Welcome to our review of DARQ, a game where the obscure and the puzzle genre make one messed up baby!
DARQ tells the story of Lloyd, a boy who becomes aware of the fact that he is dreaming. To Lloyd’s misfortune, the dream quickly turns into a nightmare, and all attempts to wake up end in failure. While exploring the darkest corners of his subconscious, Lloyd learns how to survive the nightmare by bending the laws of physics and manipulating the fluid fabric of the dream world.
Apart from gravity-defying puzzles, Lloyd will have to use stealth when around enemies. He has no chance of winning in an open confrontation since the creatures he will encounter are much more powerful and faster than him. Instead, he has to rely on careful planning to avoid getting detected.
Jump scares in DARQ serve one purpose: they help establish that in a dream world anything can happen at any time. However, this isn’t a game that is all about jump scares. Quite the contrary, they rarely occur. DARQ is more about building tension and anticipation in between jump scares. Once the player knows that a jump scare could happen, they are more likely to stay on the edge of their seats for a very long time.
I will admit that I initially wanted to compare this game to Little Nightmares after I saw the trailer, but it is so much more. Sure, you can pretty much place them in the same corner of the games industry, but in my humble opinion, Darq is the superior game due to its magnificent puzzles and how they play out.
In Little Nightmares, you are basically doing the dark genre with puzzles in a more linear way, while Darq does it almost in 3D despite being in a 2D game. The trick lies in being able to use everything around you to move around. A flat wall can be used to tilt the world and that opens up the other dimension.
At times, you will encounter cranks that can do that too, but to other dimensional spaces, like 90 degrees forward tilt or backward tilting, this results in another playstyle and playground for your hero to walk around in. Not to forget the awkward enemies that can actually make the levels harder as you need to often find your way around them if not just away from them.
And then, that final level, suddenly Darq becomes a Runner game! Not joking, I usually do not spoil, but damn, this caught me off guard and I just loved it so damn much. If I had not been playing this game in the middle of the night, I would have been yelling it out loud for the guy to run… (yes, much like Forrest Gump)
Sadly I also had a weird amount of bugs, two forcing me to restart levels as I was completely stuck. At one point, I was turning a wheel and suddenly my character got a 90 degree left turn, clearly stuck in its animation of turning the wheel, and well, luckily that was at the beginning of my level. The second time, not so lucky and had to redo around 20 minutes of game time.
Darq does survive these quirky bugs as it really delivered a strong puzzle game that really is not the hardest, but the entire atmosphere just made it such a blast to play.
In conclusion, DARQ might be the puzzle game I never knew I needed in my life. If not for those bugs, I might have even gone to a perfect score, but my friends all know my love for the genre. I wish there were more levels because I finished the full story and 2 bonus levels within 3 hours.
