Game Critique Blog #4:
When the Darkness Comes
Mar 30th, 2021
CMU 05-418 Design Educational Game
When the Darkness Comes is a surprisingly smart horror game that manages to blend in introspective narrative elements seamlessly.
TechRaptor Review
This game explores themes such as depression, anxiety, verbal abuse, manipulative control, and suicide.
Content Warning
GAME METADATA
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Game Name: When the Darkness Comes
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Developer: Sirhaian
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Platform: Microsoft Windows(Steam) Free Game
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Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021950/When_the_Darkness_comes/
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https://www.sirhaian.net/games/sheet.php?p=when_the_darkness_comes
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Instructional Goals: learn how the patients with depression perceive the world and learn how to understand them better.
When the Darkness Comes is a walking simulator, where the players entered a mysterious room hosted by a mysterious man. By walking through the room, the players get to understand the anxiety and depression the host feels.
This game is not a traditional educational games which practice the players with a specific skill by this or that interesting task or training. Instead of making players splendid psychologists, this game only aims at practicing the players how to understand those people who are haunted by these mental diseases, by offering very philosophical environment and experience. In terms of education, the initial intention for the game designer to make this game and release it free is that the designer want to teach the mental healthy group to understand who the mental unhealthy group perceives this world.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
prerequisite
knowledge.
There aren't much prerequisite knowledge for this game, maybe the following 3 would suffice.
1. Knowing that there are mental diseases existing in this world.
Players are not required to know what is the symptoms (or even names) of theses diseases, but they should know that there are people who suffer from these kinds of diseases.
2. Knowing how to walk in a game.
As stated above, this game is an eventually a walking simulator, so they should know how to walk in this game.
3. Some basic common sense.
For example, players should know what a shop is and what "go shopping" means in reality.
The anticipated learning is very clearly stated by Sirhaian as the game designer in his website.
" I wanted to find a way to express how I felt in my darkest times, and I couldn't find any better than an interactive experience. "
The game designer does not aim at distributing negative emotion. Instead, during his darkest time, he experienced considerable harm from the mental healthy people, so he would like to find a way such that the mental healthy people can understand his thought. The game anticipates that players who play this game will be able to understand those who suffer from mental diseases and understand what may be harmful to them, and what is their real thoughts after their pretension.
Figure 1. A depressive room that expresses the diffidence of the host of the game.
anticipated
learning.
potential
transfer.
Even though this may not be an interesting game, the potential transfer is powerful.
First, if the players playing this game with their hearts, they will understand why the world is so complicated to those who suffer from mental diseases. At least, in case someone in their life is suffering from depression or anxiety at the moment, the players will know what kinds of encouragement may be inappropriate, or what kinds of words can be really harmful to these people. Thus, the experience in the game is potentially transferred to the reality social communication.
Also, the players will understand better how these people perceives the world by interacting with the depressive scenes in this game. The depressive experience will be transferred to the real empathy.
GAME ELEMENTS
MDA FRAMEWORK
M
mechanics.
Mechanics refer to the rules and the concepts that formally specify the game-as-system.
The game When the Darkness Comes has mainly 3 mechanics.
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Walking. This game is a walking simulator, which means the most time the players are just walking around. The players can move with WSAD or arrow keys, adjusting their viewing angle through the mouse.
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Interaction. There are many interactive objects in this game, for example, buttons, or doors. The players interact with the game scene with these elements. However, some of the interactive elements may be totally meaningless, for example, when the host ask a yes-or-no question, all of the 4 buttons in front of the players may all be NO. This is just illustrating the hopelessness they feel when normal people asking questions and the mental unhealthy people found themselves have no choice for answering other options. The social pressure is then illustrated.
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Wall Texts. There are also some texts on the wall, which may be a poem, a sentence, or a simple instruction. Players get clues, hints, or some explanations through these texts.
Figure 2. A door with instruction, here enter the door. Players get instructions like this.
D
dynamics.
Dynamics refer to the run-time behavior of the game-as-system acting on player inputs.
The following lists the potential experience the players may have when playing the game When the Darkness Comes.
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Interacting with host. The player enters a room hosted by some mysterious man. During the game, the players will interact with this man, listening to his instructions or answering his questions. These instructions may be very unfriendly, or at least, displeasing.
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Horror. The game obviously depicts depression/anxiety/... etc as "darkness". This experience is supported by the horror atmosphere of the game. For example, the strangers' faces are covered by mosaics, which look totally non-human. The player is forced to walk in the room that is filled with these terrible monsters, but she is also told that these are simply "normal people". Through this illustration, the players get to understand why people with mental diseases fear the world.
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Sorrow. The game also renders the sorrowful atmosphere. The players will listen to the mocks from the "monsters", following the poem written by the host which delivers an initial hope followed by despair and the broken of any hope. Anyway, this game successfully presents these emotions to the player.
A
aesthetics.
Aesthetics describe the desirable emotional responses evoked in the player when interacting with the game-as-system.
It is definitely okay to say that "Darkness" is the aesthetic of When the Darkness Comes.
Visually, the rendering of this game is depressive. Every detail of the game tells the player that she is playing a horror game. Even though there are no ghosts, monsters, or aliens in this game, the players experience the darkness felt by the mental unhealthy. Thus, the players, even with the most optimistic character, will feel depressive and sorrowful playing this game.
Acoustically, the background music sounds creepy. Even the most peaceful music sounds really depressive and sad. At times some sudden sound effects are also presented, and the player will be frightened, needless to say.
All the designer wants to say is, this is the real darkness.
Figure 3. Even the simple "Welcome!" can be creepy under this rendering and lighting.
LEARNING principles
Learning Principles are the key way in which educational researchers communicate the results of their research to their practitioners.
In educational games, these principles are coded in the MDA framework. We will see how they are presented in this game.
multimedia.
This game uses visual aids to enhance verbal descriptions, along with auditory experience incorporated.
As discussed above, the use of depressive visual rendering and weird background music or sound effect strongly supports the experience of the learning objective. The players are perfectly practiced with this kind of sorrowful and dark perception of the world, and will definitely understand better why people suffer from mental diseases.
modality
principle.
This game presents verbal descriptions in audio rather than text when possible.
Specifically, instead of writing all the instructions on the wall, the game also gives hints through the conversation with the room host. He is talking to the players with a relaxing intonation, which sounds happy and normal. This kind of instruction shows the emotion of the host, which could not be strongly delivered by the text instructions. What's more, the players will wonder why the host sounds so relaxing; isn't he suffering from this darkness? Until they discover this relaxing intonation is just a kind of pretension for the host, they will understand better why they cannot perceive the sorrow and fear of the mental unhealthy people in their daily life. The players may respect more for their effort in trying to be normal after playing this game.
guided
attention.
This game provides explicit instructions as needed to help the player anticipate where they should focus their attention.
The texts on the wall are in strong visual contrast with the background. Usually the texts are written on black walls in white, so the attention of the players will be attracted easily. Also, the interactive elements are highlighted, so that the players know how they should discover all functions of a single room. Sound effects also help the players to focus.
In conclusion, When the Darkness Comes is a game that makes it possible for the players to understand the negative emotions of the mentally unhealthy population and feel empathy.
This game could be very controversial, since the content it delivers is really depressive, negative, unhealthy and stressful. However, from the perspective of game design, games are not necessarily entertaining. Recently, a lot of such game emerged, including horror games like Resident Evil or difficult action games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Dark Souls Series. Thus, from this point of view, When the Darkness Comes is very, very successful in delivering the content it wants to show, and torturing the players at the same time. The immerse experience, even it is only a walk simulator, still receives overwhelming positive feedback from the players. On the other hand, from the perspective of educational purposes, the topic this game wants to discuss is serious, respectable, and warning. The game does perfect job in teaching its audiences the learning material it wants to cover. The players will totally understand how dark the world is to the mentally-unhealthy people, and their empathy is also constructed during the process as desired. Thus, from any perspectives, this is undoubtedly a successful game.
The only comment for this evaluation is that this game is not a game for the mentally unhealthy players. They might feel worse if they play this game, and that is way at the beginning of this webpage, (as well as the developer's webpage and Steam shop page, ) the content warning is given. I do understand people will argue about whether a negative value should be taught -- in the case of this game, I definitely support the existence of this game. Superficially, this game "teaches" the player "how to perceive the world negatively" -- essentially, this game teaches the player how to be kind, respectful, and comprehensive to people who suffer all the time from these negative values. And I do think this is the fundamental reason that I evaluates this game as a successful, outstanding, eminent, and irreplaceable educational game.