Darkside Detective review - “With cops like these, who needs criminals?”

• The Darkside Detective sees you investigating strange goings-on around the city of Twin Lakes
• Solve puzzles, explore creepy locales and try not to get drawn off the beaten track
• And don’t forget to keep one eye on your partner - we’d hate for you to lose him

In the dark recesses of the night, in a place imperceptible to the fragile human mind, dark horrors lurk and scratch at the walls of reality. They wait for us to let our guard down before they come shrieking in to destroy us and everyone we love.

But you’re not bothered about that sort of paranormal nonsense, at least not at this point in your shift. You’ve got paperwork to file, the old folks home is being haunted by an inverse vampire, there’s a monster ‘terrorising’ the campground and your loveable idiot of a partner has misplaced the gremlin-filled magical urn you confiscated from an occult shop yesterday.

Just another day in the Darkside Division.

Yes, courtesy of Akupara Games, developer Spooky Doorway’s The Darkside Detective and its sequel A Fumble In the Dark are here on iOS and Android. And with it now in hand, how does it hold up on mobile? Well, read on and find out, but beware of the occasional (very minor) spoiler.

Plot

While relatively light on narrative, Darkside Detective does have an overarching setting. You are Detective Francis McQueen, a member of the city of Twin Lakes’ underfunded and understaffed Darkside Division. As a member of this department, your job is to investigate and resolve cases relating to unnatural phenomena that largely sprout from the titular Darkside, an alternate dimension just one poorly-placed portal away from our world.

In practice, that means you show up somewhere for entirely unrelated reasons, only to end up embroiled in bizarre activity, usually at the behest of your partner, Officer Patrick Dooley. These cases can range from finding missing people, to exorcising a haunted library, to trying to hide a lake monster from the federal government - and the solutions aren’t much less crazier than the setups.

Although some characters tend to carry over from case to case, like arrogant supercop McKing or amateur paranormal investigator Raxa, each case is almost entirely standalone. As you and your platonic life partner Dooley thanklessly resolve paranormal events with a minimum of fuss and a laissez-faire approach to procedure, the citizens of Twin Lakes can sleep (mostly) peacefully.

Gameplay

Darkside Detective is as bog-standard of a point-and-click adventure game as you can get. You move from screen to screen, selecting various objects in the background which your character will either comment on (sometimes with a clue as to your next move) or pick up and shove into their seemingly endless pockets.

What makes Darkside Detective stand out is how refined the gameplay feels. You don’t have a walk animation - instead, you simply transition from screen to screen with a well-placed tap, and rather than a complex inventory, all your items are located neatly at the top of the screen where you can combine them by sliding them onto one another. It’s certainly a far cry from Monkey Island’s verb menu, and makes everything very straightforward, especially for those moments of tapping stuff together to see what happens.

It’s not all point-and-click of course, as every case has at least one small minigame that requires you to solve a unique puzzle. Whether that’s piecing together a tinfoil hat (don’t ask) or drawing out symbols to open an arcane portal to another world, some of them are more frustrating than others, but they never overstay their welcome, and it's always interesting to see what new brain teaser you have to solve.

Graphics

Again, as far as throwback retro games go, you don’t get more standard than this, as the Darkside Detective follows older point-and-click adventure games in a 2D perspective with crunchy pixel graphics.

But don’t take that as an insult, as every screen is nicely detailed, easily readable for hidden objects (90% of the time) and incredibly varied in terms of locale. If you’re looking for super-detailed pixel graphics then the more stylised nature of Darkside Detective might put you off, but I found it very visually appealing.

Darkside Detective’s art is full of warm colours and atmospheric, baked-in lighting with the occasional flashy addition of other effects. If you rate adventure games by the number of different backgrounds, you’ll be very pleased with the variety of areas to explore, which are rarely repeated.

Audio

However, in my opinion, it’s the audio where this game truly shines, at least in a technical sense. The soundtrack is incredibly varied and almost always unique to each case, with varying audio cues as you interact with certain objects in the environment. While Darkside Detective leans heavily on humour rather than horror, it’s still very atmospheric.

And again, since I can’t emphasise it enough, have a listen to the soundtrack. If you happen to run any tabletop roleplaying games like Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green, then you’re sure to find something suitably foreboding and ominous to have on in the background or simply listen to while reading your favourite Stephen King novel.

Performance

The fact that Darkside Detective comes with virtually no sliders for audio or graphics quality should tell you all you need to know about what this game brings to the table performance-wise. It’s as simple as it gets, and the brief loading times - which are practically instantaneous when moving from screen to screen - are the only thing I thought worth scrutinising.

Put it this way - Darkside Detective won’t stress anything but the most low-end of phones.

What I liked

I think what stood out to me most about Darkside Detective is how straightforward it was. We’ve all heard of, or experienced, the bizarre and often nonsensical puzzles in many adventure games. And while Darkside Detective isn’t short on those, the small scale of each case means that you often only have a small selection of areas to explore, and many puzzles have straightforward components and the occasional a-ha moment.

The small-scale cases may be a bit disappointing at first, but just as soon as McQueen and Dooley’s banter starts to grate, or the puzzles become too obtuse, you’ll find yourself thrown into a whole new locale and with a new situation to unravel. It makes everything feel very fresh, and the lack of excessive backtracking or inventory clutter that you feel you should need makes this a great option for more casual adventure fans or those on the lookout for a lighter gameplay experience.

I only needed to look up a guide once, and that was for the sequel A Fumble in the Dark (more on that later.) That, I feel, is a testament to how well the game is designed and the lengths it goes to to minimise frustration.

What I didn’t like

So, here’s where the big buyer-beware warning is going to go. If you saw The Darkside Detective and thought, “Ooh, this looks like a creepy retro throwback to old horror games of the past,” you’ll very much be disappointed. Darkside Detective is a comedy through and through, and if humorous asides or gentle prodding of the fourth wall isn’t your cup of tea, it won’t be your thing. But that’s very much all based on personal taste, and even though I went in with a bit of apprehension, I found the humour charming enough not to grate.

But put it this way - you won’t really be spooked at even the most tension-filled of times.

There’s also the occasional small issue with the new touchscreen controls for the mobile port. Most of the time they’re incredibly easy to use, but small icons in minigames and areas of the screen you need to tap to transition can suffer when faced with fat fingers. Fortunately, this is rarely a game-breaking problem, but it’s an issue nonetheless. Ditto for the dialogue boxes at the top of the screen, with the tiny selection field for each line of questioning.

These are all fairly small potatoes, however. But they may be enough to detract from an otherwise very well-polished package and excellent port.

Addendum: A Fumble in the Dark

It’s not just the original Darkside Detective that’s made its way to mobile. Akupara Games have also brought over the sequel A Fumble in the Dark, and while I didn’t get as much time with this game as the original, it’s broadly more of the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the puzzles remain intuitive and the environments as varied if not more.

Of course, there are some differences. Although it might just be my imagination, I like to think the screens are more zoomed out, feeling a bit less cramped. And for better or for worse, some of the cases (like the opening) broaden the scope even further, requiring far more movement and multiple puzzles to solve.

If you liked Darkside Detective and are hungry for more, then A Fumble in the Dark is definitely a must-buy. But if you’re sceptical, or found the first game to be more than enough zaniness for you to handle, then A Fumble in the Dark may not be as necessary of a purchase.

Conclusion

While it may seem limited in scope, The Darkside Detective offers quite a few hours of playtime for its price with each case clocking in at around a half-hour or more even if you fly through them, and comes bundled with all the bonus cases the original received. A Fumble in the Dark expands on it even further, broadening the scope, and is perfect if you’re an adventure game purist looking for a bit more of a challenge.

Overall, Darkside Detective succeeds on virtually all fronts. It’s pleasing to look at, the music and ambience are great, the puzzles never get too complicated or ridiculous, and even the humour can get a genuine, sensible chuckle out of you on occasion.

I reckon that for adventure game fans, this is sure to be a worthy addition to your library. And if you’re a sceptic about the cryptic world of point-and-click, well, maybe this is the game that’ll win you over to the *ahem* Darkside.

Want to see what other great games have caught our eye? Check out our list of the best Android detective games to start exercising those brain cells!