![]() ![]() But as an answer to the refuseniks who still dismiss games' potential as a storytelling medium, The Darkness II is emphatic. This is not a game for action gamers: it plays, by and large, as a fairly simple first-person shooter. All of it voice-acted, the characters gesticulating wildly – like proper, three-dimensional mob men. Each conversation is warm, characterful and funny. Wait still longer and the pair share a long and smutty Lone Ranger and Tonto joke. Wait longer and you discover he cheats on Eddie's sister, and Eddie knows, and what's more, he's OK with it. You can, of course, choose to ignore them, but opt instead to talk with them and they'll bicker – their names, we learn, are Eddie and Frank, and as well as being mobsters, they're brothers-in-law.Įavesdrop and Frank accuses his brother-in-law of never having been in love. A pair of burly mafia goons sit at the bar, deep in Sopranos-style banter. Early in The Darkness II, the player is left alone to wander his mansion. Video games can still be mindless if the player wants.īut just as there's the option of foregoing the story, you can also seek it out. Unlike in films, the story of a game will tend to be optional – in The Darkness II, as in most new games, players who just want to crack skulls can skip nearly every cutscene and line of dialogue, and scoff at the game's attempt to engage them emotionally or intellectually. The sofa scene is an example of the way storytelling in games can be both far richer and, at the same time, far less important than in films, and in a sense for the same reason. In the sequel the pair are reunited in short, bittersweet and tender hallucinations – stark counterpoints to the relentless blood, guts and grime of the rest of the game. ![]() Games blogger Nathan Grayson called it "the most authentic instance of romance ever conveyed in a videogame".įor the players who sat with Jenny until the end, it must have hit like a hammer when a short while later rival mobsters shot her dead in front of them. ![]() Jennie falls asleep, her head on your shoulder, and as the player you can choose to stay there, watching the film all the way to the end, in real time. The Church in the Darkness is an action/stealth game where you infiltrate a religious cult and the story changes every time you play. In one scene from the original game, Jackie and Jenny sit watching To Kill A Mockingbird on a tattered old sofa. For all the vice and viscera, The Darkness II, like its predecessor, is at heart a love story: between our hero, young mafioso Jackie Estacado, and his childhood sweetheart Jenny Ramano, his only friend from the orphanage they grew up in.
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