At one point I had my whole gaming plan for the year laid out… I ordered Unknown 9: Awakenings on the Xbox because I would be spending much of September and October working my way through Star Wars: Outlaws on the PS5… then the end of October onwards would be clearing through Dragon Age: The Veilguard, following which my insane Crazy Christmas plan would cover me the rest of the year.
Then I ruined it all.
Firstly, I bought the physical edition of Balatro, which has me hooked… and secondly… I actually started to play Star Wars: Outlaws and thought it was… well… crap.
A few hours saw me into the second planet, and a couple more saw me able to leave there… and that was that, no desire to go any further, no will to see myself punished for messing up another stealth section… no urge to chase down bounties… so I sold it on Ebay.
Feeling guilty that a huge chunk of PS5 gaming wasn’t going to happen, I invested some of the sale proceeds (a week of so before they were credited to my account) on DarQ, a game I could only physically see on sale at one store, and cheaper than copes were selling for on Ebay.
The YouTube guide sits at around 58 minutes for the main game and the DLCs, the physical copy includes all of them in one bundle and offers up a Platinum Trophy… a nice little palette cleanser before Unknown 9 lands me thinks…
Main Game
It’s a side scrolling platform puzzler similar to Inside or Limbo, but with a perspective trick… you can walk on walls, turn walls around, to allow you to access parts of the current level that look out of reach.
Whilst this is all vertical at the start, further levels have you switching the access 90 degrees so you’re walking down different streets, and another has you jumping in and out of the screen via switches… the puzzles are nicely worked out, and there are timing elements to take into account, so you may need to set something up, quickly switch the perspective, and then race to grab an object before it disappears.
On 2 of the first 4 levels I’ve encountered a scared child who has run off, and there are other “beings” that you have to be careful not to get spotted by else it’s all over.
Having cleared the first 4 chapters I’m only around 15 minutes into the walkthrough video… chapter 5 looks like it’s something more substantial to dig my teeth into.
Chapter 6 is a much bigger thing to undertake, even with a guide helping me along the way it seems to take forever, and this is where the unresponsive controls really start to hit home… you really have to push the stick left or right really hard to have your character running.
As I hit the final Chapter, with no collectables or any puzzles, just a memory test for when and where the landscape changes as you’re chased by the creature in a wheelchair… and the terrible controls lead to me being killed at the final stage several times as I attempt to run to the left for a sustained period of time.
DLC
Having forgotten just how bad the controls are, I jump into the first of 2 DLCs a couple of weeks later… and even though I need to complete both of these for the Platinum Trophy… I can’t put myself through it… I play for maybe 15 minutes, 15 minutes of walking because for some reason running seems even harder here… and I call it quits… life is too short for this.
Rating
Had the game continued in the same vein as the opening few chapters this would have scored way higher… but the difficulty in running anywhere drag it down… how did they not notice how hard it is when using a controller to run? Before I started knocking points off for this the game was in the high 60’s score wise, but it smacks of a lack of polish that this issue wasn’t noticed, it hampers the gameplay and makes it more difficult than it should be… getting killed when all you’re doing is moving left is not a player skill issue, it’s a major control issue that should have been sorted before release.
In the end it lands at a 53 which is in the 3rd worst game I’ve played for Indie Fest… and it goes to show how one “small” issue, which should have been fixed before launch, can hold a game back.