Newgrounds was never meant to be a bastion of quality, and that is not an insult to Newgrounds. Sites like that or its competitors (Armor Games, Kongregate, etc.) do not host media for profit; they make money from advertisement clicks, they sell t-shirts on occasion,but the average user spends not a single penny on the games and animations hosted within. Whether this is a stable buisness model is not at question here, but it does explain how a game can be popular on Newgrounds even when it is not perfectly polished- when a game is free, and made by someone who clearly took joy in the act of creation, it means more than a mass-produced cash grab. Even if only subconciously, a player can sense that earnest honesty in a small, shoddy Flash game.
![Posted Image]()
Which brings us to Mark of Darkness. Mark of Darkness is not the creation of some faceless marketing group, but its façade bears those same birth marks. Everything about this side-scrolling action RPG is seemingly designed to be as generic and flavorless as possible, down to the very roots of its game mechanics. WASD to move and click to attack is perfectly fine, being a sane control scheme hammered out over generations of games. There's an inventory and status screen that pauses everything and makes using healing items trivial, and a block button that is less efficient than just jumping out of the way, with a perfect-timing parry mechanic that computer-controlled opponents will always be better at than you- except when you jump and the AI decides to jump after you. No new ground was broken here.
Where the controls fall apart is at selecting special moves. To activate a passive status boost, first the you would go into the status screen to place the ability onto your quick-select bar, then point and click at the icon on your bar when you want the effect to activate. World of Warcraft popularized the "hotbar" for special moves in MMOs, but World of Warcraft was designed this way because it was, at the time, the best interface for a 3-D real-time RPG; when a player character encounters an enemy, they immediately drop into a fighting stance and auto-attack when the player makes no other choice. All a player has to do is choose the right ability at the right time to help their band of warriors slay the monsters. Mark of Darkness, however, is not a 3-D game, is not a multiplayer game, and expects the player to manually click to attack or backpedal to dodge. Requiring the player to break their mouse aim to click a little button should never be a problem in an action-oriented game. The only reason Mark of Darkness has this function at all is because a more popular game used it first.
The game's aesthetic is similarly derivative. Mark of Darkness aims for a low fantasy, dirt-caked European fantasy flavor where nobody is flawless and the only magic known to mankind is actively malicious. The tutorial stage ends with your player character's friend being executed by brigands, a turn of events which would have meant more if you had seen said friend for more than a few seconds before his death. There is rarely any interaction with a given NPC beyond "kill x number of orcs and report back to me", and no way to give a damn about anyone's problems beyond getting paid. Walk-pound-walk, march right and click (perhaps jumping once in a while) until the enemies fall over. Don't mourn, they re-spawn as soon as you walk off-screen.
![Posted Image]()
Low fantasy has been popular as of late, with stories such as A Song of Ice and Fire finding large audiences, so it is no surprise that Mark of Darkness was built to capitalize upon this trend. Fantasy tales in this vein are not popular because they are grim, nor because they are about manly men hitting brigands with axes. The Game of Thrones series has found popularity because of the tangled romantic and political drama (of which the game has little of note), and the tension of any given character facing death at any point in the narrative, marketability be damned. Mark of Darkness offers a plot thin enough to use as a window pane, no dialogue besides having orders barked at you, and of course all the NPCs are invulnerable outside of story events.
The graphics and sound go out of their way to be as forgettable as possible. Mark of Darkness is rendered in a style resembling digitally inked artwork come to life, which in this case means that it looks best when it is not moving. You are offered a stab at character customization in the beginning, where you get to choose between one gender (male), two body types (muscles or more muscles), and a variety of haircuts that are always hidden behind a helmet. Characters talk in large speech bubbles, complete with written emoticons to avoid animating the one humanoid model more than needed. Enemies and allies alike do little more than pace around waiting for the player character.
Meanwhile, the music is passable as long as you are not in combat, which is all the time. The town and field music ranges from pleasant to haunting, and while not memorable, the BGM does a passable job of setting the scene. When you enter combat, the ambiance is replaced with a generic marching drumbeat. The most commonly heard track in the game is nothing more than pattering taps on a digital snare drum, with no interesting flourish to make it stand out; even letting the calm field music continue would add some interesting dissonance. This track, like the game itself, is paint by numbers and rote to a depressing degree.
The question may be, what does Mark of Darkness bring to action RPGs that is unique and interesting? What about this game shows what the designer was dreaming of when they coded it? No designer goes into a game without some sort of vision, even if it is only admiration for ideas that another dev had first.
In the case of Mark of Darkness, that dream was free-to-play mechanics.
![Posted Image]()
It is not my place to say that F2P mechanics are bad, or that they ruin a game. In some cases, real money trades are only for bragging rights; fancy hats or invisible helmets aren't cheats, just harmless vanity in exacange for supporting a project you like, a mark that shows you are a super fan. But with this game, the only premium features on offer are more powerful equipment, cheats to accelerate a player through the game. Selling power is the absolute worst use of real-money trade, because it the opposite of vanity items. While a goofy hat on your character is a way of showing that you supported the game developers, powering up with money only proves that you want to play the game less by skipping boring parts... which suggests that the game is boring and that you don't want to be playing it. All Mark of Darkness has to offer for gameplay is clicking increasingly heavily padded walls of hit points until you give up and buy a more powerful weapon or tougher armor, or more magical jewelry. Real-money trades in this game are not out of love, but out of bitter rivalry with a hostile and indifferent world.
The delivery system for these purchases of power are downright asinine. The first instance you are likely to find are the Premium Keys. Scattered all across the game map are blue chests, each requesting that the player kindly donate a few dollars to open them. These chests most closely resemble a pre-order bonus, one or two extra items to sweeten the deal for players who show faith in a game before it is even released. Rather than rewarding a player for helping the developers, these keys are blatantly grifting players for deigning to assume that a game hosted on a site for free time wastes would actually be free. This is not adding content, this is locking content away and slapping your hand when you assume you have earned it. The word "premium" has also lost all meaning as of late, but that is a completely unrelated rant.
For those who want more than the chests offer, this game also offers a randomized prize wheel. Very early on, a gold-armored man appears next to a quest NPC and gives you a free voucher for the wheel, one precious prize as temptation. While the chests at least tried to maintain the appearance of an in-world phenomenon, this wheel has no connection to anything else, a non-sequitur at best. However, the wheel and the chests have one thing in common; there is no way of knowing the real dollars you spend are worth investing until after they have been frittered and wasted away in an off-hand way. While this resembles the reward for faith which pre-release bonus content offers, this is not rewarding faith so much as taking advantage of it. These features simply assume that the player base will wire the developers money as a matter of course, regardless of what the product actually is or whether it is something of worth.
What is most disturbing about the free-to-play elements in Mark of Darkness is that the entire experience is single-player. For all the abuses real-money trade represent in MMO games, the barest of justifications would be that you can share or show off your shiny goods to friends and strangers alike. Even if it is the hostile connection between haves and have-nots, or even the scorn of players who consider your investment to be cheating, it still represents some form of connection to another person. Mark of Darkness is an absolute single-player experience. There are no team-mates egging you on to level up faster, no audience for your golden dragon hatchling. Buying new equipment for a Mark of Darkness save file is purely mastrubatory- and if you really wanted that, there are reams of free pornography of much higher quality out there in cyberspace.
And yet Mark of Darkness gets plenty of good reviews on Newgrounds. These do not appear to be paid advertisement on the developer's part; a significant number of people seem to have enjoyed this game, and that is okay. There is nothing wrong with having tastes that differ with an irate voice on the internet, no matter who that voice belongs to. There is always an audience to be found. However, issues pop up when problems with a given media are ignored until it is too late. It bears repeating, Mark of Darkness was created only to make money for the developer. There is no love for the design, no creativity was indulged, no greater meaning beyond dollars was imagined. Newgrounds is supposedly a place of free creativity, where entertainment can be presented as practice for a fledgling creator, or as a demo for a game worth selling, or even only something built out of a desire to impress. Newgrounds games are rarely of high quality, and they don't have to be; either you enjoy it or you walk away and lose nothing. Bringing banal marketing practices into a site like Newgrounds and making the front page is only a symptom of a much greater problem.
![Posted Image]()
Small, independent game designers should not be behaving as if they are a marketing-led buisness that cares more about quick money than gaining the customer's trust. Granted, marketing-led businesses should not be acting like that either, for the same reason that farmers should not be slashing and burning rainforest, but in this case a certain humility is expected from game designers who have not yet proven that their creation is worth money. If all a developer can think of is walking to the right and stabbing wild boars for two EXP each, then they should not expect money to fall into their coffers for imitating much better games. There is more to the game industry than fat stacks, and anyone who has forgotten that has lost something essential to the human condition.
Newgrounds was never meant to be a bastion of quality, and that is not an insult to Newgrounds. Sites like that or its competitors (Armor Games, Kongregate, etc.) do not host media for profit; they make money from advertisement clicks, they sell t-shirts on occasion,but the average user spends not a single penny on the games and animations hosted within. Whether this is a stable buisness model is not at question here, but it does explain how a game can be popular on Newgrounds even when it is not perfectly polished- when a game is free, and made by someone who clearly took joy in the act of creation, it means more than a mass-produced cash grab. Even if only subconciously, a player can sense that earnest honesty in a small, shoddy Flash game.
Which brings us to Mark of Darkness. Mark of Darkness is not the creation of some faceless marketing group, but its façade bears those same birth marks. Everything about this side-scrolling action RPG is seemingly designed to be as generic and flavorless as possible, down to the very roots of its game mechanics. WASD to move and click to attack is perfectly fine, being a sane control scheme hammered out over generations of games. There's an inventory and status screen that pauses everything and makes using healing items trivial, and a block button that is less efficient than just jumping out of the way, with a perfect-timing parry mechanic that computer-controlled opponents will always be better at than you- except when you jump and the AI decides to jump after you. No new ground was broken here.
Where the controls fall apart is at selecting special moves. To activate a passive status boost, first the you would go into the status screen to place the ability onto your quick-select bar, then point and click at the icon on your bar when you want the effect to activate. World of Warcraft popularized the "hotbar" for special moves in MMOs, but World of Warcraft was designed this way because it was, at the time, the best interface for a 3-D real-time RPG; when a player character encounters an enemy, they immediately drop into a fighting stance and auto-attack when the player makes no other choice. All a player has to do is choose the right ability at the right time to help their band of warriors slay the monsters. Mark of Darkness, however, is not a 3-D game, is not a multiplayer game, and expects the player to manually click to attack or backpedal to dodge. Requiring the player to break their mouse aim to click a little button should never be a problem in an action-oriented game. The only reason Mark of Darkness has this function at all is because a more popular game used it first.
The game's aesthetic is similarly derivative. Mark of Darkness aims for a low fantasy, dirt-caked European fantasy flavor where nobody is flawless and the only magic known to mankind is actively malicious. The tutorial stage ends with your player character's friend being executed by brigands, a turn of events which would have meant more if you had seen said friend for more than a few seconds before his death. There is rarely any interaction with a given NPC beyond "kill x number of orcs and report back to me", and no way to give a damn about anyone's problems beyond getting paid. Walk-pound-walk, march right and click (perhaps jumping once in a while) until the enemies fall over. Don't mourn, they re-spawn as soon as you walk off-screen.
Low fantasy has been popular as of late, with stories such as A Song of Ice and Fire finding large audiences, so it is no surprise that Mark of Darkness was built to capitalize upon this trend. Fantasy tales in this vein are not popular because they are grim, nor because they are about manly men hitting brigands with axes. The Game of Thrones series has found popularity because of the tangled romantic and political drama (of which the game has little of note), and the tension of any given character facing death at any point in the narrative, marketability be damned. Mark of Darkness offers a plot thin enough to use as a window pane, no dialogue besides having orders barked at you, and of course all the NPCs are invulnerable outside of story events.
The graphics and sound go out of their way to be as forgettable as possible. Mark of Darkness is rendered in a style resembling digitally inked artwork come to life, which in this case means that it looks best when it is not moving. You are offered a stab at character customization in the beginning, where you get to choose between one gender (male), two body types (muscles or more muscles), and a variety of haircuts that are always hidden behind a helmet. Characters talk in large speech bubbles, complete with written emoticons to avoid animating the one humanoid model more than needed. Enemies and allies alike do little more than pace around waiting for the player character.
Meanwhile, the music is passable as long as you are not in combat, which is all the time. The town and field music ranges from pleasant to haunting, and while not memorable, the BGM does a passable job of setting the scene. When you enter combat, the ambiance is replaced with a generic marching drumbeat. The most commonly heard track in the game is nothing more than pattering taps on a digital snare drum, with no interesting flourish to make it stand out; even letting the calm field music continue would add some interesting dissonance. This track, like the game itself, is paint by numbers and rote to a depressing degree.
The question may be, what does Mark of Darkness bring to action RPGs that is unique and interesting? What about this game shows what the designer was dreaming of when they coded it? No designer goes into a game without some sort of vision, even if it is only admiration for ideas that another dev had first.
In the case of Mark of Darkness, that dream was free-to-play mechanics.
It is not my place to say that F2P mechanics are bad, or that they ruin a game. In some cases, real money trades are only for bragging rights; fancy hats or invisible helmets aren't cheats, just harmless vanity in exacange for supporting a project you like, a mark that shows you are a super fan. But with this game, the only premium features on offer are more powerful equipment, cheats to accelerate a player through the game. Selling power is the absolute worst use of real-money trade, because it the opposite of vanity items. While a goofy hat on your character is a way of showing that you supported the game developers, powering up with money only proves that you want to play the game less by skipping boring parts... which suggests that the game is boring and that you don't want to be playing it. All Mark of Darkness has to offer for gameplay is clicking increasingly heavily padded walls of hit points until you give up and buy a more powerful weapon or tougher armor, or more magical jewelry. Real-money trades in this game are not out of love, but out of bitter rivalry with a hostile and indifferent world.
The delivery system for these purchases of power are downright asinine. The first instance you are likely to find are the Premium Keys. Scattered all across the game map are blue chests, each requesting that the player kindly donate a few dollars to open them. These chests most closely resemble a pre-order bonus, one or two extra items to sweeten the deal for players who show faith in a game before it is even released. Rather than rewarding a player for helping the developers, these keys are blatantly grifting players for deigning to assume that a game hosted on a site for free time wastes would actually be free. This is not adding content, this is locking content away and slapping your hand when you assume you have earned it. The word "premium" has also lost all meaning as of late, but that is a completely unrelated rant.
For those who want more than the chests offer, this game also offers a randomized prize wheel. Very early on, a gold-armored man appears next to a quest NPC and gives you a free voucher for the wheel, one precious prize as temptation. While the chests at least tried to maintain the appearance of an in-world phenomenon, this wheel has no connection to anything else, a non-sequitur at best. However, the wheel and the chests have one thing in common; there is no way of knowing the real dollars you spend are worth investing until after they have been frittered and wasted away in an off-hand way. While this resembles the reward for faith which pre-release bonus content offers, this is not rewarding faith so much as taking advantage of it. These features simply assume that the player base will wire the developers money as a matter of course, regardless of what the product actually is or whether it is something of worth.
What is most disturbing about the free-to-play elements in Mark of Darkness is that the entire experience is single-player. For all the abuses real-money trade represent in MMO games, the barest of justifications would be that you can share or show off your shiny goods to friends and strangers alike. Even if it is the hostile connection between haves and have-nots, or even the scorn of players who consider your investment to be cheating, it still represents some form of connection to another person. Mark of Darkness is an absolute single-player experience. There are no team-mates egging you on to level up faster, no audience for your golden dragon hatchling. Buying new equipment for a Mark of Darkness save file is purely mastrubatory- and if you really wanted that, there are reams of free pornography of much higher quality out there in cyberspace.
And yet Mark of Darkness gets plenty of good reviews on Newgrounds. These do not appear to be paid advertisement on the developer's part; a significant number of people seem to have enjoyed this game, and that is okay. There is nothing wrong with having tastes that differ with an irate voice on the internet, no matter who that voice belongs to. There is always an audience to be found. However, issues pop up when problems with a given media are ignored until it is too late. It bears repeating, Mark of Darkness was created only to make money for the developer. There is no love for the design, no creativity was indulged, no greater meaning beyond dollars was imagined. Newgrounds is supposedly a place of free creativity, where entertainment can be presented as practice for a fledgling creator, or as a demo for a game worth selling, or even only something built out of a desire to impress. Newgrounds games are rarely of high quality, and they don't have to be; either you enjoy it or you walk away and lose nothing. Bringing banal marketing practices into a site like Newgrounds and making the front page is only a symptom of a much greater problem.
Small, independent game designers should not be behaving as if they are a marketing-led buisness that cares more about quick money than gaining the customer's trust. Granted, marketing-led businesses should not be acting like that either, for the same reason that farmers should not be slashing and burning rainforest, but in this case a certain humility is expected from game designers who have not yet proven that their creation is worth money. If all a developer can think of is walking to the right and stabbing wild boars for two EXP each, then they should not expect money to fall into their coffers for imitating much better games. There is more to the game industry than fat stacks, and anyone who has forgotten that has lost something essential to the human condition.