Hello Darkness, My Old Trope

"I've come to stumble, curse and grope

Because designers, features lacking

Made a virtue of blind clicking"

- Paul Simon 

 

In the interest of clearing a bit more of my backlog of ten-bucks-or-less indie games, I decided to dive into a strategy title with an intriguing Hollow Earth premise, Anoxia Station... and immediately belly-flopped into the shallow end.

I've restarted the tutorial twice now, not least for being unable to discern which tiles I'm clicking half the time. I will concede a chthonic aesthetic benefits from a dose of claustrophobic encroaching gloom, and as you advance you do uncover some light sources - lava, glowing crystals, the usual fantasy cave stuff and stuffings. Still, it seems especially counterproductive to play up this angle in the first mission which serves, just to reiterate, as a tutorial where the player should be learning what everything looks like and how to navigate the screen, not guessing at 3D models and terrain under shadows and static.

 

My first truly conscious "enough is enough" moment of exasperation with the abuse of low light conditions came back when Doom 3 launched twenty years ago. I had a reasonably modern vid card and wanted to get in on the latest polygon-counting craze for once, like the cool kids do. The fact I paid full release price yet never even bothered finishing it probably demonstrates how badly that impulse backfired, and the disappointment became my mental reference for avoiding flavors of the month from that point on. For a game making as much noise as possible about its fancy new graphics, Doom 3 was inordinately desperate to also hide those visuals in near pitch darkness. Probably because the light of scrutiny quickly revealed it as a by-the-numbers, linear, generic shooter the likes of which had cluttered the market ever since Doom 2 showed 'em how it's done. The predictable yet infinitely redundant jump scares didn't help.

 

And it's not like it was a new problem by 2004 "crank up the gamma" being the first piece of advice you'd get from any other player before booting Diablo a decade prior.

 

Sure, it's not always a cynical cop-out. We are a diurnal species after all, and readily acknowledge darkness as the universal implied threat of predation. Always gives our monkey spines a little frisson. So a horror series like Amnesia is well served by a struggle to light one's way as game mechanic. But even they can take it too far, like forcing you again and again to run around blindly into forks and dead ends during chase sequences. Especially during Rebirth.

Even when it doesn't actively interfere with gameplay, this gimmick can still annoy. When discussing No Man's Sky I thought it absurd that my space-age space-ship lacked space for a simple magnetic compass. Added after release, like most of that game. In Cyberpunk 2077, I find myself asking instead: why doesn't V have a damn flashlight?

I've got electrical wiring up the wazoo (that particular mod was on sale for some reason) and I'm apparently an infinite-watt-hour walking power station. Half my implants glow even if they're internal. My cyber-eyes can do everything but shoot Superman lasers, but they can't perform the function night vision goggles do now? Couldn't I stick a light bulb in my navel or somesuch? Do I need to dig up a smartphone-flashlight from the dark ages to light my way in the dark? And sure, sure, I'll give CD Projekt credit for not abusing it constantly like Frictional. Only a handful of rooms in a handful of quests remind me of the lack, and it's played for due effect. But the incongruity of it is still ridiculous.

 

There can be some active utility in it, of course. I mentioned Fallout NV paired dim lighting with a largely monochrome aesthetic to make trap-finding a part of first-person roleplaying, but even they overdid it. More often than not, dark games are thrilling at first but tend to overemphasize it to the point of gratuitous punishment, or even when playing it for realism push it into unrealistic situations.

 

Reliable exceptions to that caveat tend to feature deep, deep darkness as a function not of level design but of resource management and the day-night cycle. See Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Miasmata. Paired with survival mechanics and a need to travel it encourages the player to make resource-conscious use of night-time while still leaving the option to wait for dawn if he gets too lost. Compare that to a dark level in most games where trial and error (and gratuitous reloads) is the only option. It turns a randomized failure condition into an economic decision, valuating the player's input instead of limiting it.