I suppose you probably don’t need me to tell you that I Can’t Escape: Darkness is an indie horror game available on Steam; the title says it all. Steam has had a cavalcade of indie horror games since the successes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent and more recently Outlast.

For a horror game to stand out from the blood speckled masses, it has to do something special. The question is: does I Can’t Escape: Darkness manage to distinguish itself?

As horror games go, I Can’t Escape: Darkness is unusual. Without meaning to insult, it feels as if someone made a horror mod for Legend of Grimrock. It’s features a step-by-step grid system which involves shuffling about the eldritch dungeon at a snail’s pace.

Moving incredibly slowly isn’t helpful when otherworldly foes are in pursuit, one step behind. It makes it difficult to get away from all the rats and animated clusters of green strings that are hungry for silent protagonist flesh.

The game begins with the clumsy protagonist falling through a hole, which leads him/her into a dungeon with only floating paragraphs for guidance. The only way out of the dungeon turns out to be down, meaning the player has to descend through floors of relentless horror whilst battling the encroaching darkness.

It’s lack of tangible story is a result of the randomly generated levels and rogue-like nature of the game. Each excursion into the dungeon offers a new experience with new puzzles and a new layout.

I Can’t Escape: Darkness has some really odd design choices. For example, the levels are filled with black holes. My first thought was that instant death via spikes lay at the bottom. However, falling through the holes basically lets the player skip a few floors.

As an experiment, I plummeted through every hole I came across, and I got to the final floor of the dungeon in a few minutes. I did get mercilessly mauled by the cluster of pulsating veins that awaited me, but the point still stands.

The aforementioned slow-walking speed necessitates combat, as if you don’t decide to fight the monstrosities you’ll find yourself backing up through-out the levels to avoid being gnawed on by a grim conga-line of giant rats.

Unfortunately, the combat is sticky and awkward. Like Legend of Grimrock, when an enemy appears on screen, the player has to left-click to encourage the protagonist to swing his or her weapon in the enemy’s general direction.

The main character can’t take many hits, and dealing with any enemy can be fatal. For most of my time with the game, I was armed only with rocks, which had to be thrown and collected again with each use. With four or five throws needed to kill any enemy, it can be a gruelling task. Finding a sharpened stick in this game is a blessing.

The terrible combat isn’t I Can’t Escape’s only problem. Fundamentally, it’s not a scary game. If you play the game at night with the lights off, then the well-executed sound design filled with gruesome noises and disquieting flourishes of music might send a shiver down your spine, but it never terrifies.

The main issue is the enemy design. Giant rats and giant clusters of multi-coloured strings just aren’t scary, especially when the player is too focused on throwing the same rock over and over again to kill it.

With better enemy design and the odd jump scare to keep the player on their toes, I Can’t Escape: Darkness might have been a little more unnerving. I like the ambiguity of the setting and the background. There are huge, bloodshot eyes that peer at the player as they stumble around the dungeon. The eyes can be gouged out if you’re feeling sadistic, but thus far, there presence remains unexplained.

Also, the floating paragraphs refer to the darkness in ways that anthropomorphize it and implies it has malevolent intentions. As I’ve said in previous editions of the ‘Horror Show’, the unknown is scary, and sometimes it’s best to leave things unexplained.

However, even the stronger aspects of the horror are handicapped by procedural generation. Once you’ve run through the game four or five times, you’ll know exactly what to expect, and even the odd chill down the spine will evade you.

But for the first four or five runs, I Can’t Escape: Darkness is at least interesting. It wills you to play again if it means unravelling a little more of the enigma. As far as horror games go, it’s fairly ineffective, but also fairly unique. And I can safely say, I’ve never been so glad to see a sharpened stick in all my life.

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