2Dark

I was wary of 2Dark the moment I was told that saving the game could kill me. I would like to thank Gloomy Wood for making this critic’s life easy by putting one of the main problems with the game right there in the title. It’s too dark. It’s too dark to see anything, requires having the torch on at all times even in a lit room, and that spoils stealth instantly. Not that it needs spoiling, since it’s atrocious anyway. You can’t sneak past people, sneak up to people, hide anywhere, ...

For its asking price, a nine-hour campaign seems more than reasonable for 2Dark, especially since it’s such a well-developed game. It isn’t without its issues, but the minor frustrations don’t take away from the overall quality of the story and the game. If you enjoy a good horror with a bleak tale – and can stomach seeing pixelated children in cages or mauled by animals – then 2Dark is definitely worth checking out.

2Dark is a compelling horror game that tackles some truly horrific subject matter. But cheap deaths and uneven level design hold it back from being truly great.

In 2Dark you play as Smith, a man with a tortured past. On a camping trip many years ago his wife was murdered and his two children kidnapped. In response to these tragic events, he dedicates his life to not only finding his own children, but also saving other kidnapped youngsters.

Although you can bypass most patrols, leaving any guard alive will only create problems once you’ve managed to locate and rally the captive children. Prone to noisy outbursts, they’ll often give your position away unless you spend ages carefully planning an escape route. It’s clearly not the way 2Dark was meant to be played, but the only way I could reliably make any sort of progress was to systematically kill every hostile threat, saving between each kill.

2Dark offers exciting moments for each mission, just don’t let it frustrate you. I recommend that if you get the game, complete and finish it. A very compelling and weird sick story for a 2.5D game despite all the bugs, sound glitches, and frustration we encountered, we were still able to finish the game and enjoy it through the end.