Developer: Amazing Studio Platform: PSX / PC Release: July 31, 1998. Genre: Adventure / Action / Platformer Disks: 2 (PSX), 1 (PC)
You can't help but be a bit of sad when trying to explain to someone what kind of game Heart of Darkness is. The newest game I can relate it to is probably Abe's Exoddus and even this comparison falls a bit short. We don't see good platform games anymore, and even less original platform games like HoD or the Oddworld series.
Saying Heart of Darkness is just a game where you progress from one static screen to the next one would be like saying Starcraft is just a game where you control little guys. Though victim of the years that have passed graphically, even at first glance one can tell the amount of work Heart of Darkness has in it, but we will talk about that later.
Story
Does looking at an eclipse hurt your eyes? I do not know, but it sure hurts your dog!
Just from the credit intro you can see the game has a movie-like approach. Andy goes with his dog Whiskey everywhere, but suddenly an eclipse covers the park and Whiskey is taken captive by a strange shadow. Andy, despite being afraid of the dark, runs home and equips himself with the latest in shadow hunting technology: a colander helmet, a light shooting gun and an aircraft, nothing can go wrong right?
Ok, the story is nothing super mature and won't get an award, but serves an awesome excuse to jump into a fantasy world with excellent design and good story developing.
Design
The level design is great. Most platform games would have looping backgrounds or something along those lines, but not Heart of Darkness. HoD has animated backgrounds always fitting the story, it's even hard sometimes guessing what could turn to be an enemy, cause enemies in HoD are nothing but shadows. This means our enemies can take all kind of forms and appear from any object provided that there's light around to create the shadow.
fear of the dark ♫ fear of the dark ♫ I have a constant fear that someones always near
How we defeat our enemies depends on where we are on the story. Using our light gun at the start is one way, destroying the object creating the shadow could be another one, but sometimes we can't even fight our enemies directly and need to be more creative.
How our enemies attack us changes from enemy to enemy too. One giant crocodile shadow might eat us without even caring to chew us, some shadow like ape will run to us and hold onto us keeping us immobile so other shadows come eat us. You can see how even the plot is silly it let the designers have a big range for creating fun gameplay.
A separate paragraph should be left for death animations. We know the ESRB is not the smartest organization when it comes to setting an appropriate rating, and I know the story is about a 8 year old, but when you see movies and other games getting an R for a little blood you can't help but laugh seeing how HoD got an E (for Everyone) after watching the next video.
E for Eaten alive?
Music and voice acting are superb, one of the best I have heard along with Soul Reaver and the Oddworld series. The game has over 30 minutes of FMV (something very rare back then, except for Final Fantasy games), the music was performed by the London Philharmonic Symphony and it's fitting for a movie, like the rest of visual and audio arts in the game. When you hear that Heart of Darkness took over six years to develop, you kind of understand why.
The game's graphics would be it's best point if it weren't for the resolution. I don't know what kept Amazing Studios for going up in resolution. I guess probably how many CDs it would take. Despite that the animations are smooth and very vivid, the backgrounds as I mentioned before blend with the front "layer" where the characters are to the point where sometimes it becomes indistinguishable what's part of the background and what's not.
Gameplay
The controls are simple as they should be considering it's a platform game. Despite the linear gameplay and the easy controls the game is not easy. Don't get me wrong though, it's not frustrating either, it's just challenging. You will die a lot of times figuring out where to jump or how to kill certain enemies, but the death animations are just so beautiful dying doesn't feel that bad!
The story and the action develop continuously throughout the game, you don't just get FMV and story bits feed at you at the end of each area like you would in most games.
Puzzles blend with the story nicely too. You don't get a "stop" in the action to solve a puzzles, puzzles are how we interact with the environment to open the next area. Nothing extremely fancy, but helps keeps the game in focus with the story.
In the end Heart of Darkness is all about the experience. All the previously mentioned items in the review: backgrounds, characters, music, FMV, voices all blend to create a wonderful story that disguises what it could have been a simple platform game for kids to one of the best in it's "genre".
The only bad thing that could be said about the game is that it's rather short, but after seeing the amount of detail an work every part of it has, it doesn't sounds like the developers slacked there. The game benefits from being kind of short too, as the story develops all the time.
Yay
Game design and presentation.
Addictive.
The gameplay, the puzzles, the difficulty, the music, ... everything!
How everything blends together.
Nay
It's a bit short. (one less excuse not to try the game!)
TeamLiquid CJ Entusman #1 (PM to become an Entusman) • Newest member: asl-ninja
The.Crow Denmark. February 05 2009 00:52. Posts 604
oh man that game was good, although I never finished it (PC). It creeped me out sometimes, I was so small back then... ... and it wasn't the easiest one either. I remember how hyped it was back then, and how often postponed it was...
Navane Netherlands. February 05 2009 01:25. Posts 1138
Thanks for the review man. I really want to try it. Anyone knows where I can get the pc version? My torrent search only gave me results for the playstation one.
edit: nm, found it with rapidshare links (thx coulthard )
Last edit: 2009-02-05 03:16:41
IntoTheWow Argentina. February 05 2009 03:17. Posts 25193
This was one of my favorite old pc games. I still have memories of how the shadows would follow you from screen to screen, and how you had to fight off that huge wave in the beginning with your lightning gun.
Man I am about to Rick-Roll this kid so hard he's gonna have to pull back his foreskin to take out his contacts
I remember I got a PS1 one christmas and a game called Heart of Darkness. So good game, but never mannaged to finnish it. To bad my brother traded it away for FM
To bad they almost dont make any platform games anymore. They are the best!
IntoTheWow Argentina. February 05 2009 00:51. Posts 25193![[image loading]](http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/IntoTheWow/GWP/d61f5d08.png)
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![[image loading]](http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/IntoTheWow/GWP/1.png)
![[image loading]](http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k255/IntoTheWow/GWP/3.png)
The.Crow Denmark. February 05 2009 00:52. Posts 604
KrAzYfoOL Australia. February 05 2009 00:58. Posts 2729
SpriteLove United States. February 05 2009 01:08. Posts 149
NotSupporting Sweden. February 05 2009 01:15. Posts 1381
klizzer February 05 2009 01:23. Posts 456
Navane Netherlands. February 05 2009 01:25. Posts 1138
TonyL2 United Kingdom. February 05 2009 01:38. Posts 975
Coulthard Greece. February 05 2009 02:35. Posts 2588
good old 90's
)
Naib Hungary. February 05 2009 03:54. Posts 4226
(not literally, but they made me uneasy). Nice review though, once again 
Neivler Norway. February 05 2009 04:15. Posts 332
grobo Sweden. February 05 2009 05:03. Posts 3781
Zoler Sweden. February 05 2009 06:17. Posts 3942
Saracen United States. February 05 2009 09:15. Posts 2310
