Darkside Story

Sometimes you are not one hundred percent sure whether a game actually exists, or whether it is just a dream from four hours of playing some other software of the era. Darkside Story from 1995 is exactly that kind of eerie curiosity — something between an adventure and an RPG, which paradoxically a handful of fans remember, but official records skipped it and even the schoolyard did not notice it on pirated disks.

It is roughly a crawl through a dark fantasy world that works with elements of a point-and-click adventure and a tournament-style combat system. The exact details of what precisely you do and where you go are no longer entirely certain — the era and the number of titles pouring out of indie developers have shuffled them in memory. It was certainly something with finding your way through a gloomy environment and confronting enemies in a mode that demanded a click or two and some waiting, which recalled early Baldur's Gate.

The title played clumsily. The interface was outdated even in the nineties — you are used to smoother controls or at least cleaner logic, but this recalled an older attempt that slipped out of the author's hands. The character animations were paper-thin and jerky, the music tumbled over itself, but it had that peculiar DOS charm that everyone later gave up. The first ten minutes were more frustrating than fun.

Today only a handful of people remember it, those who had it at release in some .zip file on an old hard drive. The game never really got played out, did not travel the world and ended up forgotten — which is not surprising, it would have been about the tenth similar attempt of that era. Yet it exists today precisely because it did not burn its bridges and kept the freedom to experiment.

If a nostalgic trip into the depths of the nineties suits you today and you are not afraid of clunky controls and unclear goals, Darkside Story can give you a bit of the scent of an era when creators could afford to publish things without a market in mind and without any drive to score. It is not a masterpiece, but it is authentic.