Dark and Deep Review

 Driving down the road, with the sound of a conspiracy podcast playing in the background and a bagged body in the back, you take control of Samuel Judge. This is the opening sequence, moments before disaster strikes and you begin in a strange, dark world.

Developed by Walter Woods, this horror walking simulator has you using empty frames to search for heartless creatures lurking in the shadows — literally. Invisible to the naked eye, you'll need to acquire several frames throughout your experience to discover new ways to bring things to your realm or prevent things from others from interacting with yours.

At its base, Dark and Deep doesn't bring much innovation to the genre in terms of storytelling, using vague messages and some notes scattered across the world to help you piece the puzzle together. Still, even though I don't often connect with these sorts of narratives, I enjoyed the way this one pieced everything together, from the religious undertones to the images you'll find; it's fun to decipher the story and even better that it nigh straight-up tells you the results at the end. It's a great change of pace from typical horror tropes, where unless you've found every note and made notes of said notes to avoid getting lost within the notes (yes, that's a lot of notes and note-taking), you won't understand the sub-branching-extra-side story that somehow connects to the main one. The straightforward narrative is definitely a highlight in an otherwise convoluted genre, giving me the capability to look forward to actually knowing what happens in the end. And though it's far from ground-breaking, it's a story I didn't mind uncovering, and that's a win.

Aside from the narrative itself, you'll spend your time exploring the actual world. Its picturesque settings are gorgeous, and it has a painting-like aesthetic that givesDark and Deep a unique look as if you were walking inside portraits. It's interesting to look at, though I felt the world sometimes leaned too heavily on the dark and muted colours, relying heavily on blacks and whites that, though interesting, sometimes felt difficult to decipher.

It's a minor niggle at worst because it's otherwise a unique experience that you won't have almost anywhere else. The monotony does indeed break in the later levels, as the worlds get more and more Hellish, with skulls and darker tones of green that were welcome. It might be a bit psychedelic with muted tones in some parts, with nonsensical world design that made me yearn to return to the real world to look at some of the other environments (like an office space you explore later), but it uses its art as a strong-suit to keep the world engaging.

With the various frames, you'll look through them to achieve numerous skills that'll let you advance, and Dark and Deep includes one of my favourite additions to modern gaming: Story mode, which lets you experience it like a puzzle title rather than a horror one. Though it won't have you running in circles trying to unravel the next step, with otherwise straightforward things to complete, it was an enjoyable experience not getting lost in every other puzzle, allowing for a smooth, forward-moving experience in a narrative I genuinely looked forward to unravelling.

There are some issues, however, and Dark and Deep's indie roots show in what feels like poor playtesting in some areas. Parkour sections felt out of place in an otherwise gritty world, forcing you to jump to avoid water that will have you sink to an unnerving foe for Thalassophobes... and then an extremely long cutscene, a fade to black, and back to the nearest checkpoint you go.

The gameplay loop consists of finding a way to progress to the next area and (sometimes) battling the parkour to get there. Though it was mostly frustrating in the early sections when I wasn't used to the gravity of the world, the long cutscenes and over-exposure to the monsters took what was an eerie atmosphere of being hunted by shadows into a more common foe. Dark and Deep doesn't rely on cheap jumpscare tactics to get a fright out of you, leaning instead on the feeling of being watched and followed, but when interactions with the monsters become too familiar, they lost their terrifying factor and became a gameplay element — the next mechanic to get over to the next puzzle.

It fails in being a horror experience because you familiarise yourself with the monster quite early on, and it removes the tingling feeling in your back when traversing corridors. An ingenious use of lighting and environments at the beginning feels unnerving, but the monster becomes a common foe by the end of the experience, dampening the overall fright factor.

I'll say, however, that some of the sections — especially later in the game — were enjoyable. Puzzle elements could combine together to bring forth new possibilities, and a particular maze in Chapter 3 was a definite highlight of my otherwise short experience. Clocking in at just over five hours, I'd say that out the other side, I enjoyed Dark and Deep, though perhaps not exactly for the reasons marketed on the Steam store page.