Indie Game of the Week 387: The Darkside Detective

Hard to believe we're almost eight years out from 2017, still one of the best years for gaming in recent-ish memory, and I'm sure it won't be too much longer now until that year's output will be considered retro gaming. Before that happens and I completely turn into dust and drift away on the winds of time, I'm still determined to track down any remaining standouts released across those twelve busy months and find places for them in my ever-in-flux GOTY list for 2017—now 125 games strong, somehow—to feed a level of obsession that's now bordering on Ahab territory. How could we see so many bangers in a single year? And how does Spooky Doorway's humble comedy adventure game The Darkside Detective rank against all that stiff competition?

Well, this game's kind of delightful so I'm sure it'll have a fair showing. A traditional point-and-click with a minimalist pixel look (we're talking King's Quest 1 territory here; not too dissimilar to another more recent detective adventure game I played, Inspector Waffles), The Darkside Detective follows the titular cop, Det. Francis McQueen, who solves crimes of a spooky nature with his hopelessly dumb sidekick Officer Dooley across the town of Twin Lakes (though they're not actual twins, a local information booth points out, as one of them is adopted). A lot of these cases tend to involve the requisite mix of inventory puzzles, mostly unhelpful dialogue with NPCs, and the occasional Layton-esque puzzle (I've seen at least two Pipe Dream instances, so they've been real inventive with that stuff so far) with as many gags and references as the developers were able to jam into each of its many screens full of hotspots to examine. The game's strength, as has been the case with many others of an Indie nature, is its episodic approach: each of the game's "cases" are about 30 minutes to an hour long at most and are entirely distinct from the others, with nothing passing over besides recurring characters and running gags. This has the benefit of minimizing puzzle confusion and screen real estate if also perhaps incurring the malus of making everything a little too easy to figure out.

Still, the game's pretty amusing in its yarn-spinning alone and despite the minimalist look there's plenty of personality injected into each scene. Also, the game does the best it can to make relevant items stand out as much as possible, rather than the inscrutable pixel hunts you might dread with a game this lo-fi—after all, if they told you some three-pixel-long line hidden deep in the background was a pair of pliers vital for a circuitry puzzle coming up, who are you to deny that's not what you're looking at? Between the short campaigns, stylized pixel graphics, and the occasionally surreal sense of humor I was reminded several times of the McPixel franchise, though to its credit The Darkside Detective is considerably less scatological. The episodes and their pun titles also give the game a pulpy feel too, like it's a long-running cop procedural or a series of short novellas that plays on its formulaic approach with the occasional humorous twist. The Darkside, for instance, is a mirror realm that features sinister (though not hostile) opposites of the citizens of Twin Lakes, including a cryptic doppelganger of McQueen and an old-timey cop version of Dooley called Ghouley. Many of the supernatural issues facing the city are due to the Darkside leaking through some hastily constructed portal or other, though they make it sound that they're as much a problem for them too and a case where you actually go over there gives you an idea that they just take the Upside-Down nature of their hellworld as entirely normal. It's us fleshy types with all our breathable air and non-sapient furniture and skies free of ominous draconic creatures that are the strange ones.

A typical case will set up the premise, the location of the mystery (most episodes are set in a single location, like a library or the police station), and then let you wander around collecting junk and talking to people until you have a firm idea of what needs to happen to make progress, whether that's thwarting whatever eerie menace is causing this mayhem or someone points you to a problem that you'll need to jerry-rig some junk together in order to resolve. The relative simplicity of the puzzles, which often stand aside to give the game space to tell its jokes, makes this series a pretty strong introduction to that classic style of adventure game that might already have become a little antiquated and inaccessible to modern audiences. After all, it's been some time since the heyday of Sierra and LucasArts: anyone hoping to break into those timeless paragons of the genre might find a gentle onboarding ramp like The Darkside Detective a good means of doing so, especially as the homage-heavy nature means you can be prepared for all the terrible wordplay and left-field non-sequiturs you'll bump into when going that far back.

At some point the game picked up three bonus cases in addition to its core six—I can't tell if they were always there or were added as DLC later—which is a smart way to take advantage of this game's structure to make such post-release extras like these far easier to implement, not to mention a nice treat for those who already bought in for that vital early support and an equally nice incentive for those late-risers like myself yet to take the plunge. The Darkside Detective has since seen a 2021 sequel I've already acquired, The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark, and while I imagine it saw a number of minor improvements and enhancements befitting a sequel it also looks like it's a similar series of bite-sized campaigns, suggesting that this team could continue putting these deductive nuggets out whenever they have a fun idea for a spooky mishap in a new venue. For what it's worth, I think this game is more sharply written than most working the satirical adventure game beat and even if it's visually unimpressive it makes do with the little it has, with an important lack of ambiguity for its items and important hotspots despite the low-resolution approach. I might not quite so readily defend all of its hacky references but I guess that comes with the territory to some extent. An Indie adventure game is often like hip-hop in that regard: if half of it ain't shout outs they're not showing the correct amount of respect.

Rating: 4 out of 5.