You play Jackie Estacado, a lackey for mafia crime-load Paulie (typical, stereotypical mafia name). Anyways, a job goes horribly wrong, and the two dudes you’re with end up dead. Well, this doesn’t go over well with Paulie. So, for your 21st birthday, Paulie makes you a little present in the form of a bomb strapped to a dead guy’s chest inside a closet. BOOM! Your body is blow clean out the seventh-story window.
That’s when the Darkness starts to manifest inside you. The screen turns an eerie blackish-purple; captions appear at the bottom of the screen in a gigantic, twisted font; and a demonic voice starts saying things like, “you’re soul does not belong to you.”
Shortly thereafter the Darkness emerges in the form of two massive black serpents that rip out of your back and hover in your peripherals. You can have them attack people, or slither out ahead of you to scout the area. You can also have them eat people’s hearts, which makes them more powerful. As they get stronger, the two heads start fighting over the hearts. One will have it in their mouth, and the other will be yanking at the severed arteries.
Okay, creepy… but I could keep playing on the principle that the only disturbing thing about the game was me.
Of course, the Darkness cannot aid you unless you’re in the shadows. Now, when you get freaked out in most game, you just fall back to the well-lit areas where you’re safe. That doesn’t work here. If you want to feel safe, you enter a room and shoot out all the lights… Because that’ll give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you’re in a haunted orphanage.
Eventually, you realize that the Darkness is taking over your body. To stop it you eat the barrel of your gun and pull the trigger. But you don’t die. You awaken in the trenches of WWII, where instead on Nazis, they’re fighting against zombie-cyborg-soldiers that don’t die unless you devour their hearts.
Messed up, but whatever. I was fine until I reached the bomb shelter. The backdoor is down a long cement sewer drain. Just before you reach the mouth of the tunnel, the silhouette of a soldier suddenly appears in front of you and instantly vanishes, scaring the crap out of you! I damn near crappie-flopped on the living-room floor. What the hell was that?! That is not okay!
Against my better judgment, I kept going. The sewer empties into a battlefield that’s covered in a heavy, rust-colored fog. All you see are shadowed forms moving on the edges of your vision. And then BAM! Lightning. The screen goes white. Thunder crackles. You heart skips. And when the flash clears you’re offset twenty yards. Get back to where you were. Keep going.
Bam! Silhouette! And then its gone again. But I’m still firing at nothing and screaming in my living room like I’m actually out there…
Stop firing. Breathe. Keep going. Bam! Lightning! Silhouette! Lightning! Lightning! Silhouette! And suddenly, I’m surrounded by zombie-cyborgs and they gun me down.While the game reloads the Darkness spouts off in its demonic voice while faces of death flash across the screen…
…I don’t play that game at night anymore…
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