“The Darkside Detective” is a point and click adventure game centered on Francis McQueen. McQueen, a detective working for Darkside Division, has taken on the responsibility of investigating occult, demon activity and more within Twin Lakes City, where the game takes place.
Darkside Detective was born November 2014 and released as a short demo in February of 2015. It was meant to humorously deliver a short series of adventure stories about the paranormal cases that McQueen solves.
The 8 bit game features 6 paranormal stories, and as the player completes a story, the next one unlocks. The game incorporates puzzles, clue hunting, and humorous interviews with city folk who are involved in each case.
Within the release trailer we see paranormal happenings such as ghostly shoot outs, celebrity ghosts such as the comedic and catty phantoms of Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Shaq, Zombie infestations and more.
The ghosts of these two famous writers can be found within their natural habitat surrounded by books.
In a piece written by Adam Smith for Rock Paper Shotgun, credit is given to the game’s outrageous characters such as Officer Dooley, a hapless policeman who “doesn’t care about saving the world or the city… [and] just wants a quiet life.” Smith also gives credit where credit is due in regards to the humor of the game, which ranges between puns and straight up jokes, some of which were influenced by jokes from “TV and films and so on, and other games of that type” such as Blackadder, X-Files and Twin Peaks, says Dave McCabe, one of the game’s writer in an interview with Adventure Gamers.
