Dark Years

I wanted to love Dark Years. The historical backbone here is genuinely fascinating: the 1953 CIA- and MI6-backed coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, an event that reshaped the Middle East for decades and still barely registers in Western popular culture. A noir action-adventure built around that story, following a Tehran detective and a London-based Iranian journalist as their paths converge on the conspiracy, sounds like exactly the kind of overlooked gem I live to write about. It is not that game. The structure gives you two playable protagonists across third-person open sections of Tehran and London, blending point-and-click style inventory puzzles, shooting sequences, car chases, and even brief 2D brawling segments. On paper that variety is ambitious. In practice, each of those modes is broken in its own specific way. The open streets feel hollow, the puzzle logic collapses without warning, invisible walls appear mid-stride and force restarts, and the car chase in particular landed in every review I could find as a low point of 2015 PC gaming. There is no mid-level save system to speak of, so when a bug or a four-digit code puzzle with no contextual clues stops your progress, you are reloading from scratch. The collision detection adds its own chaos: narrow gaps pass fine, wider spaces suddenly become impassable. The English voice acting, stiff and clearly read line-by-line from a script, makes character interactions painful. Reviewers across the board noted the Persian-language dub is noticeably more natural, which suggests the solution to at least one of the game's problems. Now for the part that genuinely surprised me. The hand-drawn animated cutscenes that open the game are lovely - a different calibre entirely from the in-engine work. And the soundtrack is legitimately good. A dark cello theme sets the noir tone well, Middle Eastern melodic themes woven through the later sections show real care, and a choice to use Barber's Adagio for Strings at an early escape sequence is odd but the track is undeniably beautiful. If RSK Entertainment had built a visual novel or a static-image adventure around this music and story, we might be talking about a cult favourite. The gap between the soundtrack's craft and everything else in the game is almost surreal. Who is this for, then? History enthusiasts who are genuinely curious about Operation Ajax and willing to accept a rough-edged curio as the price of entry might find something here - but the narrative itself, once you get past the setup, has been criticised as disjointed and too predictable to carry the ambition. The Steam user review picture is mostly negative, and the handful of defenders tend to grade on a steep curve. I respect RSK Entertainment for choosing to tell this story at all, and the cutscene art and music are proof there is real creative instinct inside the studio. But finished craft and playability are also part of the job, and on those counts Dark Years needed more time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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