When I played the demo for Darwinâs Paradox, I was enchanted by the idea of a puzzle platformer based around crawling on walls. It was a unique way to engage with a 2.5D world, and Iâm always excited for games that make the act of moving your character interesting in some way. The stealth gameplay of the demoâan homage to Konamiâs Metal Gear seriesâwas a bit frustrating, but it was fine as the gimmick for a single level. And surely that wouldnât be a key mechanic of the entire game, right?
Surely.
Darwinâs Paradox opens in the ocean, teaching you about Darwinâs many abilities and how they differ depending on whether heâs underwater or on land. Not only can he climb on walls, but he can also move obstacles, shoot inky projectiles, and camouflage himself. Darwin and his unnamed friend are quickly fished out of the ocean by the sinister UFOODS corporation, and he later wakes up in a landfill, covered with mud that prevents him from crawling on walls and using other abilities. As the game progresses youâll slowly regain those abilities and even learn a couple new ones along the way, taking advantage of every trick you can string together to find your missing friend and escape back to the ocean.
The art and animation in Darwinâs Paradox is delightful, even with the reduced graphics of the Switch 2 version. Every character is incredibly expressive, especially Darwin himself. The animation in this game feels reminiscent of Hollywood studios like Pixar and Dreamworks, and the combination of cinematic flair with rich, detailed environments is easily the highlight of the experience. The only real dud of the gameâs presentation is its soundtrack, which feels like an awfully generic pastiche of Hollywood scores.
Sadly, actually playing the game doesnât feel quite as refined. The puzzle platforming is a joy whenever youâre actually allowed to do it; puzzles are constantly evolving throughout the game, and each of the gameâs chapters introduces a new idea to the table that adds new wrinkles to your journey. Sometimes youâll need to carefully hop between steam pipes to avoid burning yourself on the ones that are too hot. Sometimes youâll need to find a route thatâs fast enough to get to the other side of the room quickly enough that the radioactive waste keeping evil rats away from you doesnât wash off. Even the aforementioned stealth mission from the demo has compelling moments where you have to time your camouflage well so that youâre only moving while youâre in complete shadow.
Unfortunately, that stealth missionâwhich is roughly a third of the way through the storyâis just a preview of what the rest of the game is going to be like. Stealth is not the gimmick of a single level so much as it is one of the genres that Darwinâs Paradox falls into. The puzzle platforming never goes away, but staying out of guardsâ lines of sight is one of the main things youâll be doing for the rest of the adventure, and itâs never nearly as fun as the first taste thatâs in the demo. The initial stealth mission takes place at night, so guards all have a flashlight that clearly marks their line of sight. For the remainder of the game, you need to just kind of intuit where their vision cone is, and thatâs easier said than done since Darwinâs Paradox is a 2.5D game where guards are able to move unrestricted through 3D space.
Some levels have even more drastic changes to the gameplay loop that just arenât fun. In one level youâll be running away from an anglerfish that will eat you alive if you slow down for even a second, forcing you to trial and error your way through a tense action sequence as you find the right path to escape danger. In another youâll be piloting a robot suit that for some reason moves entirely based on momentum. You need to slowly build up to a brisk walk, and coming to a stop needs as much lead time as hitting the brakes while speeding down the freeway, which leads to an awful lot of deaths from falling into pits. When Darwinâs Paradox lets you slow down and think through its puzzle platforming, itâs wonderful. But far too much of the game is spent on tense action challenges that donât mesh well with the gameâs own mechanics.
Many of the gameâs gimmicks lack polish, and unfortunately that lack of polish extends to the hidden collectables that are found throughout the gameâs world. These are typically newspapers or posters that are locked behind the gameâs toughest and most interesting puzzles, and they give a lot of exposition on what exactly is happening in the human world around Darwin. When viewing these rewards, youâre able to press a button to display any words visible in the graphic as plain text on a black background; a standard accessibility function that the game somehow fumbles on. The implementation of this plain text is incredibly inconsistent. Newspapers will be missing more than half the text in the article. Some posters describe the art pictured instead of any text (sometimes adding bespoke jokes that are only in the description), but most of them donât describe the art at all. I got one collectible whose plain text version was almost entirely blank, and even one that had a typo that wasnât in the plain text version. This seems like a small thing, but itâs very strange to see in a finished game and makes a worse experience for anyone playing in languages other than English since only the plain text version is translated.
On Switch 2, Darwinâs Paradox runs fine, but it feels more like the kind of performance Iâd expect from a Switch 1 port. Not only is the game locked at a target of 30fpsâwhich it usually hitsâbut the graphical quality has been significantly reduced from other versions, detracting from the film-like charm of the art and animation. Meanwhile the framerate is mostly solid, but it noticeably hitches when loading new areas, which does unfortunately happen during a couple of tense action scenes. This isnât really a surprise since even my PC with an RTX 3070 couldnât hit a consistent 60fps on the demo, but when other small-scale games are managing to look similar to their PC and PlayStation counterparts on Switch 2, the downgrade definitely stands out.
The store page for Darwinâs Paradox calls it âa grand adventure worthy of a true animated movieâ, and I canât help but find that funny when the game honestly reminds me a lot of the licensed movie tie-ins I grew up playing. I think of the section in The Matrix: Path of Neo where youâre in an attack helicopter firing a minigun at other helicopters, and itâs half-baked and plays nothing like the rest of the game, but itâs part of the movie so it has to be in the game! I think of the robot suit and chase sequences in Darwinâs Paradox and feel like they have to be sequences from an animated movie that doesnât actually exist, and thatâs why theyâre in the game. Itâs a shame that this game couldnât be more focused on its puzzle platforming, because these half-baked distractions suck a lot of the fun out of what couldâve been something really special.
