Darkness

When was the last time you cleared a dungeon so thoroughly that not a single mouse was left in it? Darkness is exactly this kind of game — modest, unpretentious, knowing what it wants and not needlessly fussing over it. It came out in the mid-nineties, when a mix of action and RPG elements worked for plenty of titles, but not all of them were lucky enough to stay in memory.

It is a dungeon crawler in which your hero fights through darkness and swarming enemies. The world is not interconnected, there is no grand story — it is a pure mission. You gain experience, improve, look for better gear and push deeper. A classic, nothing surprising, but that very simplicity had its charm. You cannot get bogged down in fifty side quests that would lead you away from the point.

It is played from a top-down view, you move the character with the keyboard, with the action in your head. The dark graphics in 256 colors create an atmosphere that today looks more like a quality design choice than a hardware flaw. The character animations are stiff, but their plainness has a strange charm — you are not here so that the hero can look into your soul, but so that you live him and handle his defeats and victories. Combat is not button-mashing glory but rather cold math — you have this much HP, the enemy has his, whoever lasts longer wins.

Darkness did not shine with new ideas, but it had one strength — no coddling. There were no empathetic lines where the game whines to make you like it. There were no cutscene animations that would halt the game for five minutes just so that something could “dramatically happen”. All of that came later, and perhaps Darkness simply arrived a year or two too early.

What is the point of playing it today? Practically speaking, probably none. But if you are curious what playing looked like without queues and flashing lights, without pretense — a proper dungeon in pure form — Darkness will show you. You can find it in the browser, and once you start it, you may have an hour free of noise and demands on your attention.