The odd stealth section here and there sees you hiding from instant-kill enemies, but-for better and worse-they’re limited to picking the right moment and hiding in clearly-marked hiding spots while you wait for the enemy to pass. Logic puzzles of the block-sliding and Tower of Hanoi ilk (among others) bring a bit of variety into the mix, but again, they tend to stick to their simplest forms. So it goes throughout all of Darq: a constant stream of interesting mechanics that never really get to flourish. Once you finish that one main puzzle, you’re done, and it’s on to another level that introduces its own new gimmick without ever really expanding on the one you’ve just touched on. It’s not an especially difficult or complex puzzle in itself, but it acts as a good tutorial for what you can do with this wall-walking business, and teases more complex iterations of the same idea.īut that’s the whole level. Navigating through them all to find the necessary items to move is all about using the floor and ceiling of the switch room in order to access different parts of the others, while dealing with the fact that, depending on which room you’re coming from, you can’t always access both sides of the switch. Take the aforementioned subway level, as an example: there’s a room with a switch, which cycles the adjacent space between four different rooms. Each new level introduces new ideas and twists on the basic idea, but comes to a sudden end just as its starting to play with the most interesting applications of that idea. One particular highlight sees you switching control between Lloyd’s body and his severed head, a medley of levers and wall-walking (or rolling) letting them lead one another through a labyrinthine crypt.Īnd yet, it’s a concept that never feels like it’s explored to its fullest.
In combination with more familiar item- and exploration-based puzzles, this changing gravity can lead to some incredibly creative puzzles, where there’s always more to any given room than first meets the eye. A seemingly blocked path might just need you to go along the ceiling instead a switch that apparently does nothing probably wants you to flip the world upside down first. Any vertical surface can become a floor when Lloyd walks up or down it, rotating the whole world around him accordingly. Why can’t a little wristwatch you just picked up suddenly become big enough to bridge a broken floor?ĭarq plays out in the familiar mould of an atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer (think Little Nightmares or a less brutal Limbo), with perspective and subjective gravity being the cornerstones of its puzzles. But when you know you’re dreaming, like Lloyd soon realises, you can use that to your advantage, defying gravity and the rules of time and space as you see fit.
Darq game dream journal pages full#
In practice, it’s a game that doesn’t quite reach its full potential, even in this DLC-inclusive Complete Edition release, but it’s nonetheless an interesting way to spend a few hours and an impressive feat for what is mostly the work of a solo developer with no prior experience.Įach level of Darq sees Lloyd, our unlucky protagonist, “wake up” into some strange place: a subway station where the trains run up and down the walls a rainy city block where severed arms claw at whatever they can grab hold of an industrial tower that turns into organic, flesh-walled hellscape at the flick of a switch. Darq: Complete Edition comes with an intriguing premise: a young boy is trapped in a seemingly endless recursive nightmare that wouldn’t look a jot out of place in a Tim Burton collection, and the only way for him to escape is to bend the laws of dream physics and solve increasingly surreal puzzles.
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