While the cracked kitchen floor tiles and stained wallpaper of Lloyd's apartment accentuate the industrial monochromatic aesthetic, they're more creepy than scary.

Monotony is a sure-fire way to kill potential scares.ĭarq isn't as scary as it wants to be, and those occasionally tedious enemy encounters aren't solely responsible for this. These sorts of encounters are all over Darq, and they get old, fast. Try to bolt past, and you'll get tackled and met with a game over. So I had to sit there twiddling my thumbs as the beast crept by at an agonizingly slow pace. The trouble is, this took place in front of a puzzle that I needed to access several times. All I had to do was hug the walls as it slowly patrolled to and fro - pretty standard stealth game fodder. At one point, there was a grotesque creature that only responded to touch.

Stealth is also a big part of Darq but, unfortunately, it isn't as successful in this regard. However, it took me far longer to figure out how to get the final cog, which was suspended from the ceiling. The first came easy, and the second was just gated behind a simple sliding jigsaw puzzle nearby. So I examined the level from top to bottom, searching for the cogs in question. There was a barred gate, and the only way to get past was to power up a giant mechanical contraption that was missing three cogs from its engine. Even the very first puzzle is a real noggin-scratcher and one I struggled with. You will spend most of your time fiddling about with these lever-based puzzles, and they’re pretty enjoyable. While in other cases, turning a crank might swap out a room for a completely different environment. Sometimes, it’s as simple as hitting a lever so that a drawbridge shifts to a perpendicular angle letting Lloyd walk up to it and onto the ceiling. Throughout each chapter is a smattering of levers that shift the camera’s perspective or change the layout of a room. The trial and error puzzle-solving nature of games like Limbo and Inside are here, yet there are not quite as many brutal fail states. It would be easy to undercut that mystery if the gameplay wasn't up to snuff, but thankfully Darq's mechanics are pretty clever.

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