Heart of Darkness

Moby ID: 262
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Andy is a child who likes playing with his dog Whiskey, doesn't particularly enjoy going to school, and has a knack for inventing complicated gadgets. One day Andy and Whiskey are strolling through the park, when suddenly a solar eclipse darkens the sky, and after a moment Andy realizes that his dog has been taken away. But science can solve everything, and Andy heads to his treehouse, which is home to his outstanding inventions, including a spaceship! If you thought it was just a toy, you thought wrong, because Andy boards the ship and pilots it into the heart of the Darklands, a world controlled by the evil Master of Darkness. Andy takes out his gun (another splendid invention of his) and prepares to fight the evil sorcerer's minions. Nothing will stop the boy from rescuing his beloved dog!

Heart of Darkness is a cinematic 2D platformer designed by Eric Chahi, the creator of one of the genre's progenitors, Another World. Though the game has many fast and furious action sequences, including shooting hordes of dark creatures, it is built like a series of tasks, each requiring different approaches, from arcade-style shooting or jumping to interacting with the environment and solving puzzles. Like its spiritual predecessor, the game is linear; completing a section usually takes Andy to a different location, where another task awaits him.

Andy has several guns at his disposal, though in certain locations he will lose his weapons and will rely on the player's wit or quick reaction to survive. Andy will also gain magical energy, which can be used to grow or destroy trees. Similarly to Another World, many hazards are placed on the hero's path; despite the child-oriented premise, the game contains graphically explicit death scenes, which occur if the player is not careful or quick enough to save Andy from a gruesome demise.

Heart of Darkness features orchestral music and pre-rendered animated cutscenes. It comes with a pair of 3D glasses, which allow the player to view certain scenes in the game in 3D.

Spellings

  • ăƒăƒŒăƒˆăƒ»ă‚Șăƒ–ăƒ»ăƒ€ăƒŒă‚Żăƒă‚č - Japanese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

188 People (163 developers, 25 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 77% (based on 38 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 90 ratings with 8 reviews)

Is one of the best games we ever played!

The Good
Everything! You have pure action. The grafic is high, full of details and surprises!!! The best is, everytime they "kill" you (believe me, there are lots of;) If you fall to your death or get eaten (which is always a particularly gory event, especially in contrast to the saccharine trappings of the story), you end up at the beginning of your current puzzle area, which is never too far back. Keep getting killed and a tip will appear to help move you along, though knowing what to do doesn't always make the going easy. We have a lot of PS/PC-Games in our collection, but believe me, nothing comperes to "Heart of darkness"!

The Bad
We played more than a week, never the less it was too short, because is so damn good!!!



The Bottom Line
The game is something for advanced players!

Hidden away in the Heart of Darkness lies a terrifying world. A world ruled by the Master of Darkness whose cruel and absolute power leads an army of emaciated devils. The fiendish force scours the land in search of Andy a young boy on a quest to rescue his dog Whisky. Trapped in a terrifying nightmare only you can take Andy through hundreds of epic encounters to overcome a whole host of wonderfully weird characters and emerge triumphant from the Heart of Darkness.

PlayStation · by Dani Mittler-Coe (2) · 2003

A challenging, atmospheric platformer that's not as well-known as it should be.

The Good
Fantastic animations and presentation for its time. * Imaginative world and level design * Clever, challenging puzzles * Orchestral soundtrack

The Bad
Sluggish controls * Frustrating combat sections * Weak ending

The Bottom Line
Heart of Darkness might be better known for its lengthy, troubled development than for the game itself. Designed by Eric Chahi along with his team at Amazing Studio, it was a spiritual successor to his pioneering cinematic platformer from 1991, Another World. Originally meant to be released in 1995 on the 3DO, it was delayed so much that it ended up being released on the Playstation in 1998. By the time Heart of darkness released, it couldn’t help but feel dated next to games like Ocarina of Time, Half-Life, and Metal Gear Solid. Despite that, and somewhat middling reviews, it has become a cult classic for many who played it.

The two games are remarkably similar in terms of gameplay and plot. You control a protagonist who finds himself in an alien world with strange technology and magic, and must solve puzzles and fight numerous enemies to survive. While Out of This World had a 70’s sci-fi vibe, Heart of Darkness is more in the mold of a Spielberg 1980’s fantasy adventure.

Heart of Darkness follows the adventures of Andy, a typical suburban kid who doesn’t get along well with his teacher and has a fear of the dark. One day after school, a solar eclipse occurs and Andy’s dog, Whiskey, gets sucked up into a black hole. After racing home, he packs his things, grabs his gun and helmet, and hops into the spaceship he invented to head to the Darkland where Whiskey was taken. Along the way, he’ll have to face many enemies, but also make friends. That plot’s a lot to swallow even for a video game, and you kind of have to just roll with it as it plays out.

The plot may be paper-thin, but I actually really like its presentation. For one, the voice acting is actually quite good, and I don’t think there was a single character that sounded flat or out of place. The orchestral score by Academy Award nominee Bruce Broughton, one of the first orchestral scores in a video game, really heightens the cinematic fantasy feeling of the game during the cutscenes. Only a cop-out of an ending keeps me from absolutely loving the way this game tells its story. While I don’t necessarily hate where the story goes and what it suggests, I will say that it seems to cut itself short just as things are getting really interesting, and the way it transitions from climax to denouement will be incredibly jarring for most players.

Fans of Another World will feel right at home once they finally get to control Andy. This is a platformer with step-based movement, meaning that actions are delayed after you push the button in order to accommodate complex player animations. Andy can sprint, jump. Unusually for a cinematic platformer, Andy can also double-jump. This is very useful for dodging some projectiles and getting over gaps.

While Andy has invented an lightning gun, its not something that you’ll be using for most of the game. Instead, Andy’s primary means of attack is magic, which he acquires by touching a glowing rock at the bottom of the lake. You can either fire single shots or charge up for a more damaging shot, which is really only useful on certain enemies. The charging shot can also be used to manipulate certain objects in the environment, such as making plants grow from seeds, or destroying obstacles in your path.

The game’s puzzles are very well-designed, often forcing you to come up with clever solutions to get past obstacles. You’ll frequently need to manipulate the environment and the creatures inside of it to find ways around them, or take advantage of Andy’s size and agility. Admittedly, though, there were a few times when the game just flat-out gave me the answer because I was dying on a particular screen so much, but its understandable since the game wants to keep up its pace. Still, I wish that the hints were something that could be optionally turned off.

Where the game falters a bit is when you have to actually start fighting the darkness. Much of the game’s combat encounters can be completed by standing in one place and simply firing away until all enemies are dead. You’ll occasionally need to jump and duck to dodge projectiles, but most of the time its about making sure that any enemies on all sides of Andy are killed. Enemies seem to take an inconsistently long time to kill, and there’s no cancel button for firing animations, meaning that quickly dodging something can be a challenge unless you see it coming from fairly far away. It doesn’t help that the frame rate is only about 15 frames-per-second to accommodate the game’s animation. All of these flaws are exemplified by the game’s combat-heavy final chapter which features numerous such encounters, including a unique enemy type that respawns two more of itself after you kill it. It was quite a slog throwing myself against this wall over and over again, and at times it felt more like luck rather than skill when surviving some of these combat sections, even after I got reasonably good at it.

Another issue is the game’s lack of scrolling. This is a flaw that many cinematic platformers unfortunately have, and Heart of Darkness does absolutely nothing to solve it. Screens can sometimes take some time to actually load. As a result, some of the more fast-paced sections of the game have to be replayed over and over again until you beat them, because you cant see a deadly monster or gap coming up after the screen flipped.

The graphics were a major selling point for Heart of Darkness. While the pre-rendered graphics and environments may look similar to games such as the Donkey Kong Country series at first glance, the lighting, textures, and animations are far more detailed than in the SNES platformers. It’s honestly amazing how fluid and realistic the animations for Andy look, and it still impresses even to this day.

What really stands out is the art design. The tone of this game is truly eerie and otherworldly. These environments are simultaneously beautiful and frightening to behold, and there’s quite a bit of variety. You’ll traverse canyons, swamps, caves, and volcanoes to track Whiskey down. Similarly, creature design is fantastic, with some genuinely creepy and foreboding enemies to face and friends to meed.

One of the things that contributes to the game’s atmosphere is also arguably Heart of Darkness’ most notorious feature. You see, despite having a family-friendly rating from the ESRB, this game has some of the most shocking deaths you are ever likely to see in a game rated as such. There may be no blood or guts, but that doesn’t make the deaths any less disturbing. The first time you see a flying creature pick Andy up and snap his spine in twain, complete with a loud crack, it’s hard not to wince and question how this could have possibly slipped past the ratings board. You’ll also see Andy get incinerated, crushed, and eaten alive by numerous creatures, leaving behind nothing but his shoes. Even some of the villains characters have painful-looking deaths. These deaths make the “darkness” of the game something that feels like an actual nightmare, giving the game the feel of a dark fairytale.

While the gameplay flaws are frustrating, I have to say that I really enjoyed Heart of Darkness while it lasted, which admittedly wasn’t long. There simply aren’t enough games like this that get made today, and Heart of Darkness is overall an excellent, if dated example of its genre. One of the most underrated games of the 32-bit era, this dark, atmospheric title very much deserves a re-release or even a remake on modern platforms. Despite its initial kiddie appearance, this is a game with some real bite and challenge, and will appeal to older gamers arguably more than children.

PlayStation · by krisko6 (814) · 2018

A great game cast from a mold long long lost.

The Good
Okay, okay the opening story isn't that belevable, but one thing you better believe is that this game is great. A classic in my book and surely my favorate game of 1998. On the surface, Heart of Darkness may appear as a simple platform game, but don't be fooled because it is much much more. This game has character and is fun to play -- from the silly shadows creeping around to the flame-throwing skeletons burning you to your bones. Once you start, you won't put it down until you are finished, and once you are finished you will curse that people have to sleep because you will want to play it again.

The different levels, each with their own strengths and required skills to complete will make sure you don't get bored from repetitive uninteresting gameplay. The balance between action and puzzle solving is nearly perfect. In addition to the changing gameplay, the atmosphere changes from level to level in a fluid way that complements the story (and games as a whole) rather nicely.

Andy, the boy you control, has many movements, all of which get used throughout the game. Even though this is a platform game, he is often required to do things in places you just don't expect in a genre like this. Additionally, small in-game movies are well-placed to help give the illusion that Heart of Darkness isn't a dated platform game. All of these things have convinced me that there is much more life left in this genre. I just hope other developers follow suit.

The Bad
The main complaint I have with this game has nothing to do with gameplay, graphics or any of the other important characters of the game. My beef is that there appears to be NO way to skip past a cutscene the first time it is played. Some of the cutscenes are quite long and I'm sick of seeing them. Every time I start Heart of Darkness from a clean install, I have to sit through the cuttscenes over and over again. To add salt to an open wound, the end credits are almost 10 minutes -- let me skip them so I can start the game again! I've pounded on the keyboard, kicked the machine and cursed something horrible. If anyone knows the magic touch please let me know and I'll eat my words.

Apart from that tirade, I only have two minor gripes:

First off, the graphics or pretty low resolution and the palette rarely uses over 200 colors. Considering that this game came out in 1998 and still runs on a 486/66 I'm not going to gripe too much. But the fact that this game does run so well on low end hardware pisses me off because I could have been playing this games for the last six years with no problem -- geeze.

Secondly, the final sequence in the game is brutally hard. I think I'm pretty good at these types of games and I was pounding my head quite a bit. Every time I finish the last scene, I get the feeling that I won it by chance, not skill.

The Bottom Line
If you are an oldskool gamer and you haven't got this game run... don't walk to you nearest dealer. Get your fix while you still can becaue this is the good stuff.

Windows · by Brian Hirt (10409) · 1999

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
european publisher pierre martin (5) Feb 19, 2021
Willy Beamish? John Peterson Oct 1, 2009

Trivia

Aliens

The friendly aliens Andy runs into in his adventure are called "Amigos", this is Spanish for "friends". In fact they all speak in Spanish in the English version, although they do so in loose, unconnected words.

Copy protection

This game is one of the early users of CD-based copy protection.

Development

Eric Chahi (main creator of Heart of Darkness) worked on the game from September 1992 to June 1998 (5 and 3/4 years). The game is based very loosely on the Joseph Conrad novel of the same name.

DirectX

Although the installation program insists that you need DirectX 6.0, the manual says HOD will run on NT 4.0 with SP3.

Extras

  • The game comes with a small pair of 3D-glasses with which you can check the after-final animation which is black and white until you put those glasses and see the depth and get a feeling of what you see as real 3D picture.
  • Some releases of this game on CD-ROM contained a Making of Heart of Darkness video documentary, which had interviews with the development team.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack for this game is performed by The London Symphony, and composed by Bruce Broughton. Release date is 1999. The CD also contains a Demo of the game.

Tracklist: 1. Main Title 2. Andy's Mission 3. Big Mistake 4. Andy's Friend 5. Space Island 6. Vicious Servant 7. Back to the Lair 8. Meteor Destroyed 9. The Plot 10. Andy's Victory 11. End Credits

This soundtrack was available on the Intrada label (www.intrada.com).

Story

Though the game is not a sequel, add-on pack, nor spin-off, the game has a striking similarity of story to 1990-1992's Commander Keen series.

Information also contributed by B.L. Stryker, Garcia, MAT, Narushima, Swordmaster, Yeah No and Zovni

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Brian Hirt.

PlayStation added by Grant McLellan.

Additional contributors: MAT, DreinIX, Zeikman, Patrick Bregger, Bart Smith, finsterhund.

Game added September 5, 1999. Last modified February 24, 2024.