Welcome Time Wasters!
This week I sat down to browse my favorite gaming websites when I ran across this little title called Darktopia. Darktopia is a fun little adventure game that takes a lot of inspiration from the Nintendo and Super Nintendo eras of gaming.
To be more specific, the game feels a lot like a Metroid game. We start out with our character, Lorraine, trapped at the bottom of a pit. After a quick flashback of her husband telling her to get away from here, Lorraine gets up to start her search for her husband. Along the way she discovers that that the pit she was trapped in connects to some ancient alien ruins. Female protagonist, in a sci-fi setting, who collects power ups to further explore the alien world she is on, yeah it’s kind of like Metroid.
Lorraine starts out walking at a slow pace and can’t even jump (she did fall down a huge pit). After a short time of adventuring around the area, Lorraine comes across a pair of boots. The extra support from the boots now allows Lorraine to jump again! This is how the game works, explore everything and find upgrades to progress further.
Darktopia has a nice feel to it even if the default controls are a bit wonky at times, but luckily key binding can be changed. The game has a nice learning curve by starting out with simple jumps, but it slowly transitioned to areas that had me dashing and jumping perilous pits where one mistake could mean death. It was a fun challenge, but I found myself wishing health upgrades weren’t in the game. Lorraine’s starts with three health and additional health can be found. Unfortunately having extra health made the game much easier. Instead of caring about taking that extra damage I found myself sacrificing health to get past a tricky jumping puzzle.
The graphics of Darktopia are typical of games that copy the eighties and early nineties. Pixilated graphics are great, but Darktopia had a very bland look to it. Most of the environments blended together, making it hard to remember which areas I had already visited.
The sound of Darktopia is a different story. Sure the game has good sound effects for jumping, shooting and all that jazz, but what I really enjoyed was the soundtrack. I can’t sit here and say that I was listening to a full orchestra (it’s all bleeps and bloops), but the tunes of the game were very catchy and enjoyable.
Overall Darktopia is an okay game. It takes inspiration from one of the greatest games series in my opinion and does a good job at mimicking it, but besides the music nothing really stands out. Don’t misunderstand me here, it’s still a good game, it’s just not a great game.
Darktopia earns 2.5 Gin Gems out of 5!