DARQ: Complete Edition

THE GOOD: this game really shine thanks to the impressively creative puzzles. I'm not too fond on this kind of games yet I found myself really amazed while trying to solve most of the challenges. Wall-walking mixed with some switches create so much freedom to explore in every direction possible that I felt my poor brain cracked open several times during my playthrough. THE BAD: Very short! On top of that there is one certain chapter that feels completely disconnected from the rest of the game. The new chapter found in free DLC compensate a little for this issue. THE UGLY: only one little bug that froze my game and made me restart chapter 5.

Original, creative, passionante, a short but wonderful journey. I highly recommend!

Really enjoyed it. Congrats to the developer!

Now, that's not to say its strengths aren't really good. It's tighter focus to 2D leaves the scares more unpredictable as you get comfortable with the illogical nature of the dreams and how you traverse the environment. What mechanics it does introduce is very interesting and leaves for good idea's for puzzle solving, but these moments come in few and far between that the most I can remember, after a day of beating the game in one sitting, are only a few key moments in two or three levels. What is well polished is in the superficial. The environments, the few set pieces and how the dream world acts in such bizarre ways is what really gets me, with some fairly good scares that got me. But after that first play-through, I didn't really feel a desire to return to it. Not even the documents did anything for me as I collected them. The gameplay, past simple puzzle solving, is shallow. It tries to be a dream-like version of little nightmares without what made that unique. You are very rarely in danger save for repetitive patrol routes of monsters in a total of 3 chapters, and the lack of 3D space leaves those sections kind of boring as you hide in a certain spot waiting for the monster(s) to move to the other side, and you sometimes have to visit these locations more than once which drives the pacing of the puzzle solving to a halt. While its interesting to have a horror game of this scope entirely 2D, and I'm not saying they did bad doing it, it just felt restrained in what it could do and needed something to keep it interesting, which I was still waiting for to the very end because after the first 3 chapters, it doesn't really go up from there gameplay wise. Maybe I'm not the gamer for this game, but it was hard for me to feel invested when I was moving through a level at a snails pace from the games own core design, which is a problem I see in most small child scary world games. I cant recommend it as it has too few moments I remember to make it special.

Sound design, aesthetics and the puzzles are truly beautiful. It only loses a star on my account because I felt the disabled-wheelchair enemies felt cliched on the psychological horror theme. But wow, what a stunning experience from start to finish.