We often say that particularly clever video games consist of “shades of gray,” but there are just as many shades of black. The color black has had a strange underground career in computer graphics and aesthetics, spanning a wide variety of displays and graphics hardware, as well as genres and art styles. Gameboy gaming darkness is greenish and fertile like a puddle of algae (and equally dependent on sunlight). The darkness of CRT displays is a dense fog trapped behind bulging reflections.It’s no wonder Silent Hill’s most atmospheric moments predate the advent of flat screens.
Of course, black symbolizes the death of Western society, but it also stands for elegance and luxury, with craftsmen of all ages striving to create the richest and finest shadows. Like 16th-century Venetian wool dyers, high-dynamic-range TV makers promise “the darkest blacks.” It’s the obvious antidote to the “crushed black” realm of old TV, which, like the gravitational singularity, engulfs the lighter objects it contains. Grading and calibrating virtual shadows has become something of a connoisseur. One of the more ominous video game startup rituals of today is changing the visibility of he two or he three images in a row. creepy pasta. The marketing hype around black people (this is tied in subtle and painfully obvious ways to the treatment and portrayal of black people in the industry. This infamous PSP adAlso The fight to lighten Skyrim’s not-white skin) extends to the presentation of video game hardware. Xbox One was a “liquid black” work, design “Melting into the background when in use” is a useful quality of the console that was once always proudly touted as an online home surveillance device.
Needless to say, horror developers are doing well in these proliferating darkness. See the upcoming harvest of cursed spaceship games – Callisto Protocol tracks the resurrected corpses of ancestral dead space, Fort Solis claims to Mars, and the long-awaited routine travels to the Moon. I love Dead Space’s gloomy corridors, where Isaac Clarke’s hologram-lit torso seems to float in it, a way of foreshadowing his own mutilation. But my favorite darkness belongs to Duskers, his bleak roguelike from 2014’s Misfit Attic. As the last human star pilot, the film sends a drone to search the wreckage for fuel, parts, and clues to the destruction of the universe.
Duskers evokes one of the oldest kinds of video game darkness: the MS-DOS command line interface. This is the primordial darkness that predates graphical desktop interfaces and persists insidiously,[スタート]Hidden in the menu. This is a particularly fae-like species of virtual mark. In modern 3D worlds, shadows are intentionally placed in the world for utility or effect. Darkness is present. For example, if Corvo Attano is gunning for his position at guard, even a supportive presence. Using the command line interface, darkness is like an uncreated void. it doesn’t represent anything. And the terrible thing about nothing is that it can be the source of everything.
Daskar thrives on its generative formlessness. There’s 3D geometry here somewhere, each procedurally generated derelict top-down labyrinth of debris, salvage, and sealed doors, but the very inputs that make this a plausible sci-fi setting As a way of representing the world, what makes them compelling is how much of that world they seem to hide. Your characters never step into the ships you crack apart except when requisitioning them, which is an off-screen process. Alternating between LIDAR video feeds, you experience each ship in degradation, sometimes controlling the drone with WASD, sometimes entering commands like ‘generator’ or ‘navigate all r5’.
Drones are equipped with different optical technologies, so they paint the landscape in different shades. This helps distinguish the drones (given first names and is a nasty twist on the knife given how often you lose them), but the feeling that you’re switching parallel dimensions adds to the game’s creeping solipsism. One drone reads the room as a chilly blue checkerboard, while another portrays it as a menacing red bowel. Which version is more reliable?You’re Lieutenant Gorman in a distorted helmet staring down his feed column, while Daskar’s Ripley hijacking the APC and driving you across the boundary between representation and object is not here. There is no way to know if you are at the mercy of Descartes’ demons. Like Ash, he is busy misunderstanding his place in this story and the nature of the threat. I get more solace from the audio, which splices instrumental feedback with ambient recordings, but it still somehow seems unmediated, objective, and even grounded.
Even if you’ve grown accustomed to the alienating effects of the interface, the act of exploring your ship is largely about responding to things you can’t know directly. A motion sensor lets you know there’s something nasty in the room, but omits the exact location of the entity. Do you have a few seconds to sneak in and collect something as you’re getting farther away from the drone? opened and closed the far door many times, and a passing anomaly blocked it (once the door closed, I had to guess which side was safe). Similar to the sanity effects in the Amnesia game, the creatures you find on each ship should be kept firmly in your peripheral vision. To keep them in focus, I usually sacrifice the drone I’m holding in my hand to make the video feed static. So play around with the gaps these apparitions have left in reality, avert your gaze and lure them into a room that’s clear, or even better, a room with a turret or airlock that can be activated from afar. , the audio is really comfortable. These muffled bursts of turret fire are the closest thing to a resounding “all clear”.
Aside from keeping an eerie distance from your play space, the awkwardness of typing commands provides a satisfying sense of tension when you need to act quickly. worry about typos, extra words, and WPM. Duskers upgrade those fears to fear. Incorrect letters can be costly to execute. Did you tell the drone to go to Room 1? Did you tell it to navigate individually instead of typing “all”? Congrats, Twaddlers – they and you are now backstory debris part of the field.
Some of the game’s greatest fears are self-harm as soon as you realize you’re trying to enter D10 instead of D19, a door that’s sealed with something fidgety and swirling. Congrats on finishing your last minute proofreading, feeling like someone is waking up on the stairs. But wait, the sealed room has vents and, voila, one of his in your feed suddenly becomes static. Best to get out of there, reckless hack, probably leaving the trpa behind to counter the threat, oh that dead drone was carrying all the fuel you scavenged and oh you is D4 instead of D3 and now something is between the rest of the drone and your ship.
Your enemies – each requiring different tactics, each being the core of a different account of cosmic destruction, and lore unlocks persisting between runs – can get even more nasty when they die. The interface can be cumbersome, but its color coding is pretty accurate. Red on the motion tracker means “stay away,” green means “safe,” and yellow (a color we absolutely hate in Duskers) means “umm.” Killed enemies blend these hues obscenely, adding stress to the game’s visual composition.Dead pixel clusters of festering gold, crimson, and purple are a fresh mystery even towards the end of the game. (Spoilers below!)
Except there is no ending. As Ran melds with Ran, he hacks terminals to uncover logs, follow trails of evidence between certain ship classes, and slowly fills an archive of theories about the cause of the apocalypse. But the game refuses to choose the correct interpretation, and its lore derisively reduces to frayed, chewed-up mass email chains and error messages.
Trapping you behind a drone feed gives up endless roaming the bay in a way that makes Ishimura feel like a birthday party. I admire his Dead Space remake overhaul of the light and shadow effects of his 2008 game, but for his 3D horror in his game of Blockbuster to create such a complete and merciless darkness I would be very surprised if I could.
