Heart-Eating Game Mechanics and Powerful Script makes for Good Times

So I played The Darkness for the Xbox360 this weekend and I can heartily recommend it. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to like The Darkness so much: I didn't like the comic. Imagine my surprise that it was good: one of the best FPS experiences I've had. The Darkness isn’t really an FPS for me though. It’s more like they decided to use the FPS style as a medium to tell a very cool story. Without the solid script it would have been like F.E.A.R. and without the awesome production values and graphics it would have been bargain bin material.

But the solid script isn’t what sold me on The Darkness. It is the fact that they serve up a gripping experience and they certainly employ all of the genre’s standard trappings to do that, but they went further and used everything at their disposal in the thing. In my mind stands out the last sequence of the game: assault on The Lighthouse (Darkness - Lighthouse - get it?) . It is fucking brilliant in the way it presents a climactic cinematic battle that felt like an evolution of the way FPS games usually serve up this kind of fare. In that regard it has placed itself way above anything that Halo does (for me), and I doubt that it will be surpassed for some time to come.

Most likely I am the only one who sees it that way, because I obsess over storytelling and I was hugely surprised that the FPS genre can serve as a medium for a gripping story-driven experience. I thought that it had become nigh impossible--or the art of understanding it was solely in the hands of Bungie. I was wrong: it is in the hands of Starbreeze, and long may they hold it.