DarKnot: Let’s try a mix of great horror classics

The horror genre is definitely one of the most inflated genres in recent years. Many developers continue to look for the perfect mix of elements in hopes of creating something innovative or something that meets the needs of a particular niche of players.

There are studios working to deepen the horror and anxiety-relieving aspects of the thriller experience, some betting entirely on survival dynamics, while others building a guided narrative arc accompanied by action mechanics. DarKnot, one of the boys ElbrusLabhe also wants to be inspired by the classics of the genre such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Lately The DarkKnot demo we tried He explained this to us in a precise language.

A mix of content rather than form

DarKnot launches the player into the labyrinth of a cursed city filled with a completely hidden mystery, whose only hope is to survive and escape. The environment is particularly gloomy, supernatural events haunt the streets and corridors of buildings, fear of jumping is always around the corner. stylistic featuresfear it’s all there, but in the two hours it takes to face the demo, they seem consolidated for completeness rather than consistency. There are monstrous creatures, occult rites, ghosts and crazed shadows ready to attack us. Everything is plotting against us, but the details of the story are so empty and embryonic that they don’t want to give us why, they actually don’t want to give the player a sense of escape other than the terror that appears before them.

We understand your desire to protect. demo as a spoiler without contextualizing our character within the game world, but that way we don’t have a narrative element to contact at this cognitive stage. Alongside a certain phenotypic characterization of the protagonist, he has an occult symbol on his back that weighs on his head like the sword of Damocles, but beyond that we know very little.

A series of puzzles sets the pace of the game

DarKnot is almost entirely a third-person game, only going first-person during the puzzle-solving stages where the interaction with objects becomes much more specific. this puzzlesThey are very creative from the core of the game and offer creative solutions. The few we’ve actually seen are quite simple, very “fictitious” (i.e. very little logic behind them), rarely have environmental elements, but at least adapt well to the pace of the game. By the standard of the genre, there is a moment that invites the player to explore and requires confrontation with other minor ones to resolve.

There is no shortage of enhancing options. non-linear progression On the game map these can be played for a limited number of tries determined by the number of candles the player has.

A development strategy of DarKnot versatile product It’s very simple and basically consists of filling the mechanics with items taken from various types, then giving the player choosing how to use them and which ones to prefer. The game can be approached as an action, survival or psychological horror. However, this openness emerges from the first bars of the entry as a problem rather than a strength.

this war victim of slow and tired animations, the survival system, the crafting with it, it’s very simple and doesn’t seem to have big repercussions on the dynamics of the character, and the psychological aspect is less on when you should download some monsters/minors. A couple of benevolent fists are enough. The player can defeat almost all hostile creatures that populate the game world, with the exception of ghosts, and once they land on the ground from them, they can retrieve the necessary raw materials and tools to fulfill the DarKnot survival mechanic subplot. These are used to restore the hero’s various health parameters by filling the consumption bar.

Definitely a notable final mechanic for DarKnot. Tarot. This is not the classic tarot cards, but a sui generis deck of cards, pieces of which can be found in the exploration stages. These cards give the player bonuses that are activated on new awakening or post-death respawn. They represent an interesting starting point for trying different approaches to the exploration of warfare, but due to the narrowness of the demo we don’t know the extent of their impact on the gameplay experience.

There death It keeps the player’s achievements so far intact, while restarting the same from the last room where they “rested”. Over time, the number of deaths, according to the developers, should create narrative variations that will affect the game world, but we did not have the opportunity to get concrete confirmation in the current demo.

WITH technical level The game demonstrates the potential of the Unreal Engine in line with the bugs and refinement one might expect from a game whose output is yet to be determined and which doesn’t like a developer with big pockets behind it: animations are the weakest part after all. during the fight. Other than these considerations, the demo never showed insurmountable issues or bugs that could “break” the game.