A Case For Intimacy: The Darkness

We first see Jackie Estacado, protagonist of The Darkness, within an endless black space. A light shines from above, illuminating smoke and silhouetting the young, leather-clad mobster. “My boss,” he says, “Uncle Paulie, sent me here to whack the foreman.”

Starbreeze Studios, the developer of the game, roots the game in the first-person perspective but uses these moments of temporal displacement to allow Jackie conversation with the player. These scenes, ostensibly occurring within Jackie’s mind, also function as loading screens throughout the game.

Jackie shares humorous anecdotes, gives brooding monologues and occasionally spouts necessary exposition. Whether relevant to the core story or derivative, Jackie’s disclosures breakdown the fourth wall between players and the character. We gain privilege to intimate knowledge and Jackie reveals his thoughts and musings. It’s this confessional that initially endears Jackie to players. Luckily, Starbreeze carries the theme of “getting personal” – and these intimate interludes – across the entire game.

The Darkness’ narrative highlights consist of two moments; the first is of pure intimacy. After dispatching thugs at the Graves End Construction Site during the game’s first mission, Jackie speaks to his longtime girlfriend on the phone: Jenny Romano, another orphan who grew up with Jackie, She invites her boyfriend over to inspect her new apartment. Jenny surprises Jackie with a cake for his 21^st birthday — an event he’d rather not recognize.

After Jackie grumbles through a false explanation of troubles at work, Jenny says, exasperated and irritated, “’It’s your birthday and I’ve got a new apartment; let’s take one day off from ‘Fucked up.’” Like this night at Jenny’s apartment, these personal, human moments in the game provide reprieve from the bloodshed players inflict in most every other. Starbreeze, it seems, has no problem letting players take a day off.

The culmination of this scene shows Jackie sitting down to watch the television Jenny has so elegantly displayed atop cardboard boxes. Jackie fails to express his love to Jenny in a lump-planted-firmly-in-throat moment before the camera jarringly slips into a third person animation showing Jackie plop onto the couch.

Upon settling in, players resume Jackie’s point of view, which now includes Jenny nestled into your shoulder. Sitting quietly on a couch in a dingy apartment with my character’s love at my side remains one of the most poignant and haunting experiences I’ve encountered in gaming. Maybe it’s the phantom of reality that imbues this moment with so much meaning; maybe it’s knowing intimacy requires fewer words than alienation; maybe it’s knowing the expiration of this brief bliss approaches rapidly. When the Darkness controls Jackie and forces him to watch Jenny’s murder — the second narrative highlight — this moment on the couch is what both Jackie and players immediately recall. As my memory of the game fades over the ensuing years, this one I will always retain.

Jenny’s character, presence and death represent a number of the title’s strengths, which are mostly tied back to its narrative and presentation. On the other hand, Starbreeze gave the gameplay separate anchors: frantic first person shooting, including the use of the Darkness’ powers, and a scaled back open world filled with personal quests to complement those of the shooting variety.

While The Darkness proudly wears its shooter intentions on its sleeve, an undercurrent of RPG mechanics exist, giving pace to the game’s action. The most notable of these mechanics is the inclusion of side quests. Players discover these by exploring The Darkness’s interconnected world. Strolling through subway stations, players encounter NPCs with whom Jackie can interact. Many patrons fill the underground tunnels and only some will have anything to say. Players parse the distinction by approaching characters whose names appear on the screen when Jackie is looking at them. They eventually reveal simple tasks Jackie can complete. Many objectives entail fetching items — a hobo’s harmonica, a key from a belligerent ex boyfriend, an old woman’s bracelet from the train tracks — across the game’s depiction of Lower Manhattan. My personal favorite involved playing courier for long estranged husband and wife between the real world and the Darkness’ Otherworld. It serves as a reminder that these two sections of the game, though aesthetically, chronologically, and dimensionally disparate, inhabit the same cohesive universe.

The side quests are, by most standards, banal affairs. Players’ actions only result in the accumulation of additional phone numbers used to unlock collectibles. I suspect most players skipped or ignored the side quests after discovering their fruitlessness. No experience, no new toys, just some arguably interesting concept art; all work and no reward, it might seem.

But these side quests are important because they provide objectives devoid of massacre and mutilation. They remind players that getting to know people, in this case by conversing with those marked as interactive NPCs, entails connections forged through dialogue and in some cases, favors. Rather than just a means of obtaining collectibles, assisting others in their daily struggles becomes the end itself. Don’t let the game’s supernatural mythology confuse you: this is a game about people.

While most first person shooters concern themselves with distinct levels, Starbreeze instead crafted an overworld in the form of subway stations and a number of New York Citysets. There are only two subway stations, Fulton St.and Canal St. From them, players can access all of the game’s locations at any time, aside from the Otherworld. A subway trip results in a quick loading screen before reaching the other half of the game’s world, but it feels less like a disconnect and instead like Resident Evil’s infamous door loading screens. In my mind, the psychological distance is similar. Games such as Fable 2 fail to maintain a sense of cohesion amidst their expansive worlds, but The Darkness nails it. No loading screen ever managed to create the sense that I was moving through this world in the same fashion as all other characters and even as people do currently in Manhattan. This tethers Starbreeze’s New York City to our own and the game is stronger for it.

These New York streets are sometimes difficult to navigate. The game’s map features no waypoints or directions; the HUD provides no assistance either. Instead, players must rely upon the same mechanisms as real inhabitants of the Big Apple. Traversal becomes less difficult through repetition and familiarity. The more intimate Jackie becomes with the various districts, the more players become comfortable with locations. New York City rewards its residents with a sense of closeness that tourists and passersby cannot possess and The Darkness does the same. After becoming familiar with the game’s world, both Jackie and the player come to call this place home.

It all comes down to this: Starbreeze’s coupling together of the intimacy of character, story, mission structure,  and level design often resulted in strange moments of bliss, which I have rarely experienced within a game. And one of these moments inspired this entire discussion.

After Jackie’s second journey to the Otherworld culminates in his acceptance of the Darkness, he returns to St. Mary’s Orphanage. As I took control in this final chapter of the game and made my way back to the Fulton St.station, I remember the feeling of elation as I passed through the turn stiles and down the stairs, a poignant violin piece playing in the background.

The preceding events mingled with the familiar activity of navigating this world to increase the scene’s gravity. Spotting Vinny — one of the many subway habitants whom Jackie served — at the bottom of the stairs and hearing the rush of passing trains and the hum they leave in their wake, I felt relieved. Jackie lost his girlfriend and just gave himself over to the demon that forced him to watch her death in complacency; this is certainly not Jenny’s idea of taking a day off from ‘fucked up.’ As I soaked up the sights and sounds of that familiar subway, watching the citizens whose disputes I’d settled and lost treasures I’d found, reflecting upon the loss of the brightest light in my life and looking into the bleakest future, I felt okay. No matter what, this was my home. No loss, no sacrifice would change that. I had spent countless hours exploring and perforating it; I lost true love; but I was a part of it.

About the Author

Nolan McBride Nolan has lived in Ohio for 86% of his life but he hopes that one day his English degree and passion for video games will fuse like the Wonder Twins, activating in the form of a full-blown gaming career that will help him escape the clutches of this bipolar Midwest climate. He can be reached by e-mail at nolan_mcbride@yahoo.com or found on Twitter @nolan_mcbride trying to coerce (by any means necessary) people to love his favorite games as much as he does and live tweeting awful films.