D’ARKUN by Michael Baltes
Spoilery Review
When I saw that the game was clled D’ARKUN and opened with Tool lyrics, I was expecting something edgelordy. In fact the game turned out to be a relatively sedate Lovecraftian with strong influences from Anchorhead. How strong? It copies the “you need to lock the front door before you go to bed” thing.
As a game, D’ARKUN is… perfectly fine. It suffers a bit from comparison to Anchorhead. They’re both exploration games, which is fine, but the pacing and the motivation are somewhat weaker in D’ARKUN. I’m particularly thinking of how at one point there’s no way to advance the game beyond cycling out into town, despite there being no particular motivation for the player to do that. There’s a vicar there who’ll only respond to one question. (Probably should have either given him more to say, to encourage interaction, or had him respond to any interaction with the gate.)
Above I described the game as ‘a relatively sedate Lovecraftian.’ That’s an odd combination of words. What I mean by that is that the game often takes its reveals as given. The PC is shocked by some occurences, like the man in her bedroom. But a door made of bone is described neutrally. Near the end of my playthrough, my player went to a village inhabited by Deep Ones (for eighty years? Without anyone noticing?) and witnessed a dark ritual. Described neutrally (using the word ‘unfathomable’ once doesn’t count.) In addition to being humorously un-Lovecraftian, the prose is also often just weak. For example, "“The rest of the room is quite bare, as if there are some things missing, that once might have been here.” The lack of interiority and specific detail makes the game feel generic.
I do have something positive to say about D’ARKUN, which is that I really liked the characterization of the old Morpheus Putgarten and his pals as just sort of overeager scientists who didn’t mean to awaken ancient terrors and were mostly just after knowledge. Of course, in a Lovecraftian world, learning the secrets of the universe isn’t a safe thing to do.
I’m glad somebody else (besides its creator) is working in Dialog, which is one of the more exciting developments in the parser space in the past few years. Even if I found the game itself underwhelming, I think some strategic revision could solve most of the real issues with it.
Rankings
A Paradox Between Worlds
Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg
The Song of the Mockingbird
How it was then and how it is now
The Last Doctor
Off-Season at the Dream Factory
Walking Into It
Fine Felines
Sting
The Golden Heist
What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed
The Libonotus Cup
Hercules!
Finding Light
Silicon and Cells
Dr Horror’s House of Terror
D’ARKUN
Mermaids of Ganymede
Ghosts Within
I Contain Multitudes
Wabewalker
The Library
The Spirit Within Us
Plane Walker
Kidney Kwest
Second Wind
The Vaults
What remains of me
The daughter
Unfortunate
Smart Theory