The Haunted Hoard: Dark (Xbox 360)

There are two major types of stealth video games. In the first, a player is encouraged and rewarded for moving quietly and avoiding detection, but if they are noticed by the enemy, they still have a decent chance of fighting their way out of the situation. The other type is far more strict as the player is expected to remain virtually unnoticed since if they are caught, they lack any real means of fighting back and their best bet is to lose their pursuers and wait until it is safe to sneak around again. This second type of stealth gameplay is what the Xbox 360 game Dark focuses on, but it came out at a time where that type of stealth was far less common. The gaming press and reviewers of the time seemed to utterly revile its attempt to have such a focus, the quotes on the box certainly not reflecting the game’s many abysmal scores. While Dark certainly has its flaws, it does seem like it was treated rather unfairly, especially by anyone who mentions combat as a flaw when the game essentially has no straight-forward combat mechanics. While I won’t be telling you that Dark is a secret masterpiece that was unappreciated in its time, I can at least give you the perspective of someone who is willing to accept the game’s less mainstream approach to stealth.

 

Dark begins with Eric Bane waking up with no idea where he is, who he is, or how he ended up turning into a vampire. Opening in a modern nightclub where such creatures of the night meet, Eric soon learns that vampires exist all throughout modern society under the radar of humans, their strictly nocturnal lifestyles and absolute need to have human blood making it understandable they have decided to exist in secret. However, while Eric has been turned into a vampire, the process appears to be incomplete, as without the blood of an elder vampire or the vampire who turned him, he will eventually become feral and turn into a ghoulish creature whose fate is to be killed like vermin or enslaved by the less savory vampires of the world as a mindless thrall. With the help of nightclub owner Rose and her employees, Eric sets out into the city to search for elder vampires, learning that most others of his kind are far darker individuals who deserve the violent end Eric is forced to use against them.

 

One thing the game impresses upon you immediately is that Eric, despite being undead, is still very much vulnerable to bullets. Since the areas he is heading to are often owned or are associated with powerful individuals and ancient vampires, their security is well armed, sometimes even with devices like artificial sunlight projectors because they know the type of trouble they attract. Getting around areas like the museum, subterranean dungeon, indoor gardens, and plenty of generic commercial building interiors will require Eric to slink between shadows, hide on the other side of planters and cubicles, and do his best to avoid entering the sight lines of the guards and ghouls patrolling these locations. If you do start to trigger their suspicions while moving about, a ring will appear on screen informing you of the direction the alerted individual is and give you a small window of time to escape their notice before they react, but there’s another tool that seems to be one of the smartest uses of a special objective revealing vision I’ve seen in a game. Triggering vampire vision does give an unfortunately annoying distortion effect to your environment, but it allows you to see guards as stark red objects in the blue and white haze meaning you know their positions and can sneak around them accordingly. However, the intelligent part of this increasingly common feature in stealth games is that while it is active, you move at an incredibly slow speed to the point keeping it active for more than just learning the lay of the land would be unfeasible. Thus, while you do get a quick peek at your opposition, it can’t be totally relied on as you move about, meaning wits are still necessary once you start moving between cover or begin assassinating guards silently.

When we begin to look at other systems Dark has though, we begin to see some of the issues. While Dark is the kind of stealth game where getting noticed can lead to a quick death and your best bet is to run and hide, sometimes the guards and other enemy types interact with this in odd ways. Enemy vampires can’t really be approached and killed quietly so you need to make sure they’re alone when approaching them, even in the busiest rooms. Sometimes new enemies will keep feeding into an area making escaping notice almost impossible, and other times a location might essentially guarantee detection as a stubborn foe will stand watching your only point of entrance. Your means of distracting guards with anything but running quickly into view and then scurrying off are very limited so it’s not like the game is expecting something clever from you, and even when it sets up things like motion detectors that play sounds that you’re meant to use as lures, they have the bad habit of triggering a far wider range of guards than would be helpful and thus you can’t pick them off since they will travel in a pack.

 

On the other hand, the AI for guards can also be surprisingly dense, such as when you’re moving between larger action areas and the guards clearly weren’t meant to move between them, leading to them standing in doorways or at the edge of alleys as they want to pursue you but you’re in a zone they consider untouchable. Killing guards around corners can also be touchy since your button to kill characters is A. This can be used against guards who are even looking right at you but they have a better chance of resisting or can be outright immune, hence the lack of combat as it’s basically a situation where it will either succeed or fail. Even if you properly sneak up before pressing A, the A button is your all purpose interaction button and if the enemy isn’t positioned properly you might trigger something else like the option to move between sides of a cover object and get yourself killed and sent back to a checkpoint where the room will be reset completely no matter how big it might be.

 

Luckily, being a vampire means you have certain powers at your disposal beyond just vampire vision, and while very few play into the old myths, they do at least all seem to be directly tailored towards the stealth gameplay. The stealthier you are, the more experience points you earn from a kill, the player leveling up and able to buy upgrades with each new level. Some of these are brand new abilities, and there are definitely some incredibly useful ones on offer. One will give you the option to immediately teleport onto an enemy and instantly kill them for example, good for clearing distances or taking out a guard who is about to raise the alarm. Another can let you kill them from afar, the deed initially incredibly noisy and leaving a corpse but upgrades can make these powers more subtle and even have extra effects like the death grip power disintegrating the body as well. However, while some of these are godsends and interesting expansions to your toolkit for sneaking around areas and eliminating foes, almost all of your powers are tied to Vitae.

Since you’re a vampire you need to feed on blood, and so blood ends up being the way you fuel your powers in the form of Vitae blocks. However, you have only two blocks when the game kicks off and even upgrading it won’t give you many more. Draining blood from a target is incredibly slow and noisy so refilling a single block is already hard, and even after upgrades you’re lowering it from something like 8 seconds to 6. Essentially, you can only feed when a target is very isolated or the only one left in the area, so abilities that require Vitae are more costly than they seem since refilling the blocks is situation dependent and difficult to perform regularly. This Vitae requirement also means that a lot of the quirkier power concepts like scrambling a guard’s mind are never going to be used since they are a waste of power and upgrade points, and even ones that could have been helpful like the ability to make a distraction appear elsewhere can’t be justified since you’ll lose your powerful kill options.

 

You do at least have one useful vampire ability completely free of this system, the Shadow Leap allowing you to teleport to a nearby location and its range increasing if your put level up points into it. It too is noisy and thus risky to use brazenly, but it has its own cooldown to limit it rather than drawing from the Vitae pool, and it really seems like having cooldowns for your powers would have been the better idea than a hard to collect resource. However, the Shadow Leap has some flaws outside of the intentional ones, as it proves to be the source of most of the glitches I encountered during the game. Sometimes I did notice small things like a guard teleporting down a staircase after he went from on alert to calm, but Shadow Leaps can lead to you accidentally entering objects or attempting to climb through walls. The teleport can often get you out of these situations as well, but sometimes it leaves you exposed and thus death comes by way of gunfire instead. It is for the most part a useful but situational tool that allows you to get out of a bind or plan interesting movement through an area, but it can’t quite make up for the flaws in enemy intelligence and positioning.

THE VERDICT: Dark tried to go the route of stealth being a strict necessity to succeed, but the mechanics and systems that were meant to tie that idea together were unfortunately flimsy or ill-conceived. Enemy AI has plenty of quirks and issues that do not pair well with how the game often positions them in an area, and while you do have some interesting vampire abilities like the clever vampire vision and decent teleport, your best and most interesting skills are all tied to the awful idea of needing to slowly and noisily suck blood out of enemies when the chances to do so are slim or hard to set up. You’re kept from using your coolest powers and thus a lot of the sneaking around becomes stale or rubs up against the game’s genuine problems, Dark’s attempt at a hard focus on stealth not having the level of support such an approach needs to thrive.

 

And so, I give Dark for Xbox 360…

A BAD rating. As weird as it may sound, I found Dark refreshingly bad. It’s not the kind of awful game that hurts to play and most of its flawed systems feel like ideas that simply weren’t thought through completely, the game comparable to a musician trying to pick up an unfamiliar instrument. It has the basic understanding of what it wants to go for and some of the tools do allow Eric Bane to sneak around and easily dispense with his enemies from the shadows, but then something crops up like the Vitae system being so limiting in design or the guard AI’s strangeness not gelling well with their placement and the appeal starts to slip away. Had you been given more freedom to use your powers then Dark could overcome a lot of its issues as a guard looking down a hallway with a few others looking at him would no longer basically ensure your detection. Some changes to the powers could have something like a specific power only being usable once before the next feeding but all are available when you do have Vitae, the amount of Vitae could be increased, the time it takes to drink blood could be shortened… there are many better routes Dark could have taken so you wouldn’t just rely only on the best ones and ignore the room for clever play. While making the guards more challenging foes in a fair way would be a nice touch as well, actually letting the player explore more ideas for sneaking around really feels like the route Dark should have taken to best fit its approach to stealth play.

 

Dark doesn’t deserve to be maligned as much as it is. However, in this case, it’s more something that is merely bad being labelled as far worse because it seems many people expected it to be a different type of stealth game. Dark is trying to have the sneaking around and silently eliminating your foes one by one be its core gameplay loop, but people back in 2013 seemed to have thought that a vampire should be able to go toe to toe with the gunmen he’s up against and thus were harsher than the game deserves. Dark still does little to deliver on its approach to stealth because of the issues with its attempted ideas, but it’s not a painful experience. Dark is bad, but it’s not awful, and while its dismal reception at the time of release would imply it’s a lost cause, it’s actually quite easy to see where it could have been improved and quite easily turned into something decent.