The Darkside Detective

This game was what the doctor ordered. Gaming needs more comedy. There have been plenty of stabs at replicating the humor of the earlier point and click adventure games and few have succeeded (noting this with Thimbleweed Park makes 2017 a truly special year for this genre). During the demo as with the game I actually laughed.. Out loud. All those lol's I've sent have been rubbish, this was packed full of actual belly wrenching laughter. The story is bulletproof, the characters develop nicely but you already feel like you know them or someone similar. The cases have been nothing short of good old fashion fun- another rare achievement, enjoyable puzzles! We know the writing is mint, reviews are praising it as they should. But don't forget Paul Conway who delivered astonishing, captivating, mood filled pixel art, that I think is up there with the best in world right now such as Octavi, Ben and so many more. The lighting completes the paranormal feel, the characters show incredible character and emotion just through their body postures that the unique and frankly really cool blank faces just add to the comedy and feel. You cannot not enjoy this game. Buy it and hope with me this is far from the last that we see if this talented Dev team and of course McQueen and friends!

I was a little apprehensive that the game/cases would feel too short an easy (after playing the demo months ago). The "micro-adventure" formula turns out to be the perfect thing though for adults who used to like adventure games, but haven't the time nowadays to go pixel hunting. All the requisite humour and heart is here. I actually find it as funny or funnier than any of the older stuff, and when I can beat every case in under an hour, it's a very time-sympathetic game to meet adult gamers half way. If you want a hardcore adventure game, this isn't it, but if you want all the good vibes in bite sized chunks, Darkside has you covered. Very well polished, too, and patches are still being worked on for minor bugs.

As others have said (and some reviews have mentioned in passing) it's very short: 6 half-hour-ish episodes (for me, they ranged from 20-40 minutes, and I doubt anyone would spend much over an hour on any of them). And while it's great to have a game that is in nice bite-sized pieces, there weren't very many of them. The writing is fairly competent. Campy and over-the-top, yes, with a lot of fourth-wall breaking. But compared with other parodies of 80s and 90s movies and TV shows, this felt somewhat less immature and annoying. Nothing amazing, but I found it mostly enjoyable rather than irritating. The item puzzles are mostly very straightforward. The items are all single-use and go away once you've found their purpose. The episodes vary in the distribution of the items: in some episodes you can get 6 or 8 items at once, but there's a fair amount of hinting as to which items work together. Other episodes are more strictly gated and you can only get one item that isn't immediately relevant. Not a bad mix. I didn't see any places where it let you get stuck by using the item before you should, or in an incorrect way. The "pixels" are enormous and most of the mouse targets are generous, so there isn't really any pixel-hunting. There was only one item in the game that I initially assumed was just part of the background. And...it had a very generous hit-box and was (I think?) a call-out to a notoriously awful puzzle, so I'm guessing it was intended to be a bit harder. A number of the episodes have actual puzzles at critical points: there's a sliding block puzzle, a rotating block puzzle, a Flow Free-style connect-the-dots puzzle, and one where tapping a square flips the colors of both it and the four surrounding squares. Those are...annoying if you don't like the particular type of puzzle, but they're all small enough that you can probably brute-force them without too much difficulty, or just randomly click until you find the solution?

I didn't play all the cases yet, but so far it got me. It feels a lot like the old text adventures, it all comes down to a very basics. The riddles are quite basic, the solution is never far away. And since you never own many items, randomly combining won't take too long :P And you know what? It works. It's just you, your mouse cursor and the things on the screen. The humor is ok, sometimes people are a little bit TOO dumb for my taste, but that's ok. I DID have my laughs, but usually not about the people being dumb.