The back and forth table tennis match of cuts totaled in just one scene has to be some sort of Guinness World Record. With all the inner monologuing Eric Bane does, it’s a shame that those jarring cuts are in his head too. “A throbbing in my head pounded on my temples” indeed Mr. Bane.
Dark seems like it was made in the dark. The unpolished, rushed feel of the completed project left me pivoting my body on an axis of disappointment as Dark sucked the life out of me ever having fun playing a vampire. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines this is not. Dark scores a shadowy 2/5.