Darkstar: The Interactive Movie

One of the best FMV adventure games I have played (and I played a lot of them), Darkstar is an experience worthy of your time. Sure there are bugs, and path-finding can be maddening at times, but the effort put in the story writing and the excellent acting by the cast justify experiencing Darkstar. Darkstar will immerse you in sci-fi heaven, with beautifully drawn and believable(!) environments. The dialog is well written. The story is original and well thought-worthy of a Hollywood movie! I was particularly impressed by the feeling of loneliness that the game instills in the player as you rack your brain solving threatening situations on a starship. In short: play this game!

Firstly, everyone should know that Darkstar was the decade long work of ONE single father living in the mid-west, outside of the mainstream put countless time, energy, and money into it (I've heard it's something around $400,000 of just his expenses). J. Allen Williams wrote, animated, edited, produced, directed, and even played a small role in this project. His daughter also voices one of the characters. He's responded every single email ever sent through the official website. How anybody could write some of the scathing things I've heard said about Darkstar is simply shameful on this count alone.

Having said that, Darkstar is still without question a rock-solid adventure game.

If you're a person who could not care less about the minutia of game-play and the technical side of gaming (like me), you will see a beautiful story dressed to the smallest detail with stylish visuals, a rocking soundtrack, and a deeply engaging film-noir style murder mystery.

The game is not technologically progressive, but it is up to date as far as computers are concerned. My fellow reviewer, who gave Darkstar a scathing review on account of this technical nonsense, even had the audacity to complain about this and simultaneously whine that he had to install a newer version of QuickTime to play (indicating his old one must have been EXTREMELY outdated).

Don't be fooled by what that moron says about the game, as EVERY SINGLE review I've read has praised Darkstar. One even said, "...Darkstar is one of the best indie games I have ever played in my thirty years of gaming." Quite a different tune than our little savior was whistling...

Check out Darkstar if you're into story, visuals, music, or simply art. If you just want to shoot things or just ramble technical bullshit, avoid it at all costs for we don't want to hear your arbitrary complaints.

This game looks and plays like some resurrected 1990's dinosaur.

The game is composed entirely of low quality, heavily artifacted QuickTime videos, and of course, requires QT installed to play it. You can't set the resolution manually, so if you're using an LCD, you'll get even worse graphics from monitor/gpu scaling.

The data of the game is huge, large enough that if they had used a proper modern codec, it would look OK (but yet it still wouldn't be OK, due to the gameplay!). They should have either made a regular movie or 3d game, either way would have corrected most of the issues the game suffers.

It's also buggy.

If you need more detailed review - look around. Just don't fall for the high rating on IMDb like I did...