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A Darklands Retrospective
by Joshua E. Sawyer
Last year, I took a wandering tour through Germany to visit the village in Ostallgäu where my grandmother was born. Along the way, I played Darklands on the train for old time's sake. I wanted my party in the game to adventure in the historical locations that matched my current travels.* The experience reminded me of all of the positive ways it had influenced me: personally, academically, and in how I think about game design.
By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had already played a lot of CRPGs, starting with Bard's Tale and hitting full stride with SSI's “Gold Box” D&D games. I'd seen a variety of settings and styles of games, all sorts of systems and mechanics. I figured I “got” CRPGs reasonably well. When my friend, Tony, told me about Darklands, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I remember the conversation going something like this:
“So it's historical... and everyone's human?”
“Yeah.”
“And there's no classes, no alignment... ?”
“No levels, no experience points. You raise most of your skills just by using them. Your characters can die of old age.”
“...?”
The Magic Candle was the most unusual CRPG I had played to that point, but I wasn't prepared for Darklands. It used 15th century history for almost everything: canonical hours, Medieval currency, alchemical formulae, Catholic saints, practical arms and armor of the era, period-accurate names and spellings for cities, traditional music, mythic conceptions of satanic Templars – the works.
It also bucked so many CRPG conventions that it took me a while to wrap my head around it. Instead of making a party of characters of different races and classes, you developed them along life paths, Traveller-style, in five year increments. You could, in fact, have a party with a grizzled knight, a young bandit, a hapless mystic of affective piety, and an 80 year-old alchemist (whom you most certainly would not abandon for his potent potions five minutes into gameplay!) And as previously mentioned, there were no alignments, no levels, no experience points – just a learn-by-doing skill system and a big open world. I felt like the game gave me the freedom to explore “Greater Germany” as I saw fit.
Not that it was a forgiving exploration. Darklands was a wonderful open world game, one that rarely warned travelers about dangers lurking in a Raubritter's castle or what you might encounter while stumbling through the Black Forest. You could find yourself arguing with a demon in Latin at the Devil's Bridge, fleeing from the Wild Hunt after you've interrupted the witches' High Sabbath, or praying for a saint's intercession as you await public execution in a town square.
Darklands created a fantastic world out of the “mundane” myths of historical Europe. It developed an equivalent of “Radiant Story”-style quests almost twenty years before Skyrim, and it had a real-time with pause combat system six years before Baldur's Gate. Most importantly, it gave players like me a new way to think about what CRPGs could be and a greater appreciation for all of the fantastic things we can find in history books. For those reasons, it will always be one of the CRPGs closest to my heart.
* Last year's party didn't quite made it to München before I flew home, but I'm sure they'll get there before the alchemist keels over.