That’s something Heart of Darkness did with a terrifying perfection. This is the epitome of what I like in horror, which is that rather than showing you every gruesome detail of an in-game death, sometimes leaving the gorier parts of a killing to the player’s imagination allows the thoughts of what happened off-screen to ruminate and become a whole lot worse. From shadow monsters snapping your spine to giant centipedes pulling you helplessly into their burrow, and watching your legs flail then fall lifelessly limp after a horrifying snap, Infogrames pulled no punches.
Think like your standard Goosebumps story, but with an additional family friendliness… At least that’s what I thought.īecause you see, the real horror was not in the story of overcoming your childhood fear of the dark - it was in the many creative ways you can die. The story is innocent enough: a boy named Andy flies to a mysterious planet in his spaceship to save his dog Whiskey, after he’s kidnapped by a mysterious dark force during a solar eclipse. Now let’s talk about the many terrifying ways the kid protagonist can die in the Darklands. While I write about this, I want to emphasize one thing: this game is rated ‘E for Everyone.’ Got that? Good.