About This Game I Can’t Escape: Darkness is an atmospheric horror adventure game that pulls you into a living dungeon where everything conspires against your escape. It is an immersive journey into the unknown, personified by the Darkness itself. Your odds of escape are slim, and when you fail, the dungeon will change before you can try again. Defend yourself from the Darkness with whatever light you can find; once your light burns out, the Darkness will consume you.What You Get:An Infinitely Replayable Living, Breathing Dungeon - Experience dim hallways and caves carved out for unknown purposes and designed to trap all who dare enter. One false step, and you will fall into darkness forever; and when you return, nothing will be exactly as you remembered.The Truth About The Darkness - Discover clues about the tomb and the story of The Darkness as you try to make your escape.A Guaranteed Uneasy Feeling in the Pit of Your Stomach - The very walls want you to stay; they will try everything to keep you trapped in the dark. Your eyes and ears will mislead you - you’ll want to get the hell out of the dungeon as fast as you can.The More You Explore, The More You Will Find - Secrets, surprises, and special rooms are hidden on every floor.Tweet Your Escape… Or Your Death - When you die, you can let your Twitter followers know how far you made it and what killed you, or perhaps if you're lucky, how long it took you to escape!What We Get:The Sadistic Pleasure of Seeing You Die on Twitter - We’re watching, and every time you don’t escape, and even when you do, it brightens our day.More “I Can’t Escape!” - Fancy Fish Games is a small studio; we appreciate your support, and we look forward to challenging, trapping and tricking you in more games to come!The Follow-Up:I Can't Escape: Darkness is the spiritual successor to our popular 2013 game "I Can't Escape," which we developed in just one month, and which spooked and thrilled over 250,000 players. We decided to take the simple concept of "I Can't Escape" - a creepy, immersive, and expectation-challenging dungeon experience - and flesh it out into a full game while retaining the fundamental spirit of the original. I Can't Escape: Darkness is designed to invoke feelings of being lost and alone, encouraging player's imaginations to run wild while providing subtle hints of terror (rather than in-your-face savagery). What will you see and hear in the Darkness? Unpleasant things which we - the developers - intentionally placed, or terrors from your own imagination? Reaction compilation for the original I Can’t Escape (click to play) 1075eedd30 Title: I Can't Escape: DarknessGenre: Adventure, IndieDeveloper:Fancy Fish GamesPublisher:Fancy Fish GamesRelease Date: 17 Sep, 2015 I Can't Escape: Darkness Cheat Really good game and I am enjoying it. The tense creepy atmosphere really gets to me. It's great to find a horror game that doesn't have jumpscares. Due to the game's punishing nature even rats feel like a real threat. In case it isn't clear, the movement is very much like Legend of Grimrock. You can equip an item to either of your hands, to have a light, a weapon, or other items ready to use.Due to the procedural level generation I can see situations arising when you feel like the game is unfair, though I just experienced the complete opposite. I kept finding hidden pits in the floor that dropped me further and further down, till I reached the end with nothing on me but the starting items. Still scared as hell while going through it though.Game is definitely worth buying, go for it. If you like horror, you wont be disappointed.. Do I recommend this game? Yes.Does this game deserve it's current (Feb 7, 2016) Metacritic score of 40? No.To begin, let's break down a few things from the \u201cAbout This Game\u201d section.1) \u201cAn Infinitely Replayable Living, Breathing Dungeon\u201dThis one is mostly hyperbole. It's true that the setting is quite good, as is fitting for any horror story in which the location\/environment is almost a character in and of itself. The game having \u201cinfinitely replayable\u201d is by definition true, the same way that the ocean has infinite re-sailability. You've never see the same fish, wave, or storm in the same place twice, but after enough trips out it all sort of blends together and you get a good idea of what to expect. Nothing new shows up; it's just in different places (just like other rogue-like games).2) \u201cThe Truth About The Darkness\u201dYes! This game is surprisingly intricate. There's a ton of little details and hidden clues on top of everything you'll find out just in a more \u201ccasual play through.\u201d There's lots of backstory (both directly stated and halfway hinted at) that you can pull out of the game if you merely try hard enough and pay attention.3) \u201cA Guaranteed Uneasy Feeling in the Pit of Your Stomach\u201dA definite yes! I've played through dozens and dozens of runs in the game and have over 24 hours on record, and the game still gets me wigged out at times. As a self-professed horror junky, this game will definitely get you immersed. Not to mention the newest update tweaked out all the sound effects, and all for the better in my opinion. This game would be fantastic for a VR headset.4) \u201cThe More You Explore, The More You Will Find\u201dAlso definitely true. As mentioned above in point 2, there are so many little things in this game. There are a lot of good secrets and several good puzzles too. Not to mention that the dev claims I have \u201calmost all the secrets,\u201d but not actually all of them. I have no idea what I've missed, but apparently even I could still find more.5) \u201cTweet Your Escape\u2026 Or Your Death\u201dYes, you can. It doesn't do anything in-game, but it could be fun depending on your social preferences.As for my more general comments, this is definitely a more retro style game. Very much like point-and-click adventurer games, very old-school in it's controls. The controls are probably the weakest aspect of the whole game when comparing this to other, more modern games, though I did find the controls to give I Can't Escape: Darkness (ICE:D) a rather unique feel and character. The controls aren't hard to get used to, but you may likely find yourself fumbling when you get into your first few panics.I can't comment much on some of the negative things that have been said about the game. Most of the negative things brought up in other reviews had no real impact on me while I was playing the game. The game definitely demands patience from you and a certain analytical mindset and a resilience to failure, all aspects I can easily see as being weak points for perhaps a majority percentage of gamers. I know I tend to get frustrated a little easily myself.It's almost certainly unfair to have just insinuated that the failure to enjoy this game is on the players themselves, rather than the game itself. There are things about ICE:D that could have been tweaked or polished, but at the end of the day this game is going to demand a different style of play because it is a different style of game. Perhaps the true root of the problem is in the style itself; consider how this genre of game basically doesn't exist anymore. (Yes, yes, Grimrock exists, but I don't think you could argue it made any big waves when it came out. ALSO! 8\/7\/16 Edit here: Having now played Grimrock, I think the comparisons between the two games are largely inaccurate. ICE:D and Grimrock are VERY different games. A rough simplification is that ICE:D is puzzles and Grimrock is combat.)But I digress. Bottomline: I do recommend this game. If you like puzzles, if you like being in creepy places, if you like trying games that are different than the current market, if you like very challenging games, or if this strikes your interest at all really, I'd go ahead and get it. Trust your gut. It's not expensive and I think you'll at least be interested by your time here.Also, do note that the devs have continued to support this game and tweak things based on the feedback they've been getting from players. David Maletz has been continuously active on the Steam forums for the game, and Chase Bethea has continued doing some really cool work on the sound design. While these are component pieces and not a main focus for most players, I think it is only fair to acknowledge the work their team has been and is still doing.Also check out firmwares' review. I agree with everything they said.http:\/\/steamcommunity.com\/profiles\/76561198057478381\/recommended\/346090\/. The game builds suspense via resource management very well. It leaves you very limited information about the "phenomenons" you encounter, which feeds into the suspense. A nice little game. I knew instanly I would enjoy I Can't Escape: Darkness. It blends horror and grid based CRPG exploration which are two of my favorite genres. The aren't really any RPG elements to speak of but lots of puzzles and areas to explore. The visual style really reminds me of legend of grimrock with some really nice pixel art graphics. So far, the only real combat is hitting the watching eyes and killing a few rats here and there. Overall a really atmospheric game and some really good puzzles that aren't overly difficult.. This is one of those games that you'll either love or hate. It is very cryptic, can be difficult when you don't know what you're doing, and it may or may not scare you. I personally like it, to be honest. :). Great game with effective audio design. Has a sort of dungeon master\/legend of grimrock feel to it, although only in a visual sense. Totally different game styles. Enemies are quite good although they do have that enlarged-pixel design which may not be to everyones taste. Controls might seem a bit fiddly for some. I found keyboard+mouse to be much easier. The joypad (360 wireless) seemed a bit cumbersome and I did experience some wandering crosshairs. They just moved by themselves like it wasnt calibrated. May of been my setup, but no other game I own has given me this problem. Either way, a very good game so far and fairly priced. If you like dungeon crawler type games with some puzzle elements then you may like it. Some may find it shallow compared to dedicated rpg games but this isnt even trying to compete with that. It's fun, creepy and atmospheric. Definitely worth a purchase!
- flatmuterpnorthcom