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To play Darksiders III in 2018 is to harbour a fugitive. It seems to have arrived through a portal from 2010, claimed by the claw marks of old design. It’s a game unconcerned with – and uncluttered by – sprawling open worlds. It doesn’t come hard-grained with mo-capped emotion. And it’s free from the crack of a narrative whip. Not that there isn’t a story here – or a whip – just that the game does fine marching along on its own scalding steam.
If you find yourself growing restless, as the key players ramble on, know that you’re in good company. The game’s heroine, Fury, is similarly vexed. At one point, an enormous stone face, as intimidating as an exposition dump, says, ‘You are the most impatient of your kin. The least predictable, dancing on the edge of your own reality.’ (An apt description not just of Fury but of Kevin Bacon, in Footloose.) ‘Still talking?’ she spits. ‘Shall I have Death fetch us some tea or can we get on with it!?’ Hell hath no scorn like Fury for a cut scene.
You can hardly blame her; the combat is the best thing about Darksiders III. It uncoils at a lashing pace, each combo bracketed by a cartwheel and caffeinated with a slew of magical enhancements. It’s no wonder Fury is eager to get cracking. ‘If I didn’t love you so much,’ she says to her horse, Rampage, ‘I’d kill you just for something to do.’ (That surely marks the first time I’ve heard equicide proposed as a remedy for boredom.) Fortunately – for us, for Fury, and for the horse – there is plenty to be getting on with.
And it’s well-mounted stuff: hacking and slashing cast in the classical Zelda mould and cut with a splash of Souls. To say you’re tired of those gameplay models is fair enough, but it’s like saying you’re tired of brown brogues. They may be as old as the hills, but they don’t feel outdated; they seem beyond the reach of fashion. I spent the weekend merrily clearing out a graven city green with plantlife and groaning with decay. I collected trinkets and powers that levered open locked doors and blocked paths. The gameplay is there to be cheerily crunched through, but the draw of Darksiders is its tone, which tastes like the sugary milk of Saturday morning cartoons.
The art direction is possessed by a cloudburst of colour. It sees no reason why the apocalypse should have a dull palette, and quite rightly so. The bosses take the form of the Seven Deadly Sins, who must all be hunted down and hoovered up. Each of them looks as if they clung on squawking as they were wrenched from the pages of a comic book: malformed, grotesque, beaky, bound in muscle, and armour-plated with fire and ice. These motley screwballs all have their own schemes, but the ingenious flourish to Darksiders III is that it lofts its heroine above the morass and the mayhem below.
She, too, comes in a variety of hues – her hair changing depending on which magic she uses, and her armour Gothically overgrown – but she has no truck with anyone else in the game if she senses you might be growing weary. She feels like a tour guide who’s upset that bad traffic might bore the busful of squirming sightseers at her disposal. As you play, it feels adolescent in the best possible way. You’re almost eager for her to get aggrieved with the daftness of the plot, just to see her snap at a quailing human, scold her ghostly watcher, or berate a boring angel.
All of this means that despite the self-serious tone, the game’s prevailing mood isn’t one of anger, or po-faced gloom, but warmth and whimsy. If you were shut in for the winter with two games, I’d recommend pairing Darksiders III with God of War. That game was a frosty father and son tale bound in a Norse blizzard; the myths and meander of its plot was a frame for the blooming of its central relationship. It was a game where a major moment could be an expression flickering across someone’s face, in close-up.
Darksiders III, on the other hand, is wholly concerned by that myth, on its blistering, nonsensical machinations. Fortunately, Fury isn’t. And if you came away feeling sombre after playing God of War, she could be relied upon to thaw the mood. Perhaps even more entertaining is the image of her and Kratos shut in together. I can imagine them getting on famously. Besides, if he wasn’t entertaining enough, she’d have to kill him just for something to do.
