When the Darkness Comes How to Play Again
ALL SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED. This game is meant to be experienced. Information technology is free-to-play and rather short, so it'due south recommended to download and play this game first before proceeding.
The first screen of the game- and the most pleasant by far.
...Follow The Light.
When The Darkness Comes is an Indie Psychological Horror Game fabricated in 2019 by Sirhaian for Windows.
The game, essentially, is a "walking simulator" that takes the histrion through surreal and ever-changing environments, intended to illustrate the feelings of depression and anxiety in an interactive format. You are introduced to the game by the programmer, who doesn't seem to believe much in his game, and by journeying through the game and accomplishing the tasks he gives to you, you begin to find out his story. There is also a whole slew of strange shadow people NPCs and a mysterious woman on a swing.
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Contains examples of:
- Addressing the Player: The game accesses your calculator files and puts your name into the game to speak to you direct and increase the feelings of horror.
- All of the Other Reindeer: Every other "person" the role player meets in the game shuns and insults them, continuing effectually in groups to stare at them equally they pass and whisper rude things about them.
- An Aesop: Life's meaning is ours to choose; we ever have a choice to exercise things like seek assistance or create our own answers to mysteries.
- Large Bad: The personification of the narrator's depression is keeping the mysterious woman, who is hinted to represent the will to live, prisoner inside the game, and continuously tries to go the histrion to kill themself.
- But Chiliad Must!: The game presents buttons at diverse points in the game, for the purposes of answering questions. Notwithstanding, the actor is never allowed to actually make a pick; either they just get ane answer, which invariably isn't the answer they'd typically want to cull, or the respond is nullified anyhow because "they didn't mean it". A rather dark version comes near the end. The player is given a button and a adult female asking them questions, but they aren't allowed to movement. As the woman tries in vain to make you respond, you tin can do nothing just stand there and neglect her.
- Content Warnings: The game begins with a warning, informing players that if they suffer from serious anxiety and low, they should non play.
- Developers' Foresight:
- In the aquatic level, try to fall off the platform. You'll respawn on the platform, with the walls around the platform this time.
- In the alleyway, you can explore all routes, each having its own text. There's one route that seemingly allows you to get out the level before information technology'south suddenly blocked if y'all endeavour to enter.
- Don't Touch It, Yous Idiot!: The narrator leaves the player in a room while they try and fix the game, with the instruction not to touch anything. Of grade, the only way to progress is to impact the button in the middle of the room, which sends you falling to a new location. If you lot wait long enough, the narrator volition render and outright tell you to push the push because it is the only manner to progress.
- Driven to Suicide: The entire game is indicated to be the narrator and/or the role player struggling betwixt suicidal depression and hope, with both represented equally in-game characters. At the end of the game, the role player is presented with the choice to hang themselves. Do and so and the game becomes permanently unplayable.
- Failure Is the Only Option: In the alleyway level, the shop's entrance is blocked by some "people" you are tasked to avert. Touching the entrance makes you lot be surrounded by said "people" and unable to go out, but information technology will so proceed to the side by side level.
- The Fourth Wall Volition Non Protect You: The game reads your reckoner's username and screenshot of your desktop to increment your personal horror. Also, the game writes some files into your Desktop and Documents folder.
- Hope Spot: Later on some horror scenes and a bit of platform hell, the player ends upwardly in a overnice, peaceful house with a couch and a Goggle box, and are given the take chances to just accept information technology easy, every bit long as they can find the remote. When the TV is turned on, information technology's to a static channel with the sound of sirens, followed by the warning to "detect a condom place" as the landscape burns downwardly around exterior and the world suddenly explodes.
- Interactive Narrator: The game'due south narrator is there mostly to endeavour and make the role player follow the game and do things right, rather than tell a proper story; they're decumbent to getting passive-aggressive and frustrated when things don't go correct, and follow the player throughout a proficient portion of the game.
- Interface Spoiler: In the primary menu, look at the bottom left. It's told from the very beginning of the game that it's meant to be replayed.
- Last-Second Catastrophe Choice: What catastrophe you lot get depends on what yous do at the very end of the game. The player is presented with a chair and a noose at the stop of the hallway. They can either keep walking and trigger the bad ending, or turn around and telephone call for help, triggering the adept catastrophe.
- A Calorie-free in the Altitude: The "Follow The Calorie-free" segment involves the player existence trapped in a blackness void and having to keep walking forwards toward the distant, winding light. While trying to residual on a tiny axle they can't see.
- Multiple Endings:
- If y'all choose to hang yourself at the cease, the game closes and is permanently ruined- trying to replay it results in a distorted title screen that volition not let you play information technology. Subsequently all, suicide is not something y'all can come up back from.
- If you instead choose to answer the telephone and get help, you lot will exist teleported to a room where the woman talks to you and cheers yous for saving her and seeking help.
- At the terminate of the New Game+ mode, if you lot get to the phone again, it will initially vanish as the depression moves it further away and tries to get you to hang yourself, and y'all motion to a giant chess board where representations of both the woman and the low try to make yous do what they desire. Ultimately, the player answers the phone and winds upwardly in the room again, with the woman again thanking them... just the room is now distorted and glitched.
- Finally, the True Ending, which happens if you open and restart the game ane more time, has the depression attack you outright with shadow people and a Breaking Lecture. Should you lot still make it, you are dropped in the Angel room from the second affiliate, and press a button to finally free yourself, with the adult female giving a speech about how expiry is only the end of life and life is still worth it.
- New Game+: If you didn't choose to hang yourself the first fourth dimension around, yous tin can cull to replay the game with new content. This is actually required to get the Truthful Catastrophe.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Of a sort. As the game progressively gets scarier, more things will start to look glitched. A notable case is during a "conversation" game- the push with negative answers is glitched and unusable and gets worse each round.
- Psychological Horror: The primary horror of the game comes not from the creepy visuals or odd occurrences, but the feelings of helplessness and anxiety it attempts to portray. There'due south a reason the Content Warnings at the beginning ask people with anxiety and depression to stay away from it.
- Unnaturally Looping Location: The kickoff trial the player has to face involves going through a door that leads into a creepy hallway, which then leads back to the room they were originally in. The narrator is also dislocated by this and tries to make the thespian get out past making the doors more and more than obvious, which doesn't break the loop at all.
Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/WhenTheDarknessComes