Darkstar review
Thrust by misfortune and circumstance into a different era, you must struggle through adversity to successfully complete your mission. So it is for captain and protagonist John O’Neil, and for the player unfortunate enough to have bought the game.
Darkstar bills itself as an “Interactive Movie”, a term common in the mid-‘90s, when it was liberally applied to a range of glorified b-movies given a dash of interactivity. The phrase fell out of use as players wised up to the genre’s, er, ‘qualities’, and but for a few notable exceptions, interactive movies managed to be both failures as films and as games. Once the excitement over the relatively impressive graphics afforded them by their new technologies had passed, they slipped into obscurity, a genre whose name was a mark of shame.
It seems Darkstar’s marketers may have realised this, with the game’s box-art now referring to it as an “Interactive Live Action Game”, but the artwork inside the box and across the internet still gleefully declares it to be a member of this archaic genre. And just as well, because no matter how you choose to label it, there’s no hiding from the fact that Darkstar is an interactive movie through and through – it only seems fair to warn potential customers beforehand. Blending basic pre-rendered graphics with grainy full motion video, the entire game looks as though it’s fallen out of a time-warp from 1998. Perhaps in an attempt to reinforce this impression the game even comes wrapped in that most archaic of formats – Quicktime.
On booting the game you’re greeted by a clumsy, slow to react main menu, and quickly discover that the entire user interface behaves in the same way. The game is framed with a low-resolution graphic which somehow manages to clutter the screen despite the game requiring only a menu, an inventory and a mouse cursor. And to be honest, it doesn’t even need the inventory, as it automatically makes use of any items required for its ‘puzzles’. Consisting of a massive frame which shudders into existence on moving the mouse cursor away from the view screen, the interface helps to highlight the fact that you aren’t so much playing a game as browsing a series of video files, causing any footage to skip and stutter should you be so bold as to try and access it in the middle of an animation.
And there is a lot of animation to sit through. This is an interactive movie which has taken hostage the worst elements of early first-person adventure games: want to get to the other side of a small room? You’d better be ready to click your way through multiple pre-canned animations in order to make it there, pace by pace. It’s needlessly slow and obstructive, achieving nothing more than frustration.
In keeping with those old first-person adventures, the game keeps interaction limited to static screens between the animations. These screens have hotspots – hotspots which allow you to move away to new areas, to examine items, to pick objects up or to press buttons. Only, the game doesn’t think to let you know what sort of action any specific hotspot represents, with all actions represented by a single cursor. This means that, at best, you’ll be aware of several hotspots but require trial and error to find out what they do. More commonly, it means you’ll be faced with a screen that appears to be one gigantic hotspot, but is in fact multiple connected hotspots.
Take the main computer console in the opening room. The entire screen is classified as being a hotspot, and it is only through repeated clicks that you learn which symbols on the screen are considered separate actions; which are all parts of a single action; and which result in you pulling away from the console. It’s an incredibly irritating experience.
Worse, the game then combines this interface with puzzles that amount to no more than pixel-hunting. One of the very first puzzles requires that you look behind the stasis pod you emerge from; an area which, thanks to the lack of multiple cursors, makes no sign that clicking on it will have any effect different from that achieved by clicking on any other part of the pod. Pixel-hunting went out of fashion decades ago due to its frustrating nature, but even then most game designers were thoughtful enough to at least make it clear once you’d highlighted a hidden item, rather than obscuring it further with an unresponsive cursor.
The bad old design features don’t stop there. Aside from featuring numerous opportunities for death scattered about the game which requires an immediate reload, the game allows you to miss objects that are essential to later progress. It gleefully allows you to continue across huge sections of the game before finding yourself in a no-win situation because of it, losing you hours of progress. This is the point where you realise that the design is beyond lazy – it’s downright cruel.
With all of these problems, the game could provide a brilliantly acted, well told story and I’d still have to warn potential buyers off. It will come as no surprise that this isn’t the case. Supporting the shattered framework of a game is a flabby, clichéd story, acted out in wooden fashion and directed with all the flair and panache of a potato. While the stalwart ‘amnesiac protagonist’ shtick provides its customary intrigue, having you try to piece together the what you had hoped to achieve as you fled from the destruction of Earth (chronicled through customarily basic CG in the game’s introduction), it is hard to maintain interest as the low-quality video and rudimentary gameplay conspire to bore you to tears.
There’s no way around it: this is sub-par drama wrapped in a terrible game. Even at the height of the interactive movie this would have stood out as a notably poor example; faced with modern expectations it finds itself one of the worst titles released in years. Absolutely not worth your time.
