Horror is an interesting genre in the video game industry because opinions tend to differ on what makes a good horror game. They’re notoriously difficult to do well and, much like their Hollywood counterparts, their true quality may lie in the eye of the beholder. To create a truly horrifying experience, developers need to get the atmosphere, tension, fear, and sense of dread just right without coming off as hokey. There also needs to be, you know, a good game under the hood. Dark Fear, released last year on mobile platforms and recently ported to PC, is a recent entry in a slew of indie horror games released over the last several years. It stands out from many of its peers as a pixel adventure game with RPG elements, hearkening back to classic 1980s Sierra PC titles like King’s Quest.
Dark Fear does a great job of cultivating an unsettling atmosphere and tension using the relatively limited assets at its disposal. The pixel graphics are well done and fairly detailed for characters as well as the various types of environments you encounter. External locations like forests and lakes are sufficiently spooky, but the creepy factor goes up several notches for internal locations like inside houses. Sure, Dark Fear does use a few easy jump scares that admittedly got me almost every time. The game also uses fear of the unknown to good effect, though, particularly during its first half.
A major factor as to why this pixel-based game is able to generate such a feeling of foreboding is the excellent music. Arif Games markets Dark Fear as having a “cinematic soundtrack composed by film industry professionals.” It definitely sounds like it, and it’s so good I feel comfortable saying that the game simply would not be the same without it.
Dark Fear plays as a simple point and click where clicking portions of the screen allows you to move between areas and interact with people/items. There are several puzzles sprinkled throughout that aren’t very challenging and mostly depend on having collected the right items from various areas. Certain combinations of items are kind of interesting, but there’s nothing here that you’ll struggle to solve.
The battle system is basic and requires you to click to stop a slider on a bar as close to the center as possible. If you get it dead center your weapon hits for 100% damage, which makes the more challenging battles less of an annoyance. There’s no real strategy to any of the battles beyond having the right equipment and some potions on hand, which is a bit disappointing, but there are so few fights that they never really become a chore.
You upgrade your weapons simply by unlocking them with story progression and paying for them with cash. Armor, on the other hand, requires you to partake in Dark Fear’s hunting feature to get the required pelts for crafting. There are sets of animals that randomly appear at certain locations, with “rarer” ones appearing less often. You’ll be doing this a lot, as your armor is very quickly obsolete and subsequent upgrades need more of the rarer animals. There are already too many armor upgrades for such a short game in the first place, and because rarer animals occur less frequently you’ll spend more time grinding away for them. Hunting is sort of fun in a simple way at first, but it becomes tedious by the end of the game and is a cheap way to add play time.
Dark Fear’s story is where it both surprises and disappoints. The game starts off with you waking up in a cabin with no knowledge of who you are or how you got there. A bit of exploration reveals that you’re near the village of Ravenwood, which is located in an area called Diablo Valley that’s infested with dangerous animals, ghosts, and demons. Your efforts to escape this dicey situation require you to take on small quests that explore the past transgressions of many of the area’s residents while moving the main narrative forward. These smaller stories are sometimes touching and always disturbing, especially early in the game.
Unfortunately, the main story is less than the sum of its parts. As the game wears on, interesting bosses based on quest story arcs give way to typical horror movie monsters. Inexplicable characters appear to be introduced only to fill in story gaps and extend the game artificially. By the end, the story completely falls on its face. The ending sequence contains a twist that is predictable, boring, and almost nonsensical. In fact, the last few minutes of dialogue seem to serve the sole purpose of heading off the questions players will have for the parts that obviously don’t make sense.
Although I was disappointed with how the story ultimately turned out, I can say that I did enjoy most of my time with Dark Fear. Despite its flaws, it does many things right and manages to do what might seem improbable: create a moody horror adventure using only pixel graphics, music, and text. Some tweaks to the story and a little more depth to the combat system would go a long way in adding to the overall quality of the game, but if you’re in the mood for a quick horror adventure then Dark Fear certainly fits the bill.
