A word of caution if I may before I begin: For these types of games, it’s really hard to accurately translate the “feels” to words; “experience simulations” are one of the most personal interpretations of interactive media, and as such, they impact people in varying degrees, more so than some of the “traditional” experiences. Rational judgement is a bit hard in this case, but I will try my best to extract knowledge out of it and make my argument.
I’ll try not to spoil the entire experience but it’s kind of inevitable. I’ll try.
Lastly: CW: depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, social stress, etc.
Part 1: Introduction
The first place that I encountered this game was a bit different from the ordinary. I follow a lot of Rioters, and Mr. Kevin “Sirhaian” Leroy was one of them. His indie VFX work on Star Guardian Gragas and PROJECT: Karthus impressed me (ArtStation here) and that’s when (I think) I pressed the follow button.
Many weeks pass, and I see something interesting in my timeline: he released a free game on Steam. I never knew that he was a developer (well, beyond an amazing VFX artist) before that point, so I was a bit surprised. My immediate, automated response to this was, of course, was to go to Steam and put it in my catalogue, download it, set the category as “Backlog”, and… tell myself “I’m a bit busy now. Let’s revisit this when I have time.”
Then classic immature, 16-year-old high-schooler Eric moment hit me and I forgot about it for a month or so until the last day of spring break. There were other factors, of course: I was busy finishing up my Unity tutorial and playing Apex Legends and League (I am terribly embarrassed. I should cut this habit soon and start clearing out my backlog before it’s too late).
(*Let’s actually introduce the game to the audience, shall we?*) Ahem.
Part 2: The Game- Technical Stuff
When the Darkness Comes is a short indie game developed by Kevin Leroy. The game is relatively short (it took me around an hour to complete the entire thing) but has a ton of replayability in it. Developed on Unity, it features standard controls, amazing VFX, a… debatable narrator experience, and some other notable design decisions.
Darkness is a type of a game that is best labeled as an “interactive experience” though it is hard to clearly define its genre; it’s somewhere between a walking simulator, interactive fiction, puzzle adventure, narrative game, and a visual novel. Player goes through a series of dark, mysterious, labyrinth experiences of the developer Leroy’s state of mind. The player goes through the Leroy’s experiences through life, examining his mental experiences as a game developer, as an artist, as an adult human trying to have his ends meet, as a student struggling through school, as a helpless romantic, etc. Players go through his mental state and his memories, putting themselves in his shoes and trying to understand his position within himself and in life.
Since these types of games deserve more of a literary analysis and critique than standard game design analysis, I will try to make my critique of the physical experience short. Controls feel a bit slide-y and, combined with the narrow POV and overall dark color scheme of the game, made be nauseous after the first 45 minutes of it; I had to take a break to 20 minutes or so during the middle before I could continue because some parts of it were making me physically ill.
VFX was, of course, amazing, as the dev is mainly a VFX artist (or at least that’s the impression that I’m getting from his ArtStation). I noticed some very clever use of perspective, lighting, and contrast throughout the experience. It wasn’t polished as much, sure, but it was really good and it did get the message through (discussed later).
Lot of the Steam reviews for this game pointed out that the narrator was sub-par and how, for many of them, the “bad” narration impacted the experience negatively. From a purely objective point of view, yes, it does lack polish compared to, say, The Stanley Parable. But remember that this is a short side project by a single dev, and it would be a faulty comparison to compared it with the production scale of an entire indie team. Also, I think that the subpar narration actually adds to the experience (more on that later).
Environment design was not too bad for a scale like this. As I pointed out about VFX, there were some very good uses of contrast and perspective throughout the game, and those really stood out when it came to environment and map design. Some of the sections did, however, were a bit frustrating to play (like the final zigzag/jump section where you only have a single source of light to guide your path in pitch black; more on this later) and many of the sections were quite labyrinthine and caused some motion sickness. At least subtitles are there, so that’s a start. Colorblind options can definitely be there but it would be kind of hard to implement in a game where darkness is such a vital part of the experience.
Also, a quick shout-out to Julie Maxwell (link to the iTunes page of the piece used in-game), the artist who did the piano piece for this game. Her (I’m assuming here correct me if I’m wrong) performance, I think, really added a whole new layer of depth to the game and was significant in the narrative, which was a really nice touch when it came to some of the important moments.
Part 3: The Game- Actual Criticism
Now here’s the real criticism of the game. I will try my best to give the best explanation of the things that I felt while playing this game and not make it a 500-word blabber but words are hard. I’m sorry, your friendly second language learner just can’t express his words into letters that well.
Unlike some of the “experience” type games that I’ve tried before, this game stood out to me because I felt a direct connection between me and the developer. Some other games where the narrator is an integral part of the story (say, The Stanley Parable) felt like I was being challenged, tested or provoked almost, by the game itself. Those games felt more or less like Undertale where meta knowledge about the game (as in like the title itself: spoilers, story, background settings, etc.) and meta knowledge about the game (as in like a medium to tell a story and the conventions that go with it) directly affected how the game treated me. Interaction and emotional connection existed between me and the game (and its story), but everything was, more or less, an illusion of an emotional bond between the medium and the audience. A sort of connection that you feel when you identify strongly with a character in a book or a movie. A guided experience where the element of interaction existed simply as a medium to get a message across, to think not only within the shoes of an invisible entity called player in-game, but also as… well, yourself playing the game. In those experiences, I felt like the game was talking directly to me, as a person who was playing the game, talking to me to think about the impact within the constructed world of gameplay how my interaction affects things.
But note that those experiences only consist of a very small group out of the bunch that I want to talk about in this post. Games that our proud community of Internet has labeled Not GamesTM still exist (such as Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch, Depression Quest, Dear Esther… list goes on). I haven’t referenced these games because I think of them as an extension to the visual novel genre, where the layer of player interaction only exists as a medium to tell a set story. We will come back to this later.
This experience, however, was different. I felt like the game was not only the extension of the developer himself but also the developer and his inner state of mind. There was a complex communication of some sort going on in my mind between myself as a human being, myself as a player of this game in the shoes of someone else, the game itself as a medium and a set story, and the developer himself and his internal state of mind. It felt like Stanley Parable but also not like it because the dev/narrator was in control of the experience and the player (I) could go against that control, but also that control was merely an illusion and I was actually experiencing a direct communication between me and the dev. For the first time, I viewed the developer and the game as one and equal (somewhat of a natural conclusion for a one-person dev game), and sort of a complex dynamic took place between us.
The central message of this game, however, shattered that communication. The main getaway of this game is that it is your interpretation of the experience that matters and nothing else. “The game means nothing”. The game, and hence the creator of the game, is trying to actively deny looking for a deeper meaning in the text. A very strong death of the author feels here, but I don’t think this is the real intention of the dev. When I bring context back into play, I sense that the death of the author-esque feeling is an illusion, a subconscious denial almost, of the developer. There is something very clear and deep within this experience, yet the game denies me such opportunities while the author subconsciously desires such analysis. This is the moment when the author-text dynamic breaks and I realize that the author and the body of work are both separate and equal at the same time.
Darkness is an interactive, visual translation of the developer’s inner state of mind, and that translation tells us, the audience, not to extract meaning out of the experience because whatever we felt during the experience is the only takeaway that actually matters. True meaning of the experience shows, however, when I break away from the fundamental assumption that I made while judging this game, given its context: developer equals his body of work. I realized that in order to judge this game properly I must view the relationship between the author and their body of work not as a binary, but rather as a superposition, a state where the author maybe and maybe not be equal to their body of work at the same time. So the deeper meaning of this game is not nothing as the game tells you to believe, but rather the combination between the dev’s personal experiences, his emotions and mentality, and the player’s takeaway from that experience, which is a translated one from the author’s internal state of mind, plus the player’s own emotions that they identified with during the experience and after it.
If this sounds like bloaty, edgy gibberish to you, it’s because it is. But hear me out. I identified with this game so strongly because I was in his position and I still am. I struggled through some hard depression moments and I still struggle because of my crippling anxiety every day. I felt the moments that the dev illustrates in the game: I felt like people were lying to me all the time and all of them secretly think bad of me, I was terrified of even the slightest notion of criticism because I thought that it involved personal emotions, and I was on and off caring about how I walk, gesture, pose, and dress in public because I always felt like people were talking about me. I am getting better through meds and therapy, but it’s still a long way. Some of the moments in this game really hit me hard because I totally identified with those experiences, and when I did, the interpretation was not analysis of the text, but rather total empathy and full, human emotional connection, an emotion that I’ve never felt in any work of art. Teachers often use the phrase “poetry/novel/whatever speaks to you”. We all know that it’s a figurative language, but this phrase captured the essence of my experience with this game: it spoke to me. This is why Darkness felt so fresh and different to me when I finished it: even the game’s denial of meaning was a form of self-denial that I’ve experienced. Maybe I’m a bit biased, as not everyone may think like me and identify so deeply with this experience, and I totally agree with that interpretation. But as person who had to go through this experience, I feel like the game was giving not only an invitation to the author’s point of view and inside his mind but also a genuine conversation between a friend and a sympathizer, and that in itself was genuinely touching to me.
Part 4: Some Nitpicks
Before I move on to the final part of the game, let’s take a breather of some minor criticisms that I had while playing.
- Content warnings in the beginning were really nice, but the text was kind of hard to read because of the… sort of gradation/shadow effect of black shades on the text. The important text are boldened, but I don’t feel like that’s enough; the entire text should be crystal clear to read, especially in the case of these important warnings. I think it would be better if the font sizes were a bit bigger and the text was completely white and clear so that it’s perfectly legible, no matter what; for content/trigger warnings, legibility and clarity must come first before aesthetic preference.
- File installation was a clever touch and it somewhat did help my experience in a good way. It also felt quite fresh too, as most games with a feature like this usually hide their files in the installation folder, not smack right in front of the desktop. I did see some reviews, however, that this is not the smartest decision to make. I do agree on this. Yes, fully enjoying the original experience is quite important but that cannot come at the cost of real-world threats: accessibility and security. I think it would have been much better if the player could opt in to get their files either installed or sent through email or other methods; I know that time and resources were severely limited, but this approach of single consent yes-or-no was not the cleanest of the possible approaches to this.
- As I mentioned before (or did…I?), some sections of the game were a bit frustrating. I fell off almost 15 times during the section where I had to navigate through a zigzag road only relying on a direction of bright light coming from the sides and a section where I had to jump between blocks the exact same way. It was very important to the overall experience, absolutely, but the frustration that I felt while playing those sections eventually masked the emotions and the main takeaways that I felt from playing those sections. I started to feel like less of playing an emotional experience and more of playing an annoying platformer. I don’t have specific recommendations on better execution but… it didn’t feel smooth. I get the context and all but I don’t think that the dev wanted the audience to snap back into the feeling that they are playing a game.
- Also, during the jumping block section, whenever I respawn, I spawn on top of the first block platform and presumably because of collision I bounce up as soon as I spawn. Since jump inputs are ignored while I’m in air, I missed many jump timings because of this.
Part 5: Counterargument Against Some of the Criticism on Steam Reviews
I feel like some of the criticism for this game was quite valid, like how the message felt quite hamfisted and how it “tried too hard to get the player to interpret their own meaning and insert their own feelings into the story”. I partially agree, though:
1) I feel like the impression of pretentiousness and “put yourself in my shoes” was a part of the experience. It is obvious that “this game has no purpose” is not true, but the denial itself is an emotion that people often face. Maybe the experience does feel a bit pretentious, but I argue that that is the authentic anxiety experience: everything feels pretentious and everything feels like nothing at all.
2) Context matters, always. This wasn’t a full-scale production but rather a side project of a developer who already has a stable day job. I am definitely biased here since not a lot of people are aware of the full context, but when it comes to this, I feel like people jumped to the conclusion a bit too quickly.
3) Maybe it’s just me, but I think that the awkward, obvious “this has no meaning” and “make your emotions the only getaway” are what makes the experience actually special. The obviousness of the whole thing actually enriched the experience.
4) I do agree that jumpscares were a bit disturbing, but with clear content warnings, this was a commitment made by the player. This is a bit subjective but I don’t think the horror element was that protruding.
Conclusion
I think I wrote down most of what I wanted to say about this. It’s a bit hard to understand, but take a read if you are so inclined.
And Sirhaian, if you are reading this, thank you so much for sharing your experience with me. It has meant a lot to me. Also, I very much admire your work as an artist and a developer. I’ll be eagerly waiting for your next release, whenever it may be.
Eric Park- Design Corner 