DARK EARTH: The horrible future that we were promised then forgot about but now remembered

In 1997, Kalisto Studios released Dark Earth, a post-cataclysmic action adventure game for PC, which has a really compelling look. For me, it really sets the standard for this sort of spiky rusty concrete worldbuilding.

Inspired by games like Bioforge and Alone in the Dark, Kalisto set out to create that new type of game: an action game, that was also, an adventure game. In Dark Earth's gloomy future, a catastrophic meteor strike has caused most of our world to be covered with clouds of ash - with a few remaining places where people can live, called Stallites, where sunlight penetrates the cloud. Dark Earth is set in such a citadel, Sparta, ruled by monastic sun worshippers, and features an upper and lower city, outskirts, and the cursed Darklands beyond. You play as Arkhan, a warrior-cop who, in the beginning, is a respected guardian of the city, but who in the course of things is corrupted by a dark curse, and transforms into a creature, and gets cast out into the wasteland to search for a cure and to discover forbidden secrets.

Since it's only available for PC and it's from 1997, it can be hard to find a way to run it on modern hardware - but Collection Chamber has had a installer up since 2017 that worked for me just now, it's running in a Win95 emulator in DOSBox on my Windows 11 PC, but I didnt have to work out any of that stuff, I just ran Biffman's installer and I didn't have to set anything up manually.




Kalisto also developed Dark Earth as a tabletop RPG, but it's out of print and only in French. There are two editions of the tabletop game, and the first edition document that I have uses art from the video game, so I'm assuming that the video game came first. The esteemed ZebraDestroyer3000 on reddit has collected a good number of pdfs from the tabletop game, that are up here. I don't read french, but ChatGPT does, so i'm working thought those slowly.

Mostly I wanted to talk about the sort of visual worldbuilding of Dark Earth. For me this is a coveted memory of a world I glimpsed as a child, and while all the stuff I liked is in there, it's a little tinny, a little goofy, and I'm trying to sort of approach it slowly and carefully in case it's not all as brilliant as I remember.

On of the pieces of key art for the PC game is this one, I'm not sure if that's supposed to be Arkhan, I think of this guy as just Dark Earth Man.

So that's on the cover, it's on the disk. Then the second disk has this:

 

Which, I guess If I'm going to talk about the visual language I should mention this sort of thing. Kalisto in the interviews talks about Dark Earth as a game designed to appeal to men and women both. I like to look at a sexy lady as much as the next person, and I don't want to appeal to the notion that you can't do this sort of thing anymore because of woke, certainly in the current climate some want to make it so you can't really see anything sexy anymore, and the push for that comes from a conservative place, about like what's family friendly, and that's fascism, no bones about that. But this bronze-nipple-pasty tits out lady feels anachronistic and egregious to me, the 2024 reader, and, idk, it's whatever. It's not really what I'm talking about when I say I like the visdev of this game. I think the sort of 90s French Comics aesthetic includes having your tits out and being a perv, that it should have that, and honestly I wish I knew how to use that in my own work, this sort of thing is both marginalized and dope. But here it feels unfortunate to me, it's not doing it for me. They chose this to be the key art for a reason, they wanted this to be a part of the appeal and the marketing strategy for the game. The slave leia stuff is in there, but as far as I'm concerned it's not really about that. It's whatever. It's not a huge draw for me.

What I like about Dark Earth is this shit:

Yeah. Give me that animated pre-rendered rusted metal menu screen, you saucy little minx.

I love the way the furniture is designed:

(concept art by Frédéric Menne)

I want to say that nobody does this anymore, but I know all the objects in video games and movies are carefully designed by somebody. What I mean is nobody does it quite like this anymore. Something about the way the sort of carefully detailed adventure comic concepts for these hand-hammered objects interact with the pre-rendered lighting, the concrete textures with the blown-out bump mapping, the grainy dither on the crafted accents. It's so lush.

This is at odds, then, with how it feels to control and navigate the thing. 1997 presents us with such a mix of old and new design sensibilities. Some things feel very modern, some things feel positively ancient. You move the guy with tank controls, the backgrounds are pre-rendered and the cameras are static. The combat in particular is very janky. For every gorgeous well-realized environment there's a weird cramped one. But when it hits it hits.

That's the stuff.