REVIEW / Dark Lord (PC)

To give you a bit of a back story about today’s review we need to start with the fact that it wasn’t going to be a review and I’ve totally messed myself up. This was going to be me coming along and telling you about a new narrative PC card game that looked quite interesting and might be worth checking out. This would have been fine if I hadn’t spotted it was free and decided to give it a go while I had a brew and a bit of a break. Thanks to this decision I haven’t done anything remotely constructive and if it wasn’t for the fact I needed to get some work done I’d still be playing it. The game is Dark Lord and as you might have already guessed I’m going to be saying lots of nice things about it. This is going to be a worthy read for those of you looking for a new adventure.

Dark Lord is simple in all of the best ways. This title is a cross between a narrative card game, a visual novel, and something else that I can’t quite put my finger on. This could very easily be a recipe for too many things being tried and none of them working. What makes Dark Lord work for me is that everything is in good measure. The visual novel elements of the game are confined mostly to scenarios between the action, they aren’t being shoehorned into it, and that’s smart. I’ll explain what I mean in a minute, but what we end up with is a marriage of ideas that flow perfectly, which I really like.

In Dark Lord you play the villain as you can probably guess from the title. You wake up surrounded by what remains of your advisors after a spell goes horribly wrong. Having lost virtually everything, including some of your memory you will have to rebuild your forces and take control of the lands. You won’t be able to do this alone though. Your advisors are incredibly important to your cause, but as they’re all twisted, backstabbing, sycophants you’re going to need to deal with them and their needs carefully or you’ll have been betrayed before you can think.

You will spend much of Dark Lord at your manor. It’s from here that you’ll make your plans and build your forces. Each advisor has their own story that you must play through but you’ll have to have your wits about you. The goals of one of your lackeys will often interfere with those of another, so you’ll need to be on your toes if you’re going to keep everyone happy and more importantly, obedient. You’ll start the game with The Treasurer, a greedy goblin who looks after your coin, The Dark Wizard and his magical underlings, and The General who commands your troops. As you play further into the game you will unlock more allies but you’ll swiftly realize that this will only make controlling in-house politics more complicated. The more the advisors hate each other the more likely you’ll see them come into conflict during the card-based part of the game and this can make your job much harder than it needs to be.

Each chapter is broken into a series of goals you must meet and this is where the card play comes into being; sort of. This isn’t the sort of game where you have a deck of cards that you can play as you see fit, instead, it’s choice-driven. You will be given a series of scenarios and must choose between two cards. This choice will represent how you handle the situation you’re currently in. This sounds simple and on the face of it, it certainly is. What complicates matters is that your choices not only affect the story but also your resources.

Above the cards that I’ve just mentioned are four bars and you need to keep these as stable as possible. These represent your might, (the army,) your magic, your gold, and your fear. Different choices will fill or deplete these bars by differing amounts and because you don’t know what is going to get thrown at you next you need to weigh everything up very carefully, You can’t win a war without troops so overly expending might is a bad idea. On the other hand, you might be big and scary but being terrifying all the time is going to make your fear gauge overfill; at which point you completely lose your marbles and get carted off and locked up. Making this problem worse is that advisors bickering with each other creates conflicts. These are extra decisions that must be made that don’t affect the story but do affect your resources, which is why keeping your underlings satisfied and in line is paramount.

The game flows between the card-driven scenarios I’ve just mentioned and the storytelling back at your manor. Each advisor also has their own location in your grounds and you’ll need to gift them gold and upgrade their buildings. Giving them gold generally makes them more loyal to you but also helps you further their stories. Upgrading their buildings gives you more chance of them supplying their aid during missions. You can take so many of your advisors with you on each one and each will provide a small chance of giving you a boon related to their abilities. The more you upgrade the higher this chance becomes, so it’s worth doing.

I love Dark Lord. The narrative is excellent, the characters while being utterly rotten are still likable, and most importantly gameplay is thoroughly addicting. This is the sort of game you think you’ve been playing for half an hour only to realize that you’ve just lost your evening. One of the biggest draws, though, is that Dark Lord is free. By free I mean completely free. I was actually looking for the catch and there genuinely isn’t one. You can buy the DLC, (and I will be to say thanks to the devs,) but outside this, you won’t spend anything other than your time.

One of the reasons the devs have made a title that I’d happily pay for and given it to us for nothing is that they’ve given the players the ability to write their own stories. They are actively promoting the community and encouraging fans to write scenarios in their world. Once you’ve played through the main game you’re being left to your own creativity and your desire to play fan content. The devs have built the game and handed us the keys and I can only give them praise for this.

All in all, Dark Lord is a game that’s well worth your time if you like a good bit of plot. As I mentioned earlier this title is simple in the best possible way and I love what I’m seeing so far. As a free-to-play game, this is one that I think is absolutely worth your time, and considering that it isn’t going to cost you anything that is all you’ll be losing if you don’t like it. Very well done indeed.