Release Date: September 8, 2009 Developer: 8point80 (formerly 8th Day)
If you’ve spent your time looking for games with unique story and tactical premises, you likely stumbled upon Darkest of Days in a bargain bin or a deep Steam sale and wondered: “How have I never heard of this?” A game that is perhaps the most ambitious “B-movie” video game ever made. It is a cult classic in the truest sense—unpolished, strange, and wildly imaginative.
The Premise: Historical Sabotage
The game at it’s core is a first person shooter in which you play as Alexander Morris, a soldier at the Battle of the Little Bighorn who is moments away from being killed alongside Custer. Suddenly, a futuristic portal opens, and a man in a high-tech suit whisks you away to the future.
You are recruited by KronoteK, an organization dedicated to protecting the “purity” of the timeline. Someone is meddling with history, and you are sent back to iconic battles—the American Civil War, WWI, Pompeii—to ensure that specific “key” individuals survive or die as intended.
And here, the most satisfying part of the game starts: It’s sheer anachronistic chaos. There is a specific thrill, when the game finally hands you a futuristic assault rifle or a pulse cannon in the middle of a 19th-century musket line.
- The “Blue Men”: Certain NPCs in the game are highlighted in blue. These are people who must survive. You have to navigate the chaos of a massive battlefield while non-lethally “tagging” these targets so they aren’t accidentally killed by the musket fire around them.
- Scale: For a 2009 game, the sheer number of NPCs on screen during the Civil War segments was staggering. The player being a lone agent with a submachine gun against a literal army of bayonets.
The game is “janky.” The voice acting is hit-or-miss, the animations are stiff, and the “PhysX” effects (which were a huge selling point at the time) can cause objects to fly around the room for no reason.
However, these flaws are easy to overlook because the High-Concept Sci-Fi is so strong. The mystery of who is actually running KronoteK and why the timeline is fracturing is genuinely engaging. It asks the question: “Who has the right to decide the course of human history?”
Darkest of Days is the video game equivalent of a forgotten Philip K. Dick short story. It is rough around the edges, but its heart is in exactly the right place. It’s about the burden of knowledge and the danger of playing with time.
