Darkstar Review

‘Darkstar was produced, written, directed and animated by one individual over the period of a decade. Assembling a few friends in the entertainment business to contribute production talents or perform as actors, J. Allen Williams singlehandedly brought this ambitious project to the gaming screen, doing so well outside the Hollywood system.

Self-funding and meticulously crafting Darkstar from the ground up, he beat the odds and created something completely new, unique and irreverent – daring to reinvent the sensibilities of interactive storytelling from a perspective far removed from the traditional and mammoth game and film industries, and completely without their assistance or resources.’

This Garth Marenghi-style hubris, found in the manual and attributed to writer/director/animator (plus actor?) J. Allen Williams, is by far the most entertaining part of Darkstar.

It’s a throwback to the FMV, live-action led, interactive movie 'game' so poor that it’s an embarrassment not only to games as a whole but even its own terrible genre. Night Trap has moved to distance itself from it already out of shame. Sewer Shark wouldn't even return our calls for comment. 

A point-and-click adventure, Darkstar sees you as a futuristic space captain, awoken after 300 years in hypersleep to find your ship ruined, your crew in trouble and Earth dead. It’s up to you to explore the ship, which you don’t recall (amnesia, of course), and work out just what happened.

No this isn't retro and cool, it's vile and disgusting.

Sadly, like the situation Darkstar’s captain finds himself in, everything about Darkstar is spectacularly wrong. Exploring the futuristic spacecraft that this mess takes place on is agonising, as you sweep the screen looking for a hotspot so you can click to move to the next low-resolution area and then lurch there slowly in first-person, stuttering around like a drunk Max Headroom.

The ‘acting’ is terrible. The music sounds (and more importantly, goes on as long as) a 48-hour motorway pile-up consisting only of trucks filled with Zidjan and Gibson’s entire inventory. 

If you're thinking, ‘Hmmm. Sounds like a great, kitsch-filled retro laugh riot. Graphics aren’t everything, and neither is plot, nor acting, nor music,’ then we’re partially in agreement. A lot of games have poor graphics. Take 99 per cent of game plots, drop them into movies and even Steven Seagal would turn his ponytail up at them.

Unfortunately for Darkstar, most of those games that are deficient in these areas are actually – and this is important – games. We would probably forgive the low-rent acting, the terrible graphics, the outrageously overblown pretentiousness of it all – we might even be tempted to call it a big tongue-in-cheek joke – if it were not for the fact that Darkstar isn’t a game.

Can you even make out what this is?

It’s simply a series of Quicktime windows; ones where you make a choice and then are ‘rewarded’ by watching terrible FMV sequence after terrible FMV sequence.

The puzzles are obscure with barely any signposting, resulting in the aforementioned screen-sweeping and zombie shuffling. The ‘logic’ behind the puzzles is even worse. The interface is infuriating. Performance is awful, with frequent error messages and outright crashes. 

At one point we got stuck in a labyrinth that looked like a giant space sauna for days, waiting for the game to prompt us. Then we realised: why would it? It’s not a game. Darkstar? It’s J. Allen Williams’s Darkplace.