Moved by Darkness Demo

Creating a good horror game is not necessarily about the monsters themselves, but about the atmosphere you have to endure in order to avoid them. Even if no actual abomination shows itself throughout the game, you can still feel under constant threat and tremble at the slightest sound of a footstep if the level designers and sound engineers do their job right.

Moved by Darkness is a first-person horror game with survival elements and a few FPS gimmicks in there as well. However, it’s not actually a finished product, and none of the components mentioned above has materialized completely. In essence, the game’s purpose is to make the audience cower down in fear, and the developer used every weapon at his disposal to achieve that.

Story-wise, there’s nothing concrete yet, although there are some hints about what could happen in the official release. As such, the action seems to be taking place in some sort of dream world, where everything looks pretty much the same as it does in the real world, except it is in black and white. Not only that, but strange creatures roam the land, and you must use your survival instinct to avoid them.

The gameplay is very much like in a regular first-person shooter, except that you do not have any HUD and the ammunition has no limits. On the other hand, it may as well, because you cannot harm the creatures that eventually creep on you. Not only that, but they also act in a very weird way and they glitch through walls, doors, and even the main character. Sometimes, they can send you flying right off the map, which calls for a reload.

Thankfully, at least the graphics look nice, even if there’s plenty of work left to be done in this regard as well. The black and white environments improve the atmosphere a lot, and it goes really nice with the overall mood throughout the game. You can tell that a lot of work and effort went into the sound effects, because they immediately improve the atmosphere and make you feel uneasy.

In the end, Moved by Darkness is just not done yet, which means that the glitches and the lack of a proper story make it difficult to get in the mood. On the other hand, this can certainly turn into something successful, as long as the long list of issues is taken care of by then.