Many games have sought to catch some of Telltale’s success by emulating their trademark brand of story-first games. For the most part this comes in the form of copying the core mechanics, usually with regards to the dialogue choices and the quick time based action sequences. Few however have attempted to emulate the cel-shaded comic book style as most of them have their own art direction that they want to pursue. D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die appears to be an almost blow for blow recreation of the Telltale style, down to the art direction, however the similarities really are only skin deep. Whilst I admit I decided to play this to lambaste it for its almost shameless imitation the actual experience was something I didn’t expect, a rare occurrence for this humble writer.
You are David Young, former detective with the Boston Police Department and recent widower to his beloved wife; Little Peggy. The tragic incident that took his wife away left him with an amazing gift, the ability to travel back in time to see the past as it happened. He can’t do this at will though, only through the use of objects that hold some significance to the past, but those mementos are what he needs to achieve his real goal: to find “D”. Before she died Little Peggy told David to look for D and so David left the BPD to pursue this elusive character in the hopes he can unravel the mysteries behind her murder.
As I alluded to earlier D4 emulates the Telltale style of games by using cel-shading to make everything look like a cartoon. Like most games that make use of this stylization it works well for the most part however every so often the 3D world just doesn’t interact well with with it, leading to some rather weird moments. Probably the biggest stand out of this is the incessant bubble gum blowing that the main character does which just looks silly, especially when his lips don’t move the whole time he does it. It also doesn’t look too great up close, something which becomes painfully apparent when the game zooms up on a character’s face for whatever reason. Overall though the visual quality feels above average, even if I include the venerable Telltale games in the mix.
Like nearly all games of a similar style D4 is an adventure/puzzler, putting you in various cordoned off rooms with dozens of objects to interact with to solve the current objective in order to progress to the next section. It may not seem like a lot at first however once you get to the end, which displays your completion level, it becomes clear that there really is quite a lot hiding in every room of D4. These additional objects are usually things that will flesh out the backstory of the various characters in D4 whilst some will unlock non-gameplay impacting collectibles like new clothes for the characters. There’s also a quick time event based combat system which gets engaged during high tension moments, something which most gamers lament but actually felt relatively well implemented. Finally there’s skerricks of a RPG style progression system in the game in the form of stamina (used when you interact with objects), life (lost when you fail a quicktime event) and vision (used to identify things you should interact with) all of which can be improved with the right clothing or finding a certain collectible. This all adds up to a game which, if you so wish it, has quite a lot of replayability about it or can simply be played from start to finish for the story without a care for the rest of it.
The puzzles are pretty straight forward since there’s no inventory to speak of, meaning that they can all be solved by simply clicking on enough things and stumbling through the right dialogue options. If you’re paying attention you can skip quite a lot of the fluff however doing so can rob you of important pieces of backstory that help to flesh out your character’s motivations and those of others around him. For the most part though if you take the typical “click on all the things” approach that most of these kinds of games encourage then you’re likely to stumble across all the pertinent plot points without too much worry. Even if you miss them you can go back and replay the episode again which won’t take long if you know exactly which buttons to press.
Mechanically D4 plays well for the most part however the quick time detection seems a little off at some points as the achieved “sync rate” can be a little random. I’ve had times when I completely fumbled it and got 100% whilst other times I’ve done it perfectly (or so I thought) and gotten 50%. This mostly happened on the diagonal ones so I figure there’s something a little wrong in the detection algorithm for that particular quick time event. There’s also almost no way to tell how to “stay in character” with the dialogue options in order to get 100% sync as most of them seem in line with what David would say, just some are more or less dickish than others. There might be some kind of hint or mechanic that I didn’t fully understand that makes this a lot clearer but unfortunately for me I just didn’t figure it out.
D4’s story starts out incredibly weak as it has a really confusing blend of elements (supernatural powers, a detective with amnesia, a person who acts like a cat for some inexplicable reason) that don’t seem to gel well together. However over the course of the first 2 episodes that come with the initial game most of them start to make sense and the story really starts to pick up as you uncover more clues to the events that happened prior to the game. Like most episodic games it feels unfair to judge the game based on just a fraction of the whole story but D4 at least has one of the stronger foundations on which to build upon so it will be interesting to see where the developers take it from here.
It would be so easy to write off D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die as a simple Telltale clone however the game comes into its own over the course of the first two episodes. Sure it may not be the graphical marvel that many other games might be, nor is its quick time event system completely satisfactory, but it does provide a rather enjoyable experience. Whilst the director doesn’t know how many episodes the story might have suffice to say there’s easily enough build up for at least a full season and hopefully those episodes are forthcoming sooner rather than later. If you’re a fan of the Telltale style of games then you won’t be disappointed with D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die.
Rating: 7.5/10
D4 : Dark Dreams Don’t Die is available on PC and XboxOne right now for $14.99 and $19.95 respectively. Game was played on the PC with a total playtime of 3 hours with 42% of the achievements unlocked.
