I’m a millennial, and as such, I’ve lived through some weird trends. I’m old enough to have spent hours on Neopets and learning line dancing in gym class (I will always associate the song “Money, Money, Money” by N’sync with the odor of fluffernutters and the sound of dozens of small feet trying and failing to stomp on the beat). While I was a bit older than the target demographic, I also remember the vampire mania that swept along in the Harry Potter madness’ eddies, grabbing every preteen girl in its ripcurrents and dragging them all out into the depths of Twilight and everything that spawned from it.

The early 2010s were a wild time, is what I’m saying.

Dark feels very much like a part of that moment, enmeshed in all things vampire, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense to be. It couches on its vampireness in the hopes that that’s enough to make the impression it wants to make and to endear itself to its audience.

It isn’t. But it’s an interesting choice.

As a vampire, I must glower and brood over everything.

Dark is an action stealth game. You play as Eric Bane, a newly converted vampire with amnesia who must drink the blood of the vampire who converted him or the blood of an elder vampire, lest he become a ravenous beast. To this end, he moves through his city, killing enemies and trying to find blood, all to prevent his inevitable demise.

I’ll be blunt. This is a dumb game. It has some of the worst writing and voice acting I’ve ever seen in a game, none of which is helped by Eric’s constant monologuing. The plot is nonsensical, and the paths the character takes to get there make little sense. As an example, the game emphasises early on that Eric faces the horror that he does because a vampire killed him by drinking his blood, then left without so much as leaving a note on the nightstand. However, Eric uses blood to fuel his various vampire abilities. How then does he solve this dilemma? He prowls through stealth levels, drinking his victims’ blood until they die, then dumping their bodies without so much as peck on the forehead. Classic Eric.

The stakes and mechanics of this world make no sense, and leaves me with very little investment in Eric and his fate. We’re told what was done to him was monstrous, but then do the same to others. Is Eric a sociopath? Is what was done to him not actually all that bad? The game doesn’t know, nor do I think it cares. The story, inasmuch as it exists, seems to exist solely as a framework for the various stealth levels.

If you’re going to be stealthy by wearing a hood, why would you not cover up your pale arm - you know what? Never mind. I don’t even care. You do you, Eric.

A game can have a terrible story if the actual gameplay that that story is a framework for is worth it. As mentioned, Dark’s gameplay consists of moving through stealth levels. Eric has a variety of powers he can use to help with being stealthy or violent as he moves towards his goal. The game encourages the player to think tactically about their movements, carefully watching guards and enemies throughout the level, and taking them down as silently and as stealthily as possible.

The gameplay is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, bad.

At first blush, the stealth mechanics and gameplay seem interesting. There are obstacles and environmental hazards, and Eric’s range of powers provide potentially interesting pathways to navigate each level. Teleportation, in particular, offers an interesting way to navigate the level and redefine its dimensions. In practice, however, these powers are either badly implemented, or the controls are so bad and baffling that they become difficult, if not impossible to use. As an example, there were multiple points where I wanted to teleport. There were no barriers between me and where I wanted to go, but I could not get the controls to give me the option to teleport to where I wanted to be. Similarly, I couldn’t get my temporary invisibility power to work.

The combination of unwieldy controls with levels designed for these controls to actually work means that gameplay, rather than being a smooth and adrenaline-packed stealth run, becomes a tedious slog of guessing and checking a manoeuvre, dying, and then having to repeat everything up to that point again. It’s tedious rather than exhilarating, and it becomes easy to just fall into hate with this game and its broken mechanics. With no reward on the other side of the level other than the terrible writing and story, the incentive to try the same tedious actions over and over is non-existent. The game becomes dull and frustrating.

I mean, okay, I get that you need your hands free to kill some people, but you could wear gloves or something, right? Shouldn’t you be wearing them anyway so you don’t leave fingerprints? Do vampires have fingerprints?

I do not know the developmental history of Dark. I do not know if this was someone’s passion project, babied and nursed into existence through love alone. It feels like a game that was slapped into production to cash in on the vampire trend of the early 2010s, with an idea of what stealth mechanics looked like, but no investment from someone who had actually made a stealth game before. It feels like it was written by people with the barest idea of what vampire fiction looks and sounds like, but no real interest in learning more or creating something unique. This combination of half-assed investments created a game that grating, frustrating, and tedious, trying to cash in on trends and better iterations of the genre, but failing to understand what makes any of them work.

Also, the main character’s name is “Eric Bane,” and I cannot take that seriously.

Developer: Realmforge Studios

Genre: Action, Stealth

Year: 2013

Country: Germany

Language: English

Play Time: 7-10 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/lceRE9G1RBY