Darq will often have you indulging in a light smirk when you figure out one of its many ingenious puzzles. This is evidenced early on when there’s a gap you cannot cross, but instead a switch you can flip to close a door, which you can then climb up and then onto the ceiling to eventually reach the other side. Darq’s main gameplay hook is the ability to walk on walls to reach different places. This basic setup instead allows Unfold to go a little wild with not only the increasingly unsettling imagery it chucks at you, but also in how deep and complex the mechanics can logically become.
There are a lot of aesthetic hints to suggest an overarching storyline related to problems in Lloyd’s family life, but I was never really able to stitch it all together. You wouldn’t know this without first looking at the official description, however - Darq really doesn’t explain itself in-game at all. You play as a bald, incessantly distressed young boy by the name of Lloyd who realises that he is trapped within his dreams.
Inspired by the likes of Little Nightmares and Inside, Darq may at first look a little familiar, but its gravity-shifting mechanics and grimace-inducing creature designs are just two of its features that help it stand out. Well, I say “exact premise”, but semi-nude grandmothers wheeling after you and lampshade-headed women with pistols is a bit more extreme than dreaming about forgetting what algebra is.
But what if I couldn’t escape the dream? What if I was trapped in my dream with no escape, forever failing to do long division? That’s the exact premise Darq, a side-scrolling horror puzzler, provides as we are pushed deeper and deeper into the worried mind of a young boy. My personal favourite (and weirdly recurring) dream involves me worrying about having to take my maths GCSE, only to wake up and happily realise that I am 27 year old guy who already scraped through the exam well over a decade ago. A lot of us look forward to our dreams at night.
0 kommentar(er)
