Amidst the disappointing news of thecancellation of Respawn Entertainment’s Star Wars shooter, I’ve been playing an old classic, albeit one with a new coat of paint. The remaster of the 1995 classic Star Wars Dark Forces was released last week courtesy of Nightdive Studios.
I had never played the original, partially on account of not existing until a few years after its release. Yet, I had the urge to play an older Star Wars game, and I was especially interested in the fact that Dark Forces is a shooter that pre-dates the genre-defining Quake by over a year. Also, names like Kyle Katarn are exciting to a casual Star Wars fan.
A Sandbox Filled With Secrets To Uncover
My first impression was that I quite enjoyed blasting away scores of Stormtroopers with my rifle. After completing a few missions, I was enjoying the design philosophy of Dark Forces. You’re plopped into each level, each sandbox, with no guidance outside your initial brief. You’ve been given something to find, now go find it.
This can be frustrating at times, I spent a very long time in the mission Detention Centre before I figured out an obscure elevator shaft puzzle. You need to send two elevators to two different floors, allowing you to navigate an elevator shaft without dying to fall damage. However, the elevator shaft entrance is tucked (and I mean well-hidden) behind the elevator and there’s no indication that this micro-area is even important, never mind the most crucial thing in the level.
Even the third mission Anoat City took some backtracking and problem-solving to finish, as I struggled with figuring out where each water level took me and how it would lead me to the gun smuggler I was looking for. That’s part of the charm, though. It’s beautifully simple, you sprint into the beginning of a level knowing that all you have to do is find the endpoint, and you’ll be onto the next one.
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There are a lot of nooks in these levels, little alleys and hidey holes off the main path that are full of items. “Secrets” tend to be on the obvious side these days; a “secret” in a modern triple-A could boil down to walking down a different clearly-marked road than the one that leads to the main objective. You don’t get secrets like “throw a grenade at a wall that is textured slightly differently to find a secret room,” or the even more classic walking straight through a fake wall, a method that birthed many of gaming’s first easter eggs.
It’s strange to say but Dark Forces is a game where you can imagine yourself in the level designer’s shoes. They have this sandbox, these 2D walls enclosing the area the player is permitted to explore. They first create a primary path through the level and then begin fleshing it out with secrets and alternate routes. After adding enemies and items, the level is complete.
This is how all level design works but in an older shooter like Dark Forces, you feel closer to the designer than you normally do. It’s like you can follow their thought processes in real-time, “Oh I see why you put this secret wall here,” or “This enemy was placed out of vision of the player to scare them.” You also realise they were probably working with limited assets, making you appreciate the clever usage of certain objects. It’s a neat mental thing that adds a little something to exploring each level.
A Different Era
In a world of ‘yellow paint on interactable objects’ discourse, the visual clarity of Dark Forces’ levels would rattle folks on both sides of the debate. We’re talking about textures that are completely indistinct from backgrounds, limited visual feedback when interacting with buttons, levers etc. and dark corners that hide pivotal quest items.
Yet, moving through levels outside of a couple of obscure puzzles is relatively smooth. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be obvious where the player has to go to progress in a video game, but something is charming about a game that doesn’t follow this conventional wisdom (because it didn’t exist yet) and just does its own thing.
It’s exciting to think about gamers who sat down and mapped out every inch of every level of Star Wars: Dark Forces when it was released, and probably needed to pool information to find every secret. The Internet is so synonymous with secrets in video games now, ‘If I don’t know something I’ll just Google it’, I feel we’ve lost some of that excitement. Star Wars Dark Forces Remastered brought me back to a different era, even if only for a little while.
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