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Too Beautiful to Not Play It - DarkBlood: Beyond the Darkness Review

12K View2022-07-20

As a child of the ’90s who grew up on the NES and Super Nintendo—sorry, everyone, not a Sega kid here—I have this innate fondness for pixel graphics that I can’t seem to shake. Call it simple nostalgia if you must, but when a game has beautiful pixel art, I’m drawn to it. And sometimes those visuals can completely trump anything else about the game... Even the gameplay!

DarkBlood: Beyond the Darkness is just such a game, although I don’t mean to say that the gameplay is bad. It’s just that the 16-bit-style art from developer Toihaus is so utterly gorgeous that I wouldn’t even care if the gameplay was bad.

Opening with a typical old-school CRPG story, DarkBlood places players into the tattered sandals of an exile, a blood descendant of the long-ago defeated and sealed away Demon King. In order to make sure that evil force stays locked up, each of his descendants are thrown unceremoniously into the dark catacombs where The Demon King and his armies now reside. As one of those shamed scions, you’re given a simple goal: Progress to the deepest depths of this dungeon and kill your demonic forefather once and for all, or die trying.

In keeping with its old-school vibes, DarkBlood doesn’t waste any more time on plot than is absolutely necessary, so once you’ve got these basics laid out via an opening cutscene and a bit of dialogue, don’t expect much more. You know what you need to do, and that’s enough.

Accomplishing that goal, on the other hand, is a much more complicated prospect. DarkBlood’s dungeon has seven levels with different themes, and each of those areas is absolutely crawling with skeletons, bats, evil knights, giant worms, ogres, and dozens of other creatures, all eager to end your quest. While the environments look nice, it’s really the enemy design where DarkBlood shines. There are over 200 enemy sprites—unique ones, not just recolors of the same zombie over and over—and every one of them is detailed and gorgeous. They also have varying approaches to combat that will affect how you fight them.

DarkBlood’s battle system straddles the line between an oversimplified mobile game approach to turn-based RPGs and the intimidating depth of classic computer dungeon crawlers, definitely favoring the former. Luckily it never tips all the way in that direction. The game utilizes a card-based system, where whenever you start combat, you’re given a hand of five cards. However, there are only four possible cards you can receive: physical attack, magic attack, heal, and defend. You’re certain to pull copies of the same card, which is where the game builds in some surprising complexity.

See, while you could just play an attack card as soon as you get it, that’s usually not going to do much damage. But let’s say you combine two Attack 1 cards by laying one on top of the other; suddenly that will turn into an Attack 2 card, and you’ll draw a replacement. Combine two Attack 2 cards, and you’ll get an Attack 3 card, and so on. But each time you combine a card also takes up a turn in combat, so you can only do so much stalling and powering up before the enemy wallops you.

This turns DarkBlood’s fights into tense, strategic affairs with just a smidge of RNG thrown in. You have to make constant decisions about whether your highest value card is good enough to spend right away, or if you should save it until it’s more powerful, or maybe even for the next fight, which could be against a more challenging foe. Perhaps you have a Heal 4 you’ve managed to build up throughout this floor of the dungeon; you know using it right now when your health is only half gone would waste some of its massive healing potential, but you’re also desperately in need of some better attack options, so maybe freeing up that space in your hand would be preferable.

While the random aspect of card draws can be frustrating for RPG gamers who prefer having more control, DarkBlood provides some methods of stacking the deck in your favor, so to speak. Most directly, at any point outside of battle, you can open the character menu and swap between four different class options. Assigning yourself as a warrior will increase the appearance rate of physical attack cards, the mage will see more magic attack cards, the thief will get more defense cards, and the monk will receive more heal cards.

The class you have chosen will also determine how new stat points are distributed when you level up, and those stats directly affect the probability of cards showing up as well. You can further tweak stats by equipping gear that you’ve found off defeated enemies or purchased from the mysterious peddler who shows up throughout the dungeon. This system provides a compelling degree of freedom to build your character however you want and tweak them as you progress. Got a warrior type who’s primarily focused on physical attack cards, but you’d like to start tossing in some magic? Just swap to the mage class for a few levels or throw on a mage’s robe, and more magic attack cards will start showing up immediately.

The card-based combat doesn’t actually represent DarkBlood’s biggest break with the old-school RPGs it’s openly influenced by, however. No, that would be the fact that this is a strictly linear game. You may be in a massive, multi-level dungeon, but you’re not doing any exploring. Your only option at any given time is to either “Advance” or to “Transfer” to a different level of the dungeon (useful for grinding). I was definitely disappointed by this choice at first, as exploration is one of my favorite parts of any dungeon crawler. The more I played, though, the more I felt like this design just made thematic sense. After all, the game’s hero has no choice over their fate either; they’re cursed to move forward endlessly, stumbling towards an inevitable encounter with the ancestor who decided this narrow path.

Hopefully it’s a path you enjoy looking at, though, because you'll be seeing it a lot. DarkBlood is not an easy game by any means, and as part of its challenge, it employs some roguelite design. Specifically, whenever you die, you must restart whatever level of the dungeon you’re on. Your experience points, level progress, gear, and inventory items will all stay with you, so even if you keep throwing yourself at the meat grinder, you should make incremental progress. However, you’ll lose half your gold every time you die unless you agree to spend some of the game’s rare gem currency. By the nature of the game, grinding out levels is basically a requirement, so you should be prepared to die and re-walk floors plenty of times before you succeed, but I never felt like I was stuck making no progress at all thanks to my inventory and level-ups not being affected by death.

I should be clear here that while the nature of gems might make them seem like a scammy premium currency—aw, you died, how about spending $4.99 now to re-up your gems and save your gold?—the game doesn’t really operate that way in practice. You can purchase gems, but you find them as you explore, and even when I didn't have enough gems, the hit to my cash reserves never felt too punishing. DarkBlood also never really pushed me towards purchasing gems with real money. In fact, I didn't even realize purchasing gems was an option until I sat down to write this review and double-checked!

The only other microtransactions available in DarkBlood are a one-time $2.49 purchase to turn off ads (which I used) and a one-time $4.49 purchase to double the rate that you earn experience points (which I did not use). That latter one might seem egregious to some, but I never felt like I was being punished with achingly slow experience gain or anything like that.

That said, you can and should take everything I’ve said in favor of DarkBlood here through the very specific lens I presented earlier, which is: Even if it was broken or bad, have you seen how this sucker looks? I’m not a “graphics above all else” kind of gamer, and I’m not in the business of forgiving major design flaws just because a game is beautiful, so I don’t believe that’s what I’m doing here. But I want to be as open as possible about my bias, which is that this is hands-down one of the best-looking pixel art games I’ve ever laid eyes on. Is DarkBlood a true masterpiece of RPG design? No, probably not. But it’s pretty dang fun, which is enough to push it over the top when paired with art this stunning. That earns it a hearty recommendation from me, as well as a promise that I’ll be checking out the game’s sequels in the near future.

SCORE: 4 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• The Wizardry series. Of all the classic CRPGs it’s inspired by, DarkBlood is closest in tone and design to Sir-Tech’s beloved Wizardry games, which remained focused on hardcore dungeon crawling even as other major fantasy RPG series expanded into bigger, open-world affairs. It’s probably no surprise that DarkBlood is closest to Wizardry, as the former is made by a Japanese developer, and the Wizardry series grew to be much more popular in Japan than in North America.

• Eastward. This 2021 release is easily one of the most beautiful pixel art games for PC and consoles, and it’s one I can only hope will make its way to mobile eventually. DarkBlood: Beyond the Darkness is a totally different style of game, but if you loved admiring the gorgeous graphics of Eastward (or other titles from publisher Chucklefish, such as Stardew Valley), you should be able to appreciate DarkBlood’s visuals as well.

💬 Have you played DarkBlood: Beyond the Darkness? Let us know what you think in the comments! If you haven’t played it, tell us your favorite example of great pixel art, with a screenshot if possible!

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