With an ever growing backlog it sometimes feels like a rare treat to come across a turn based title that is a relatively compact experience. The deckbuilder genre in particular is filled with roguelite games that can easily devour hundreds of hours, and I say that fresh off of losing a week of my life to Chrono Ark.
Dark Sky was originally announced at the end of 2021 as a Kickstarter by the name of Xenotheria, the first title by developer Ganymede Games formed by a number of industry veterans. Almost 3 years later and a little longer than initially planned, Dark Sky underwent a name change and was fully released on the 24th September. Launching on both Steam and GOG, Dark Sky is one of those rare deckbuilders that wants to take you on a narrative adventure rather than try to be the next Slay the Spire.
The question is, does it deliver on the fresh experience it claims and do enough to distract you from the 100th run of whatever title you happen to be addicted to? Let’s get into it.
Story
You are immediately thrust into an ongoing crisis on the planet of Wolf Prime. Initially starting as Mr. Squiggles Squig, an ordinary worker, who I can only assume was not named by an ex-Warhammer player like myself. Spaceships are falling from the sky without obvious explanation, a worrying enough situation as it is, without the fact that your sister is potentially on one of them! Grabbing your best bud Norton you set off on a quest to find out what happened to your sister and get embroiled in a quest for the fate of Wolf Prime while meeting a colourful cast of alien characters along the way.
Dark Sky isn’t particularly breaking any new ground with its storytelling but it’s an enjoyable enough plot to keep you moving from one objective to the next. The characters are all likeable in their own way although make an amount of quips that border on a Marvel film at times, i’m looking at you in particular Norton!
What I do want to give kudos too is the creativity with some of the character designs and lore. Brae in particular has a very interesting past and species with traits that I probably don’t want to dwell on the practicalities of too much. Sadly there is no voice acting in the game for any characters so you will be bonding with your party over text but both they and the supporting characters are all fun to interact with.
Gameplay
Between character conversations, you will be moving Squig around on an overworld as you explore, scavenge resources that can be used to craft or upgrade cards, and fight whatever bad guys happen to be in your way. Dark Sky does make an effort to reward you exploring every nook and cranny with some extra lore, resources and occasionally even new cards for your deck but it doesn’t stop the game being a very linear affair.
Unsurprisingly, when you do encounter enemies, you are going to be engaging in card battles. Each character has a customisable deck with their own mechanics and you can select 3 party members at a time to do battle on a grid based system. It sounds fine in theory but this is where I have to start levying some criticisms at the game. For one, the battles start off at an almost glacial pace. Before you have more upgraded cards and party members, you have to continuously chip away at enemies with low-damage attacks to whittle them down.
In comparison, it frequently seems that enemy attacks have the benefit of packing far more of a punch. I suspect this is to encourage the player to worry about positioning, if you hover over the enemies you will find the attacks are telegraphed so you have an opportunity to either move out of harms war or build up some defences prior to being blasted.
This does mean that every turn to fight effectively you are going to have to look at each individual enemy, make note of where they can attack and overlay them all together to identify safe zones which is not particularly fun. After a while, I stopped worrying about positioning in a number of fights because it was quicker just to play through them and abuse the game’s generous infinite respawn mechanic.
Any time you have a downed ally, another friendly character can revive them and give them a regeneration effect by spending one action point next to them. This regeneration happens to be far more potent than the 2 shield I might have gotten using that action point to play a card.
The combat experience is also muddied by tooltips, which are often rather confusing or lack information. The majority of your damage will actually end up coming from chaining different elements from each of the characters together for bonus damage… but this is only clear with a bit of experimentation and you are going to have to frequently check the guide if you want to understand what is happening.
Cards can also be given to you in a rather confusing order, a number of cards for one character had upgrades which gave perks if you played them from the discard pile, however I did not unlock a skill that let me actually do this until close to the end of the game. None of this is enough to ruin the game but it does feel like a series of design choices that could impact a player’s enjoyment.
Thankfully, as you get further into the game, unlock different cards, and manage to apply upgrades to your existing cards, the combat is fleshed out a bit, and you do get more into the swing of things. I had some great moments of building up a chain of lightning with so much charge that I could walk away from my screen for a moment while it consistently bounced around the field for huge damage.
While the combat does noticeably improve as you progress further, Dark Sky does run into a problem of having a slight lack of variety to use your new cards against. The second half of the game feels very much like a retread of the first half from an environmental and combat perspective. A couple of bosses get reused multiple times and I can’t help but feel the content was being padded slightly with repetitive fights.
Deckbuilding
Of course with this genre of game the combat is frequently only as good as the deck building options allow it to be. As mentioned before each character has a customizable deck of 8 cards. As you go further into the story you will unlock additional cards, a total of 12 unique ones for each character, and more slots in your deck. An interesting option as the usual urge with a game like this is to streamline the deck and play the minimum number of cards possible.
Each card will then have 2 upgrades, with both upgrades allowing you to pick between 2 separate abilities or bonuses to be applied to the card. I generally found these to be interesting choices that could notably change how a card is intended to be used. Having said that, due to many new strategies opening up later in the game I get the feeling many players will not experiment much, despite a loadout system which makes it relatively easy to switch a character’s deck.
By the time you unlock additional ways to play a character you likely have a strategy locked in place. I ended up just building each party member to specialise in a certain type of damage and then picked the 3 most relevant for each fight and never found it necessary to switch my strategy up beyond that.
Each character’s deck can have up to 3 copies of a card which means you will likely be running with 3-4 differing cards per character. This does make the relatively small number of unique cards per character stretch a bit further but I would have loved to see more variety and synergies between characters that didn’t involve inflicting two different status effects.
Most of the time I felt I was controlling three separate characters doing their own thing that just happened to trigger bonuses rather than a team that can bounce cards and effects between them. The other side of this is that it does allow each character to have a unique system and feel very individual, it’s just a shame they mostly work in isolation.
Graphics
As much as the environments do feel a bit overused I am happy to report that the game on the whole looks good. While walking around the overworld Squigs 3D model will traverse some detailed 2D backgrounds with a colour palette and character design that brings to mind some sort of sci-fi comic. It’s clear that some talented artists are at work here and while not as visually striking overall as some titles, I feel like they nailed the aesthetic they were going for.
The backgrounds go hand in hand with the individualised card art which feel connected to both the character and ability in question. Some of the character designs are particularly stellar, with the raider twins Brit and Git being personal favourites. Oddly enough the more identifiable designs often feel more reserved for enemies than our own party members. Squig, in particular, feels like a rather standard alien in comparison to many of the others… but then he is just a regular worker caught up in a story much bigger than him.
Space Bugs
Sadly I did encounter a number of bugs over the course of my adventure. In one particularly egregious case I ended up softlocked upon beating the final boss and had to run the whole fight again to complete the game. Beyond that, there are other cases of weirdness where characters seem to take damage or heal for an unknown reason. This could be a problem of telegraphing to the player rather than a bug, but either way, the game could use a passover to try and fix bugs and clarify information that might impact a player’s experience (I know this is easier said than done).
Some areas also feel lacking a little bit of polish compared to the overall experience. Battlefields will often have objects scattered about that impede movement, these can be destroyed by repeated attacks. It stood out to me that on destruction these objects just vanished without any sort of animation. It’s a small thing but some QOL tweaks can go a long way. The developers have already put out a post launch patch addressing some issues so I believe these will all be resolved with time.
Final Thoughts
When researching the title and finding the Kickstarter I find myself a bit saddened by what Dark Sky could have been. Initially flaunting a large, interlocking skill tree and a hand-crafted overworld littered with areas to explore. It’s clear the game has been scaled back from the initially very ambitious intentions. While I would much rather have a smaller, complete package than a game deeply flawed by scope creep, it leaves Dark Sky in a slightly awkward middle ground of feeling like a part of something bigger.
When all is said and done, though, it’s a fairly enjoyable 10-hour sci-fi adventure across the planet of Wolf Prime. If you are in the mood for a deckbuilder with a more story-heavy focus, then you might find some fun here, but I personally don’t feel the game does enough to cement itself as many people’s next favourite deckbuilder. What I hope this signals is a promising start to Ganymede Game’s future offering, as there is a lot of potential underneath this planet’s surface. We will be watching their career with great interest.
The review code for this game was kindly provided by the developer/PR team.
