My Thoughts on Heart of Darkness

by cornbredx

I don't know why, but I felt compelled to write a blog about this game. I was thinking about it ever since the only forum thread it has re-emerged and couldn't get it out of my head. So I played through it again and now for some reason am very bored and feeling compelled to write about it. This is not a review (I don't do those) and should only be taken as my feelings on this game.

Andy is the greatest 12 year old acrobat in the swamp. Now what will the swamp monster eat? I remember when I first got Heart of darkness, sometime in the late 90s (probably 99 as I didn't get it when it came out) I really hated it. At the time I felt it was incredibly difficult and unforgiving. I got all the way to the end only to give up. Another game that defeated me (honestly, a lot do- I either don't have time to finish a game and something new comes out and I forget about the game or I just give up because I suck to much at the game- not all games mind you but a lot of them).

I do remember at the time being impressed with the graphics, it's method of story telling and impressive environmental puzzle design. The game really was fun for me at the time in all ways except playing it. I found playing it to be incredibly frustrating. See, I have this on PC and it feels as though it's more developed for consoles. This may have contributed to my disdain at the time.

But enough of annoying me as a younger man, what about now? Well, first thing when you pop it in (if you have Win 7) you will notice is it suffers from the problem most Win 95 era games suffer from. There is this annoying graphical anomaly that happens (the original Diablo does this as well). You can't photograph it but you know it when it happens, it looks the same on all games it happens on. I scoured the internet for a solution but never found one.

Then it dawned on me it was the same issue as Diablo and with research, when I was playing that not to long ago, I found the solution. The solution is the exact same for Heart of Darkness and anyone that cares to know I will tell you- everyone else can skip a couple paragraphs down. Since this does stop your explorer I must say- DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

You need to create a text file in the games folder (saved as hod.bat- a batch file) with this:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
Death by fireball! hodwin32.exe
pause
start explorer.exe
exit

To break it down, for those afraid of the demon words I spew, the first line just tells it to not repeat what it says in the command line. The second line tells it to stop explorer.exe- the process which runs your desktop/taskbar/etc. . The third line tells it to run the game. The fourth line tells the batch file to wait until you hit a button in command prompt to continue. The fifth line tells it to start explorer again. The fifth line exits command prompt (so it doesn't just hang around on your desktop). Some people are terrified of messing with the explorer.exe, and thats fine. You can find other ways to get these games to run but this is what works for me. I also recommend restarting your computer after playing- just in case. For reference, ANY GAME that has the graphical anomaly in Win 7 that compatibility doesn't fix, can be fixed with this method and work just fine (that is a theory of mine, not proven, but it works on the original Diablo and Heart of Darkness so far- so I'm 2 for 2). I haven't an explanation for what about the explorer causes programs to degrade graphically when its on, just that turning it off while playing games fixes it.

Edit: Oh, I forgot to add you may also need to set compatibility so it runs in 256 colors and in 640x480. A lot of people recommend turning all the switches on and setting it to at least Win XP sp2 compatibility- I don't know which ones you don't need after turning off the explorer, so feel free to play around with the compatibility if you need to. It may not be necessary at all.

The beginning of one of the most frustrating levels in the game.Anywho, I got the game working. I was surprised to find my XBOX 360 controller actually works in the game. It's surprising how robust this controller is.

The first thing I found was the cut scene graphics are clearly dated (as should be obvious as this was a PS1 game). The story isn't bad though and they go through a surprising amount of effort to make it propel the game play, and do so surprisingly well in spots. It's not a story over game play type of game, as this is brought to you by the developers of Out of This World who are great at environmental puzzles, but they had more room to play with the story and did so.

The actual in game graphics, to me anyway, hold up fairly well. It still looks pretty good (in that now retro indie way) and there's a surprising (well not for this developer) amount of focus on animations which are pretty fluid and look really good. Minus the falling off stuff FMV the death animations are generally interesting even if you are probably frustrated from dieing on this puzzle for the 10th time.

Another surprising thing for me was I found this game much more accessible then I remember it. I'd even go so far as to say they tried to make it more accessible then the lead Developers past game. The xbox 360 controller may have had a lot to do with it, but I found it to be mostly fluid in control and he generally does what I want I want him to. I found myself dieing far less then I remembered.  An animated gif would be much more brutal, but I think this will do.
Don't get me wrong, the game is still difficult (and wow- the ways that they animate killing this kid are often brutal) but with the controller at least it's much more doable then some may say. The ending in particular, though, is a real beast.

The only downside for me was while there is the option to remap the controller- it doesn't work right. I will hit buttons randomly and sometimes they just remove them or sometimes do nothing at all. It makes no sense but just do what I did and get used to the default settings. They're not ideal, but it works and I got used to it.

All in all, I felt Heart of Darkness surprisingly holds up after all these years and is way better then my younger self had me believe. Play it with a controller and I'd say you'll be fine. If you're playing it on Win 7 look out for that graphical glitch.

So, that's all my thoughts on Heart of Darkness, the game not at all related to the book which Apocalypse Now was based on.