Signs Of Darkness

My first instinct when I loaded Signs of Darkness was cautious sympathy. A solo indie studio taking on an open-world action RPG set in a dark fantasy kingdom, mixing swordsmanship and sorcery with companion questing. That is a mountain for any small team to climb, and I wanted to root for it. Then the UI refused to respond, my companion Zuri wandered off into the void, and an enemy I had clearly killed got back up and finished me off. The sympathy curdled pretty fast. On paper, the design is a third-person action RPG set in the Kingdom of Rosenfare, where you wake in a dungeon called the Undercrypt after being left for dead. The moment-to-moment loop asks you to dodge, slash, jump, and cast spells across open terrain, managing three separate meters: health, stamina, and magic power. You have four quick-slot buttons for potions and spells mid-combat, companions join you for certain stretches, and quests send you into bandit caves and crypt corridors. There is even a turn-based hex strategy minigame called BattleHex tucked away inside taverns, playable solo or with others online. The skeleton of a proper RPG is genuinely there, and a controller is strongly recommended over keyboard for anything to feel close to intentional. The problem is that every system launched in a state that felt closer to a technical proof-of-concept than a playable game. Combat had attack animations that locked the player out of movement or dodging for nearly two full seconds per swing. Geometry trapped characters in terrain cracks with no recovery option. Enemies registered as dead on screen while still dealing damage. The open world had no map to speak of, only compass markers pointing in a direction with no indication of distance, which turned simple fetch quests into wandering exercises that could eat fifteen minutes before a crash reset the whole thing. The developer pushed a community patch in the weeks after launch that addressed some early UI chaos, but the last recorded update was over eight years ago. The full release the studio promised for late 2018 or early 2019 never arrived. There is a version of this game I would have loved to write about. The dark fantasy setting has a quiet, mournful texture to it. The Undercrypt as a starting location has atmosphere. The idea of blending stamina-gated melee with quick-cast sorcery in an open kingdom has real promise. But atmosphere and promise do not make a finished game, and Signs of Darkness never made it out of the starting pit it dropped you into. What remains on Steam is an Early Access listing that Steam itself flags as having no developer activity in over eight years. That flag is doing a lot of honest work here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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