Dark Matter (2013)

I want to quickly say that I bought this game with the highest of hopes; I had heard of people were saying that it was an incomplete game, that the ending came suddenly and way too soon but I thought that even an incomplete good game could be fun.

There is some that Dark Matter does right, but it mostly does wrong. The best parts about it are the premise/story and the 2.5D. It reminded me a lot of Dead Space in many ways, especially the aesthetics.

Where they go wrong is when you have played the game for 20 minutes and the novelty loses its charm, you begin to see the glaring problems.

• The "Set darkness" screen didn't even show the far left square on default values. So I set it based on the next square which made things hella dark. Took a while till I figured that out.
  
• The weapon aim (IMO) seem very off; I constantly found myself aiming below the thing I wanted to hit, even at a close range.
• The health bar for the enemies was impossible to see over half the time.
• Enemies can jump from offscreen and hit you.
• Holding the right button to do "aim" mode doesn't make a difference because you already had a reticle beforehand and it doesn't show more of the screen in the direction you're facing like some (good) games do.
• AI enemies just continue walking in place when at the end of a ledge. Which sucks when you have to jump up that ledge.
• There were just glitches everywhere; at one point an elevator stopped working and when I climbed down to it, I walked right through the door. Another time I floated in mid-air after a jump while a baddy below me was swiping at me.
• The blue arrow that is supposed to tell you where to go next (I think since the game never TOLD ME what it does) pointed me to a completely pointless location.
• Rather than having a little number in your HUD for Resources that increases when you pick some up, the game decides to shove it to you in a toast; It's so incredibly visually jarring and it is so unnecessary when picking up every little thing, even the equivalent of a coin in Mario.
• Traveling in the elevator often made the Ensign's head freak out.

But there are some major offenders that really are what made the game unenjoyable.

(1) The narrator. The subtitles of the AI narrating aren't placed in the center, either toward the top or bottom of the game play, no, it's stuck in the upper right corner. I think the devs thought words would get in the way and annoy, which is just wrong. Instead of being able to read what was going on while keeping an eye on my character, I had to break my attention away from the game and turn towards the tiny illegible text to try to understand what the heck was happening. And here's where it gets worse: the narrator's voice is inaudible. Firstly, it's too quiet compared to the sounds of action & the music. Secondly, the distortion on the voice makes it very difficult to understand in the first place. So if you encounter a message in the midst of combat so you couldn't read the text and the gunfire/sounds made it impossible to hear the narrator, you're screwed, because the narrator sometimes says some crucial things.

(2) The quest system. Dark Matter shows your objective on the map screen. Wrong. It was blank for a large portion of the game for me. I can't explain all of it, but one reason I saw was this: Dark Matter removes an objective when you reach only the section for that objective. Yes, entering "Fix Boiler Room 2" clears the second you enter Boiler Room 2. And the most frustrating part is that what the narrator tells you and what is on the quest screen is mutually exclusive. Nothing the narrator tells you to do ends up in the quest screen, and things in the quest screen aren't even explained by the narrator.

(3) Just boring. Really, the game became just boring for me. A large part of it was wandering around not knowing what to do but also in general, most of the game is just running around. And I mean literally running. Even after finishing backtracking I noticed that many of the rooms in a new section don't do anything. They don't have any baddies or ammo or expound on the story or anything. They're just more ground you have to cover.

The core fault I find is: the game does a horrible job at explaining anything. The narrator can barely be understood. When he was understood, what he said often didn't make sense or really wasn't any help. At one point when I was stuck, I watched a Let's Play on Youtube and at one part, the dude's reaction was exactly the same as mine: "'Disable the components'. Ok.......how do I disable the components?......Augh......" What components? What do I need to disable them for? Components of what? What am I doing again? I mean I know what the objective says, but how is what I am doing accomplishing that objective? None of it is explained well. And the quest system is an excellent example of that: the devs really just didn't know how to explain things well. The result is backtracking which leads to boredom and being bloody done with the game before you've finished.

To give one more example of poor communication: the reason I got stuck for 1 hour is that I missed the narrator telling me to go back to the train station. I also missed that to get to the next section, you click not a door, but a train. There was no indication that it was a passageway other than words floating vaguely by which, to me, does not scream "Passageway". It screams "A thing being labeled". Like if they had words floating over the ticket gates, maybe because that's actually a freaking entrance to something.

And to top it all off was the ending. As I said at the start, I came in predisposed to allow this game to have a quick ending but after playing it for 5 hours, 2 of which were being lost or confused, it really just felt like a slap in the face. Why? Again: lack of communication. I didn't even know that the goal of the game was to find the AI, and I certainly didn't know that that was in the Biolabs. So when you walk through a door that just looks like any other and the end cutscene of the game friggin happens, you're just sitting there like "What? What did I do to deserve this?"

I don't care if it's supposed to be "episodic"; even an episodic installment should be completely enjoyable on its own. And Dark Matter simply is not. I can't imagine recommending it to anyone (ESPECIALLY for the price of $10, which is just absurd and almost insulting) and I can't imaging going back and playing through it again unless it has been so long that I forgot that I wrote this review.