"Beware
of shadows..."
There is a darkness that dwells in the imagination. It is the sense of
foreboding; a fear of the unknown world behind every wall and around every
corner. A place in the mind that cannot be illuminated. As we age we learn to
quell these fears, ignoring the fantastic and unimaginable horrors that the
imagination flings upon us. The pit of darkness is buried, hidden away,
repressed and depressed down to the farthest recesses of the mind. But such was
not always the case. The young at heart, you see, face the black void
and do not simply rationalize it away. There is a need to face the darkness and
overcome it, for where there is a darkness there is always a brightness to
provide the universal balance. The child faces the darkness of his or her
imagination and feeds into it. It is the imagined peril of an innocent mind.
Eric Chahi and the team at Amazing Studio, creators of the renowned
science fiction hit Another World (developed under the Delphine Software
label), kept the same dark artistic design and eerie landscape from that game
but strayed from the role of the adult adventurer in order to provide a
visually stunning experience in the dark corners of a child's imagination. They
created a world in which we are driven to face the...
Heart of Darkness
Developed by Amazing Studio
Published by Interplay Productions in North America,
Infogrames and Ocean Software in Europe
Released in 1998 for the PC and PlayStation platforms
Rated E for Everyone
Heart of Darkness tells the tale of Andy, a good-natured if slightly
mischievous kid who dreams of lying on the grass and watching the clouds along
with his spotted dog, Whiskey. It begins, as these stories tend to begin, with
every fictional child's most dreaded nightmare: elementary school. The
teacher's lecture foreshadows the events about to unfold for Andy and his poor
innocent pooch: "Many believe that these black holes are, in reality,
doors which open to parallel worlds. Unknown, fascinating... perhaps even terrifying!"
The teacher, a man of ill temperament and even more unpleasant appearance,
forces Andy into a cupboard as punishment for sleeping during
class, and provides the premise for the adventure ahead in Andy's apparent fear
of the dark. Andy is (literally) saved by the bell and escapes to spend quality
lounging time in the great outdoors. As Andy and Whiskey lie out on the grass a
solar eclipse occurs (darkness), during which Whiskey is dognapped
by a mysterious shadow (more darkness). This sets Andy on a path to his tree
house where a yellow flying machine of his own design transports him
to a desolate world inhabited by minions of one who is called the Dark
Master, as well as other creatures that are both friendly and
unfriendly. Thus the side-scrolling platform adventure
begins.
True, the plot is simple, but like all things it is simple when one merely
looks at the surface. Beneath the veneer
there is a tale of a child facing the darkest recesses of his
imagination, and to discover the truth behind the disappearance of Andy’s dog
is to discover a story stemming from the oldest tales of the child
lost in the woods, facing darkness that no man or woman would wish upon a
child. We see the story through Andy’s
eyes, and his bravery in the face of great danger is perhaps foolish but
nonetheless inspirational. While on his
quest Andy meets many foes, as well as friends in the form of the pudgy
Amigos, a race of beings with pink flesh, wings, and big googly eyes atop their
triangular heads. They serve as the suppressed
minority in the story, attacked by minions of the Dark Master and helping Andy
to fight him in the latter portions of the game. Andy ultimately faces the darkness alone and
perseveres, of course, but like any good story the journey makes or breaks the
tale.
So, the player is tasked with guiding Andy through the perilous Dark
Kingdom where shadow creatures
dwell in canyons, caverns, jungles, and even across the sky and beneath the
sea. Andy is limited to the standard platforming set: walking, running,
jumping, climbing, and occasionally swimming, and while there are some environmental
action elements to engage the player's reflexes they are few and far between.
Instead, the gameplay design relies heavily on solving puzzles to clear
obstacles from the path or to create a new path that will permit further
progression. An example of such a puzzle is a rock formation early in the first
level when the player uses Andy's plasma cannon to shoot the rocks and bring
down the wall blocking the path, albeit simultaneously ripping a hole in the
cliff that allows several shadow creatures to emerge. There we arrive at the bulk of the action in
the game: fighting off hordes of encroaching shadow creatures with nothing but
a plasma cannon or mysterious powers from a hidden meteor. The plasma cannon is used through a portion
of the first level as the player is introduced to the combat system.
Eventually, however, the plasma cannon is lost (for a time) and Andy is left
defenseless until obtaining what the game manual coins as the
"normal" and "special" powers. These powers allow the
player to kill enemies as well as manipulate mobile plant seeds
to create ladders and reach previously inaccessible areas in a level. All of
this weaponry is required, along with keen use of the intuitive if somewhat
rigid control system, to traverse the dangerous Dark
Kingdom and reach the Dark
Master's lair.
Topmost among the game's many achievements is the art design. Although the
pre-rendered 3D backgrounds and hand drawn environments were considered outdated
by the time the game released in 1998 (in the midst of the real-time 3D boom),
that does not change that the game's environments are simply stunning. It is one thing when a game can present candy
for the eye as the player traipses through the environments; it is another
matter when the game presents a rich, enticing world that seemingly asks the
player, “stop, won’t you, if only for a moment?” Stop and enjoy the scenery; smell
the overgrown roses in the steamy jungles; allow the glow of phosphorescent
fungi to cast eerie shadows across cave walls; stand and look out over a vast
landscape beyond the edge of a cliff beyond the edge of a lush and dark jungle,
beyond the skyscape of the horizon of gray clouds. And, eventually, stare down the darkness of
an evil lair where light from above casts faint traces of itself across piles
of long-dead creatures and twisted formations of stone. As I said, stunning.
Having said that, when I say that the game’s background and level art are
not the most impressive aspect of the art design then you may grasp what it
means when I say that it is in fact the animation that is the
visual highlight of the game. It is that
which that took hold of my sight from the moment I first loaded that disc, so
many years ago. Chahi and co.’s dedication to richly detailed animation was
apparent in their previous work on Another World and in Heart of Darkness they
not only met those same standards but far surpassed them. They created that stunning world and then
filled it with such brilliant movement in the characters and ambient level
details that one can see part of the reason why the game took
over four years to develop. It begins
with Andy, our guide through this fluid world. His movement as he walks along is greatly detailed. He walks, jumps, ducks, runs, swims, crawls, hangs,
and climbs; his clothes sway and ripple with every movement, his hat flys off
and is quickly caught as he floats through the air after a jump or runs away
from strange black creatures. But we’ve
seen good character animation before and since, so why, then, is the animation
so important? In this case it’s a case
of quality and quantity, or variety to be exact. There are many types of movement in the game,
and as morbid as it may seem the most varied type of movement is death. This poor kid dies in more ways than I’ve
seen any other video game. Falling from a variety of high places into bottomless pits, drowning, burning
alive, crushed by rocks, bones, suffering a broken neck, and being eaten by
anything with a mouth are just some examples of the many ways you can allow
Andy to perish. On the flip side, Andy
can dish out the deaths just as well as he can take them. With the aid of his plasma cannon, meteor
powers, or even sunlight, Andy can cause enemies to burst into brilliant puffs
of charred, glowing smoke, ranging from orange to green to blue, and all
animated in such a way that you feel the heat and sizzle of their rapidly
evaporating corpses. It could be said
that these are all beautiful deaths. The ambient animation of swaying grass, falling rocks from the decaying
stone beneath Andy’s feet, and smaller creatures such as butterflies and
lizards all serve as further examples of the shear beauty of all that surrounds
Andy.
The in-game action is complemented by the occasional pre-rendered cinematic
featuring notably dated 3D animation. The cinematics are, however, well-directed and they serve to provide dialogue
and scenes that further the story along. The only folly in the game’s visuals is that there can be noticeable
drops in the framerate when there happens to be too much of the
aforementioned animation on screen at one time, and the framerate for the
cinematics is also noticeably lackluster. Additionally, players who try both versions of
the game will notice that some of the cinematics in the PC version are missing
from the PlayStation version, but these are only action scenes placed in during
transitions from one area to the next. The key story scenes all remain.
As any film director or game designer can tell you, sound plays a
significant part in the experience that the observer or end user draws from a
work. Heart of Darkness makes excellent
use of sound effects for all animation in the game, from something as common as
Andy’s footsteps to a screech hinting at a creature that has not yet
appeared. All creatures in the game
emanate eerily realistic noises as they either rush Andy or lie in wait to feed
on him, and the sounds of creatures or environmental ambience serve as more
than background noise, often providing clues or warnings. The game's soundtrack – composed,
conducted, and produced by Emmy award-winning TV and film composer Bruce
Broughton – was the first game soundtrack to be recorded by a live orchestra. The subtleties of
what appears on-screen are enhanced by the swell and fall of a rousing score,
and the more dramatic moments in the game’s cutscenes are all the more
effective after the music kicks in to amplify the emotional impact.
In the end… well, I won’t be talking about the end as that it
something the player must experience, but I will say that in the end the game
is a shining example of the possibilities of the side-scrolling platformer
genre that was introduced over a decade before the game
released (with bits of adventure and puzzle that appeared in more financially
successful games such as Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee). In the unfortunate end of Amazing Studio we
received a game that ends much too quickly but will forever be remembered as an
entertaining and fun experience. In the
end, this is a story about a boy, his dog, and the limitless possibilities of
the imagination to frighten and at the same time challenge us to face that
which we fear, to face the darkness and overcome it.
Sources:
Game manual for the PlayStation version of Heart of Darkness
MobyGames
Wikipedia
GameFAQs
Recommended Playing:
American McGee's Alice
Ico
Psychonauts
Thanks to:
panamaus and Time Bandits
Space Cat and Shadow of the Colossus
Timeshredder and El Laberinto del Fauno
kovidomi and Youtube