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the screen which is fine, but once you reach the
limit, another bar pushes out. This means that
late in the game you can have an inventory
screen that takes up nearly half the screen.
You can, of course, minimize this to be only one
bar, but that means switching items or weapons
becomes a real pain in the rear. And as going into
your inventory doesn't pause the game, you are
going to be frantically running around while you
try to find that weapon or item you need. Sure,
this makes things tense, but not in the fun way
and more in the "Fucking inventory piece of shit"
sort of way.
The level design used throughout 2Dark is
fantastic, and the team clearly laid things out so
that players could take dozens of approaches to
completing levels. You can load up a stage and
see multiple ways to deal with things which
made coming back and trying new approaches
fun. Maybe you want to trap a baddie in a room
you lock behind you, or lure some into a trap, or
stalk them until you find the right moment to
take them out in the dark. It's really fun looking
at a stage and planning your attack.
But I'll go back to the story once again and say
that it's all really silly and overly convoluted.
You really have to go digging to piece together
just what the hell is going on. The main villain
that shows up at the end of the game came right
out of left field; Well, it did for me at least. There
wasn't any really motivation for what he or his
people were doing and his connection to the
player is paper thin.
The real kicker that manged to piss me off was
the twis t ending that the game tosses at you. It
wasn't shocking as you could see it coming from
a mile away, but the last stage simply blows the
impact by using an insta-kill segment to ruin the
surprise. You enter the wrong door (the only
obvious one available) to the house in the last
stage and the game spoils the reveal while killing
you. This nearly killed the entire experience for
me.
GAMBIT
There is also no real resolution to the player
characters' story when everything comes to an
end. No real reason why anything was done, and
no real coming together of anyone. Sure,
completing the game at 100% might change
things, but it feels cheap to go out the way 2Dark
did. As a character you are probably worse off
than when you started this whole stupid
adventure.
In the end 2Dark is a solid game that plays really
well, but tells a clumsy story that is more
interested in shocking you for the sake of shock,
than to tell a good story. It's a lot to do with child
abuse and murder, but it feels utterly wasted
here. In the early 90s this would have been
groundbreaking and newsworthy for what it
does, but today it's simply a good game with a
story that simply tries too hard.