Trailer, demo shine light on The Darkside Detective

Written by Jack Allin — February 23, 2015 at 15:44

First The Last Door, then Ron Gilbert's Thimbleweed Park, and now the upcoming comedy/mystery adventure The Darkside Detective... looks like the chunky pixel is back in style!

The Darkside Detective is Francis McQueen, the "sole member of the criminally underfunded Darkside Division" in Twin Lakes City, a place where "cultists crawl, where demons dwell, where the occult… occults?" Whatever the evil threatening his town, "he’s there, ready to investigate the cases that nobody else will." He'll have several cases to solve here, as rather than presenting a single unified mystery, The Darkside Detective is a "micro-adventure game" consisting of the "most bizarre and obscure cases that come across his desk."

Originally conceived in less than eight hours at the November 2014 Galway Game Jam by Irish indie developers Paul Conway and Christopher Colston, the success of the prototype inspired this full-fledged commercial version, with writer Dave McCabe and composer Ben Prunty joining the expanded DoomCube team. The early screenshots show off the game's distinctive pixel art style, while the trailer highlights McQueen's "humorous bite-size investigations into the occult and extraordinary." But you can do more than just passively observe, as a browser-based demo is already available to play at GameJolt.

Currently in production for PC, smartphones and tablet devices, there is no firm release date scheduled yet for The Darkside Detective, but the game is slated to be completed sometime later this year. In the meantime, you can keep up to date at the game's official website and vote for the game on Steam Greenlight.