Indie Game of the Week 462: The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark

It's sequel season this month on IGotW: a deliberate feature-within-a-feature covering games that are direct continuations of previous IGotW entries and not at all a coincidence fomented by my increasingly insular gaming habits. Turns out when Indies do well, their studios get to make more games; crazy stuff. I'd covered the original The Darkside Detective back with entry #387 and it presently sits in my 2017 GOTY list as the fifty-fourth (actually fifty-eighth; I need to update the site list) highest ranked game... which sounds bad but you have to keep in mind that it was a crazy competitive year. It follows Detective McQueen and his sidekick Officer Patrick Dooley as they work towards solving crimes of a more spooky and supernatural nature, which have proven surprisingly common in the otherwise nondescript American city of Twin Lakes. The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark proceeds where the cliffhanger of the previous leaves off (which I won't go into for the sake of spoilers) and then proceeds much as the first did, putting the leads through six more standalone case files as they point-and-click their way to another mostly satisfying conclusion. There's also a few bonus case files again: these being typically smaller or following different characters to develop the world and its ancillary cast some more.

Speaking of case files, both the original Darkside Detective and this sequel use an episodic format to help keep the number of moving parts to a manageable minimum: something I've seen a lot of Indie point-and-clicks employ to sidestep the usual bulging inventory and expansive real estate issues that bog down a lot of their venerable precursors. This also gives the developers more leeway for stories, each new mystery dropping the stalwart crime-fighting duo (even if Dooley's rarely cognizant of what is and isn't a crime) into a new location—or several—surrounding a common fantasy or horror conceit, like ghosts, demons, leprechauns, bigfoots (bigfeet?), and the ever-present threat of the titular Darkside: a parallel dimension of evil twins and monsters that can be surprisingly chill given its circumstances. Though visually basic owing to some low-resolution pixel character sprites, the game conversely renders its scenes and items with a higher pixel count to make them easier to visually decipher: in a sense, there's less of the pixel hunting you'd expect from the screenshots. Each case usually only involves a dozen or so screens and that compartmentalization reduces the amount of stymied wandering that can often result in games of this sort; however, those same puzzles can still fall foul of the bizarre leaps of logic that sometimes make this genre a bit of a crapshoot and it felt like they occurred more often here than in the previous game. It could be a factor that it's been a while since I played a challenging one of these—it's definitely been a hot minute since my last Wadjet game—so I couldn't sincerely argue that the sequel is tougher or more obtuse, just that it felt like I ran into walls more often and had to "itemjam" my way out by using everything on everything. Inventory items will occasionally give you hints as to their usage if you examine them at any point and while Dooley rarely has anything enlightening to add, his comments will sometimes inspire a lightbulb or two... though he's worth clicking on regardless as his non-sequiturs are some of the funniest material in the game.

As a fellow practitioner of the pun arts, I can recognize it whenever I see an example of wordplay that's so good that it's clear someone started with it and had to work out the rest of the joke backwards. Or, in this case, an entire chapter where at some point you're required to convince an auction house to give up some ancient eldritch texts.

In case I forgot to say it earlier—I might've done, but it's not like I go back and proofread these things—the Darkside Detective games are, despite the horror theme, very much in the LucasFilm school of putting humor first and any daring action and thrilling intrigue a distant second and third: despite living in a world of paranormal nightmares both the local citizenry and the ghoulies alike are rather laid-back about everything, quipping about the social decay caused by constant monster attacks and alien abductions and hauntings as much as they make pointed comments about the more quotidian problems of political corruption and the terrible, underfunded social services. Helps that the developers are from Ireland, which is decidedly more socialist than the States where the game is set—though that's not to say they can't poke fun at themselves, evinced by a case set entirely within the Emerald Isle that involves Celtic mythology, improbably anachronistic ancient rocket technology, and a Fratellis-lite family of criminals sneaking around the ancestral Castle Dooley. Usual levels of meta humor too as you go about stealing anything that might be useful despite your station as enforcers of the law and potentially leaving places and people in worst states than when you found them in the process of seeing justice done: turns out policing is never an exact science. As with the first game, A Fumble in the Dark has plenty of great set-ups and punchlines throughout and the variety of ideas and stories means plenty of material to work with from one case to the next.

All that said, I've struggled to understand what it is about this game that didn't hit as hard as the first. It could be the usual case of diminishing returns, given there's very little new here besides the cases themselves (albeit with plenty of returning faces), and the occasional Layton-esque puzzle tossed in from time to time weren't particularly riveting given they all riffed on familiar puzzle formats. I can certainly appreciate being a point-and-click developer and thinking your game could use something more elaborate than using items on hotspots, though, so I don't begrudge their inclusion by any stretch either. It did feel like there was a lot more navigation issues, in the sense of getting from one side of a particular area to the other: adventure game devs often have to bite the bullet on creating some sort of fast travel system once their environments become big enough that expecting the player to traverse ten or more screens to get back to a potential solution is unfeasible, yet the settings of these cases never quite reached the size that would've made such a feature compulsory. The first case did have a fast travel system owing to the fact you were moving around the city a lot but that wasn't the situation for the others, including one set in a school during McQueen and Dooley's high-school reunion (plenty of Breakfast Club references there, shockingly) in which it took about ten clicks to get from the science room on the second floor to the AV control room for the school's sports field—both of which became focal points of the puzzles at different stages of that case. A classic growing pain of slightly bigger sequels released in this genre, and one that did feel like it was grinding progress to a slower pace than what would've been ideal.

I love escapism.

All that said, though, I can't really say that this sequel is markedly worse than the first game, nor in turn is it markedly better. Given both games have multiple exclusive case files that only occasionally have some sort of narrative throughline—if a character comes back, they'll remember what you may or may not have done to them or for them on that next meeting, so a good memory can really enhance your playthrough of the sequel (or just playing them one after the other with no gap would work too)—it makes sense for the developers to just keep pottering away on new episodes whenever a good idea for one strikes them and then releasing a whole new game once they've enough of these episodes in the can to justify it. If that is the situation, and my time with both games would indicate that it is, then I can understand if still lament the lack of big new features or significant variation between them as it causes both games to run together somewhat; per contra, they've nailed down a particular style and approach here and maybe they don't care to rock the boat too much as long as it remains successful enough, cornering that older paradigm still beloved by many ancient adventure game fans like myself. Either way, it looks like the developers have moved onto different (albeit thematically similar) terrain since, having recently put out the well-regarded—and somewhat more serious—logical deduction murder mystery The Séance of Blake Manor that I'll be wanting to get around to before too long, so maybe they've decided the jokey, X-Files-akin, reference-laden adventure game format can be put in mothballs for a while. Mothmanballs, as the case may be. No, wait, that's... that's a mental image more horrific than any cryptid.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

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