The Darkside Detective

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Darkside Detective is a Graphic Adventure that follows a detective and his plainclothes officer sidekick (for all intents and purposes) who work in a unit devoted to crimes dealing with elements of the occult, so if it’s a mystery of a missing person involving an interdimensional door, or a ghost train holding up traffic, this is the gumshoe and the cop who are charged with responding to the call.

Graphically, this game uses a pixel art style with rather large pixels, making everything look pretty abstract. Despite this, the game manages to convey a lot of personality through its characters’ appearance, stance, and subtle animations. It’s nothing impressive on any level, but it works well enough for the game, and ensures that you aren’t trying to study every pixel searching for something you missed.

However, while the visuals work well enough for the game, it’s the writing that really shines here. Nearly every line here is witty and really helps to sell the personalities of the characters, including not only the old pro Detective McQueen and the lackadaisical Officer Dooley, but also every character you meet. And it’s all tinged with a tongue-in-cheek wry sense of humor that frequently references other works and breaks its own fourth wall countless times.

This is joined by a simple soundtrack that underlines the mysterious nature of the topic matter without getting too over-dramatic. However, I will note that the game is oddly quiet, save for when some particularly noteworthy action happens. I would have preferred to have had more in the way of environmental noises to break the silence, and some good voice acting would have been fantastic.

As for the game itself, it’s presented as a series of “case files” that act as largely self-contained vignettes. This is both a positive and a negative thing. On the one hand, it works well for the Switch since you can pick the game up and just solve one case at a time, and don’t have to remember too much of what happened three cases ago to figure out the game’s puzzles and keep going. On the other hand, the lack of an overarching story tying it all together (beyond the two central characters themselves) does make it harder to have a deeper investment in the game.

The gameplay is fairly standard Graphic Adventure fare – search rooms, talk to people, gather helpful items and use them where pertinent to solve puzzles. The puzzles are fairly logical and don’t require too much out-of-the-box thinking to solve, but you’ll still get occasional moments where you feel clever figuring things out.

I do have to take a moment to point out a few complaints regarding the game’s controls. When using a controller, the cursor moves frustratingly slow, and while you can use both control sticks at the same time, this is difficult to do when you’re selecting an item to use on something. Alternately, players can opt to use the touchscreen in portable mode, and this does make selecting things easier, but it also makes it harder to highlight parts of the environment to see if they’re selectable in the first place, since the game detects you pressing down on a spot as you selecting whatever’s there, even if you hold down on that spot so you can drag the cursor over things. These control issues were mostly minor frustrations and didn’t really ruin the experience, but they were annoying all the same.

In the end, The Darkside Detective is a solid Graphic Adventure with a great sense of humor and gameplay split up into smaller, self-contained sections that make it a great fit for the Switch. There are a few issues with the controls, but for the most part this is an excellent entry in the genre, and fans of this sort of game should definitely give it a look.

tl;dr – The Darkside Detective is a Graphic Adventure about an investigator assigned to work cases involving elements of the occult. The game has a great sense of humor and some very likeable characters, and the way the gameplay is split up into self-contained episodes makes it a great fit for the Switch. There are a few issues with the game’s controls, but overall this is a solid entry in the genre and fans of Graphic Adventures should definitely give it a try.

Grade: B

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