Dead of Darkness is a 2D-pixel art survival horror game with an intriguing story, that is held back by tedious combat and time-consuming puzzling—while failing to be particularly scary.

In Dead of Darkness, you play private investigator Miles Windham, who heads to the mysterious Velvet Island as part of an investigation into the death of his wife and child years earlier. Upon reaching the island, it is clear that not everything is as it seems, and things quickly spiral out of control.

Tall Tales

After a content warning, the game opens to an extensive story setup. It takes until you reach Graham Manor, after just under an hour of dialogue, for the game to truly begin mechanically. Unfortunately, at this point, the story grinds to a halt for an extended period, which is a shame given that it later becomes a highlight. While the game is primarily pixel art, dialogue sections feature well-drawn character portraits reminiscent of visual novels, as well as fully voice-acted dialogue.

Thankfully, given how long this initial setup takes, voice talent is broadly strong in Dead of Darkness. In particular, the voice actors for Miles’ & fellow visitor to the island Olivia, give strong performances across the game’s 10-15 hour runtime. However, a primary villain gives a hammy performance that is shockingly out of place, impacting their menace and the story significantly. 

As mentioned after the initial setup, the narrative takes a while to come back into focus. You likely won’t be blown away, and many of the twists are predictable, but what is here is well-told and competently written. There are some awkward lines and weird phrasing in the dialogue, but nothing so baffling as to be specifically noteworthy. Some conversations and collectable text documentation are overly long and drag the pacing, but overall I enjoyed the story told in Dead of Darkness. Something else I feel the need to note however is the cast of characters is overwhelmingly white, which is not realistically representative of 1985 England.

You’ve seen it before, but it’s brand new

Early on, Dead of Darkness makes it clear that it will be sticking close to classic survival horror genre staples. If you’ve played a Resident Evil game before, specifically the earlier entries, you’ll understand Dead of Darkness’ core gameplay loop: Fighting off enemies while you solve environmental puzzles that progressively open up a labyrinthian overlapping space with limited resources. Alongside the typical combination of a green key with a green door, there are some more involved puzzles in Dead of Darkness.

Point and Shoot

Combat is another major issue in Dead of Darkness. Whether you’re fighting the most basic ghoul enemy or one of the various bosses, there are functionally two options available: Either stop moving to shoot at the enemy, or move away and kite the enemy. The lack of depth here means that the vast majority of combat encounters are solved by running backward and stopping to make an attack when you have enough distance. Given that you can only aim in eight directions, it is also basically impossible to miss your target. This means most combat is an exercise in managing distance, so long as you have enough ammo to kill whatever enemy you’re facing.

Initially, any tension found in that combat was not helped by how available ammunition was. Dead of Darkness showers you with resources in the early game. Bullets were so plentiful on the normal difficulty that I was firing a handful of them into the wall to make space for critical items. But later, after a midgame boss fight, I was suddenly so lacking in healing and ammunition I thought I had softlocked the game. To proceed I needed to cross an extended gauntlet of enemies peppered across Velvet Island which was so challenging I was forced to turn the difficulty down to survive. Given there is no smart way to avoid combat or method to skilfully engage the enemies with more limited resources, I simply couldn’t proceed otherwise. 

This combat system would be fine if there was less emphasis on it, but Dead of Darkness has a lot of combat. It was rare I would go more than a few minutes without engaging at least an enemy or two, there are entire combat gauntlets, and quite a few boss battles. Because of the amount of time you spend doing it, the limitations are put on full display—and it becomes difficult to ignore how little meat there is on the bone for such a major mechanic.

One Thousand Miles, and One Thousand More

If you intend on playing Dead of Darkness, I would recommend playing on a lower difficulty. Once I turned the difficulty down I was far less frustrated by combat that had quickly become a nuisance or the time-sink of the bullet sponge bosses and could engage more fully with the story. Unfortunately, turning down the difficulty does not change one hit kill enemies and traps which still caused me to lose significant time due to infrequent save rooms that forced a lot of repetition. Because of this, an early section referred to as the ‘Path of Faith’ was an exercise in extreme frustration.