Dead Of Darkness Review

dead of Darkness, Steam

Sometimes, as a game reviewer, you get to review a game you’re really hyped about. Other times, you end up with a game that fits in your wheelhouse in terms of genre and style, but you’ve never heard of it. This isn’t always bad, but as last year taught me, it can go very sour as well. With all that in mind, where exactly does Dead Of Darkness fall in this spectrum? Does it shock an awe or does it fall short? Well…

The Story

You are known as Miles Windham. A man haunted by what happened to his daughter but oddly(maybe for the better)can’t remember the details exactly of what happened to her and your wife. Miles gets invited to a psychiatric hospital on Velvet Island by someone who claims to know more about what happened to his family.

On the way to the island, you’ll meet up with Olivia, who claims to be a nurse on her way to there to help with the medical needs of the island. Once you arrive, it doesn’t take long for drama to break out. Between everyone seemingly tense about what’s going on behind closed doors on this island and the chaos that breaks out during the first ghoul attack, you will stay busy, to say the least.

I don’t like getting too into spoiler territory in my reviews, and that’s not going to change here. However, what I will say is that this island holds some vary dark family secrets, and if you want to know what happened to your wife and child, you’ll need to push through the darkness.

Gameplay

Dead of Darkness is a 16-bit survival horror game with an overhead view not unlike old game boy style Zelda games, and in all honesty, the game plays exactly how that sounds. Your weapons are simply a knife, a pistol, and a shotgun. As you go through the game you’ll need to manage your health and your mental state with Health kits, pain pills and mild anti psychotics. Failing this may result in some unexpected consequences. It’s not overly complicated, and it doesn’t need to be.

It being so reminiscent of horror games from yester year expect to have your mind put to the test as this game is pretty puzzle heavy. While many are pretty straightforward forward, others may prove quite the brain teaser. Some may even cause you to overthink something that is more simple than you might expect. You also won’t have some side character with you to ruin that experience for you (a big plus for me personally).

One thing Dead of Darkness could do is to add some sort of option to review prior dialog from the game. There was twice when I beat bosses and quit playing, and when I picked it back up, I’d forgotten where I was headed or what I needed to do. The game does a pretty good job of leading you where you need to without using map markers to get you there, but I think being able to review the games’ previous dialog would be a good way to solve this issue, plus it’s would lend it self event further to survival horror of the past.

Performance

Honestly, this is probably going to be pretty uneventful, which is a good thing. Dead of Darkness seems capped at 60FPS, and short of putting on a smaller cap through third-party software, you’re going to get that. If you’re wondering if it will run on your setup, the game calls for a minimum of an Intel Pentium D 830. That’s a 2 core processor that came out in 2005. I think you’d have a hard time finding a PC this wouldn’t run on.

Steam Deck

For someone who may have never read one of my reviews, I always have a Steam Deck section for those of you who may be curious if it will run. As it stands, this game sits in the “Unknown” category according to the Steam Page. Meaning it has yet to be fully tested. With all of that said, I can say the game runs basically flawlessly on Steam Deck. If you use the Steam Deck performance overlay, it does claim the game is doing some sort of micro stutter, but it’s nothing I can actually see in game play. Now I will say Dead of Darkness is currently not verified on Deck, so it’s possible you could run into bugs i did not.

Conclusion

Dead Of Darkness is a love letter to survival horror games of the past, all be it with 16-bit graphics and better voice acting. It takes some of the best parts of games like Resident Evil, twists it into an SNES style package, and just lets it be what it is. In a world full of video game’s with giant open worlds that are big for the sake of being big it’s refreshing to play a game that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else. That said the lack of a system to track where you’re going did get me lost a few times after I shut the game off for the night. As stated above a spot in the menu to look at previous dialog in the game would fix this and it’s something used in this genre of game. If old school survival horror is your thing I highly, highly recommend this game.