The Dark Method

[EDITED FOR POSTERITY AND THE KINDNESS OF THE DEVS [strike] TLD;DR Get this game if you're aren't using Oculus Quest 2, that is what this boils down to. It does not feel good or even morally right to give this game a negative review. The little bit of game I got out of it proved to be an incredibly atmospheric and enjoyable experience as someone who has been playing VR titles for nearly a year now. Unfortunately, there are two things that make it not exactly viable for me, and I hope this gets seen by the developers as I'm sure I can't be the only one with these issues. My first problem is the controls. I play with an Oculus Quest 2. For most games, they don't directly support Quest 2 controls and that is fine, and I thought that it was going to be fine for this one as well. Unfortunately, however, this particular game left me with not being able to use the flashlight or to equip weapons without also moving the camera. I believe this is an issue with the "touch pad" part of the Quest 1's control scheme. Pressing inward on the left stick and moving it up opens the menu just fine. However, to take out a weapon, you have to press in the right stick and move it to the right. This also turns the camera on smooth turning and snaps it on snap turning, resulting in a disorienting mess. It also means that, for whatever reason, the buttons on my controllers don't actually work. Using the flashlight doesn't seem to happen no matter what buttons I held, and since the tutorial says that swapping weapons is the same button for the flashlight. Which seems to mean I can't use the flashlight at all, it only turns the camera and makes my pistol equip/unequip. For my second issue it is entirely my fault, but it is also an ask that I hope isn't too big. Please allow streaming via Virtual Desktop for this game. Oculus Air Link isn't BAD, but it also has a noticeable difference between it and Virtual Desktop. When using VD, the game has a tendency to kick you out of your PC and make you have to reconnect it after waiting for several seconds for it to disconnect you first. Like I said, this is my fault, but I do have to ask for VD compatibility simply because it works better than Oculus Air Link. Overall, this game looks really good and I'm anything but gleeful about requesting a refund from Steam, but my personal setup is currently incompatible with the current state of it. Much love Dark Method team and Analog Joker LLC, I hope to be able to play this one day. [/strike] I will have to update this review upon noticing how quickly and kindly the dev response was to this. I apologize if I seemed to have been misinformative, and I attribute that to my knowledge and inability to do things the correct way. According to Analog Joker themselves, my problems with controls are entirely because of trying to use Virtual Desktop, and as I suspected, the other issues also had occurred because of trying to use VD. Whether or not I repurchase and continue to play The Dark Method will be entirely dependent on my own ability to get Oculus Air Link to work properly. But for what it's worth, I have to reiterate that The Dark Method itself is still an incredibly atmospheric and entertaining experience even with the issues I faced. Again, much love to Analog Joker and even more luck for current and future endeavors

Played on Vive Pro 2 with index controllers: I cant really tell where all the good reviews come from. The game lacks proper direction. After the tutorial you are thrown into your Appartment with no indication what to do and how to do it. Eventually you might figure out you can start missions from a book, but noone explains you what is what and what does what. Apart from that: I started two missions and in both I managed to get stuck rather quickly: Once in a car in the garage, once on a corner in a building. Both cases I couldnt move away anymore, neither with controller / Teleport, nor with actual Room scale movement. So at the end the game was nothing but frustration.

I had so much fun with the game and it is underrated a.f. Hope you can earn so much money, to bring the story to an end. 8-10 hours of story gameplay until now and good visuals. nice puzzles and most of the time smooth performance. played with quest 2 via airlink. clear recommendation. thumbs up from uncle olaf

Franchement un bon jeu, on ressent bien le coté du jeu en "court de développement", mais le coté énigme/exploration est la, l'ambiance/atmosphère est tres bien rendu également, beaucoup de travail pour une personne seule. Les combats ne sont pas passionnants, mais le coté énigme est dominant et plaisant. Ce n'est pas un FPS pour moi. J'ai fini la partie classique sur Occulus quest/Meta et la je vais commencer la partie générée aléatoirement. Le développeur est présent et répond rapidement en cas de problemes. Un seul gros regret, pas de sous titres, meme en anglais.

I'd rather make this review neutral than thumbs down. I got this game at 50% off but unfortunately have now requested a refund after only 1.9 hours. This game looks like it has a lot of potential and the graphics and sound is great. Although I tried to play for almost 2 hours, I do not feel I started the game, but I am up to the refund time limit so I am cutting my losses while I can. I have an HTC Vive Pro with Index controllers. I selected the controllers that looked like the index controllers to start. When I push the left joystick forward, it would start to run, but then the inventory would pop open. It was quite difficult to move forward, but was possible by just pushing the joystick a tiny bit. Given that option was unplayable, I chose the standard wand type controller. That worked much better even though I was on the Index controller. Next up was getting my security pass. I opened the note and found the location of the PIN made it very hard to read. This was quite frustrating until I discovered that I could hold the page. After that, it was easy to read, so I guess that issue was down to me learning the controls. I went through to the room with the dummy and quickly got the four wood blocks in position. I then struggled getting the cards placed. I found my arms would frequently get offset from my body making it hard to place anything. I tried a restart and found I had to start over. There seems to be no fast forward which was frustrating. I got back to where I was, placed the wood and 3 of the cards and my headset disconnected. When I restarted the headset, all was well, but I had no sound. When I quite the game, there was a crash report screen available, so I submitted a crash report. I then started over from the beginning again. This time I got through that room, hopped over some lava and up some steps to collect a weapon. I was told that my weapon was stored. I have not been able to find where it was stored though. It was not in my inventory and also did not seem to be attached to me. I tried following the instructions "pull-trigger, swing-arm, release-trigger" thinking maybe that makes the weapon appear, but it did not. I restarted the game which made me redo the intro to this section again and after that I got stuck in the same place. When I exited the game, I had another crash report window open, which I also submitted. I feel that the crash reports are being generated and breaking some of the functionality in the game, without making the player aware, which is worse than if the game just died and exited, At least then I would restart as soon as there was a problem. This is where I gave up. If the game works for you without these sorts of issues, its probably a good game as reflected by the other reviews. If you go through what I did, you will be frustrated and things are made worse by having to replay the same content over and over.

Tried playing with steam vr and my quest 3. The game constantly crashes right from the beginning so I cannot even start it. I keep getting these unreal crash reports. My PC easily handled half life Alyx so this game should not be close to exceeding my PC requirements. I also already checked the game integrity files and restarted the OC and quest 3, but it still refuses to start the game.

Hidden gem being worked on for sure. :) Currently playing the story first before jumping into the massive random generated haunted mansion :) Only bad point so far is the movement speed is a little slow. This to be update later but overall so far so good. (and I do refund loads of games)

My wife and I both played the story to completion. It is a good mix of story to follow, with puzzles and combat along the way. Combat is not to difficult, but enough to keep you on toes. Great exploration to keep things interesting.

The FAQ stated "OBS and LIV FPS Stabilizer might crash game if you don’t have enough memory". This was not a lie. So, it is an off stream game from me. Thumbs up for being up front.

Awesome game that reminds me of Castlevania meets Resident Evil on the PSX. Unfortunately I need to refund it until there's a left-handed option, but I will buy if it's ever added. Best of luck with this hidden gem!