Dark and Deep Review – Potentially good ideas let down by frustrating mechanics and a lackluster plot

Man, how do I even begin? Dark and Deep is a game that kept me in a cautiously optimistic mood at first, because clearly a good deal of work had gone into it. It’s a first-person, narrative-driven adventure game with puzzle-solving and mild exploration as its main focus, featuring a storyline that’s hoping to blur the lines between the real and the nightmarish. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t really do this particularly well. Its storyline is nothing to write home about, and its gameplay mechanics, despite utilizing some interesting ideas, soon devolve into tedium, frustration and repetition. It’s a game I found boring at best and infuriating at worst, which may sound harsh, but... well, just hear me out.

It's family drama o’ clock

I’ll paint the basic picture for you. In the game, you play as a man named Samuel, who happens to be a big fan of a conspiracy podcast called Dark and Deep. However, his personal and professional lives are seemingly in shambles. There’s a lot of trauma to unpack here, and the game does it in a way that will likely feel familiar to anyone who’s played a first-person narrative-focused game in the past decade – as a symbolic journey through nightmarish landscapes that represent the inner turmoil of the protagonist. Visually, I thought it did a good job, and there are indeed a handful of locations that I found to be screenshot-worthy; whether it’s a huge statute of the god Apollo or the creepy carcass of a deer inside an otherworldly server room, Dark and Deep has some nice stuff on offer. Sadly, none of this serves a particularly compelling narrative, and I found it rather difficult to get invested in the protagonist’s plight, despite the trippy and occasionally artistic visual presentation. Marital issues, poorly told conspiracy theories and a recurring “joke” about eating someone else’s sandwich don’t exactly do much for me.

The title also proclaims itself to be a cosmic horror game, but its attempts at inducing terror or building atmosphere fall short at every turn, ending up as more annoying than disturbing. There are monsters, yes, but if you’re looking for a genuinely thrilling experience, you won’t find it here – dealing with the game’s nasties is about as traumatizing as squatting a fly. Now, you could be telling me, “But Gare, horror isn’t just about monsters” and you’d be absolutely correct. Yet even in terms of atmosphere and tension, the game leaves a lot to be desired, and chooses instead to fill its runtime with computer chat logs, endless quotes from Dante Alighieri, and snippets of a lame conspiracy podcast that’s impossible to take seriously.

Frames and frights

The basic gameplay loop of Dark and Deep is as follows: you alternate between otherworldly levels with puzzle solving and fantastical elements, as well as “real life” segments that further the narrative and tell Samuel’s story. In the otherworld, you’re equipped with a set of supernatural picture frames that all serve a different purpose: one lets you discover key items and locations that would otherwise be hidden, another allows you to fend off ghoul-like monsters by aiming the frame at them, and so on. You’ll also be collecting glowing, throwable orbs that can be used to power up the mysterious machinery found across the otherworld, which ties into a variety of timed jumping puzzles. You find an orb, use it to activate a machine, observe how this affects your environment, then engage in some mild platforming while making sure to use your magical picture frame and vaporize ghouls before they could interrupt this process. The glowing orbs needed to power up the aforementioned machines are their favorite snack, you see. Either way, that’s really the gist of it: activate machine, zap monsters, do a jumping puzzle. Rinse and repeat.

This wouldn’t be too bad on its own, but there are two main reasons that made the overall experience really frustrating for me. Reason number one is the game’s controls not being smooth and responsive enough for all the platforming you have to do. Number two is the checkpoint system. No, the game doesn’t let you save manually, which is particularly annoying when you accidentally miss a jump (see Reason #1) or get killed and have to re-do the same tedious puzzle you’ve just completed, or listen to an unskippable dialogue scene. Dark and Deep also includes one of the most infuriating segments I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing in a game: a huge, dark maze with dark walls that only lets you switch on the lights for a few seconds before going pitch black and throwing waves of mildly annoying – but never actually terrifying – monsters at you. If constantly losing your way in this labyrinthine darkness wasn’t frustrating enough, the monsters keep slapping you in the face as well, further disorienting you. Which, as you might imagine, isn’t exactly my idea of fun.

Final thoughts

All in all, I can’t say I really enjoyed my time with Dark and Deep. There are bits and pieces I liked: some of the puzzles were admittedly amusing, and there are a couple of visually memorable moments in the narrative. But other than that, the game kept me in a limbo of mild frustration mixed with sheer indifference – the storytelling did absolutely nothing for me, the platforming felt clunky, the puzzles became repetitive after a while, and every attempt at building a creepy atmosphere fell disappointingly flat. I wouldn’t outright call it a terrible game, but I personally didn’t get much out of it.

Dark and Deep will be out on August 13.