Preface: I’ve recreated the “dear listener” structure of the in-game podcast of new horror indie Dark and Deep throughout this brief diary. Each section is a little invitation to meditate on the game and podcast structure.
Dear listener,
I’m sorry for the delay. I wrote a piece on Rental back in April. I initially intended that little meditation on the game’s temporary spaces to be the first article in a monthly horror column.
Life happens, listener. I didn’t stop writing about horror, but I couldn’t anticipate what a rollercoaster Summer 2024 would prove to be. After several reviews at the beginning of the season, some brief entries on games I’m excited about, and a medieval conference in California, I return to writing about uncomfortably reflective horror games. My August entry is Walter Woods’s meditative Dark and Deep, a new “cosmic horror puzzle.”
Disturbing Audio
Dear listener,
I love a good podcast. Welcome to Night Vale, Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9, and Horror Joy all help fill the time of my new commute (not to mention The Punished Podcast). While I enjoy fictional podcasts that play with the ideas of conspiracies, I have never fallen into the realm of true crime or conspiracy podcasts. I find their suspicions of the world dangerous and scary.
Dark and Deep crosses into this kind of danger early. It builds on the most extreme outcomes and fears that come from not only consuming these podcasts but believing wholly in them, following religiously and acting on their accusations with dogma.
The game follows an avid conspiracy podcast listener, Samuel Judge (known online by his chat alias “RestlessDev82”) as he spirals. Judge doesn’t find his IT day job fulfilling, and his personal life devolves as he dives deeper into the world of his favorite podcast, “Dark and Deep.”
Players get to listen to this podcast alongside Judge. Dark and Deep (the name of both the in-game podcast and the game itself) balances these interactions on cluttered in-game computer screens, containing the podcast progress bar, chat messages from his work, personal, and anonymous chatrooms, and suspicious web browser activity. This clutter captures the chaos of working from a single monitor, especially when all of someone’s communications come from the same place.
Dark and Deep shines when it takes the mundane elements of office life and layers them with the anxiety and paranoia inspired by conspiracy thoughts. Judge listens to his podcast in his white-collar office, decorated familiarly against the backdrop of white-washed walls and generic furniture. His lingering over the ideas presented to him aurally and over chatroom messages transform his colleagues and his surroundings into something else entirely.
A Mirror, a Frame
Dear listener,
The social allegory of Dark and Deep invites the player beyond the screen of the monitor and soundwaves of the podcast. As a result, Judge’s story takes him on a harrowing journey through a dark cavern-like structure.
Dark and Deep is part first-person platformer and part mystery game. The platforming through its horrific world is impressively unremarkable. Early areas are rather grey while encouraging vertical movement; the latter areas become more colorful but keep the player moving across more horizontal plains.
The game’s presentation of the mystery elements within its world proves more interesting. Within Dark and Deep’s labyrinth-like world, Judge finds frames that reveal otherwise unseen enemies, objects, and secrets. Judge can also view the back of each frame where glowing text provides instructions, cryptic hints, and lore details. These details aren’t often necessary but make an otherwise rather lonely journey feel less solitary.
In this way, these spaces allegorize the chatrooms that Judge spends his screen time within. They exist to further concretize the abstract world created by the podcast. In the same way, the frames materialize creatures and secrets that only its user (Judge) can see.
These frames hold a mirror up to the world that Judge has created in his mind, fed by the podcast and his own frustration with the cards that life has dealt him. It isn’t until events evolve beyond the point of return that he even begins to realize the professional and personal losses that his actions have caused. Even then, ambiguity of where the fault lies persists.
In turn, Dark and Deep presents an uncomfortable metaphor that dances too close for comfort for so many of us in 2024. I imagine many of us have had uncomfortable experiences with family members or former friends who, like Judge, have found their way spiraling down the rabbit hole of misinformation or conspiracies. Many of us have sat across dinner tables with loved ones and colleagues defending beliefs put forth by bad-faith actors with antagonism, anger, and irrationality.
Who is Samuel Judge?
I restrain myself, listener. I fear getting too personal about relations that have fallen into these chatrooms, podcasts, and communities. The first-person presentation of a man descending into a hellish post-truth world in Dark and Deep made my skin crawl. The way that the game reveals his justification for his actions through chatroom messages and texts to family members broke my heart.
In the game, Woods includes religious quotes as well as some from authors like Dante and Milton. The injection of these out-of-context quotes gives false credence to (or even grotesquely sanctify) the conspiratorial ideas put forth. At times, this also crosses too closely to certain real-world politics and the cherry-picked quotes from sacred texts to support apocalyptic mindsets. Come to find out, when a certain group believes that they are the only ones who can decipher the secrets of the world, then that same group also weaponizes religion and apocalypses.
For Judge, Dark and Deep becomes more than a podcast but a lens by which to approach all of life. For players, the podcast and game allegorize the unnerving experiences of living, working, or worshiping with someone like Samuel Judge. Judge becomes a kind of embodied personification for the conspiratorial believer—the judge by which all information filters, dissects, deconstructs, and determines to be truth or untruth.
Judge’s experiences in the game reflect an uncomfortable horror that lingers across online and in-person spaces. To be placed in his shoes for 3-5 hours is equal parts unsettling and frightening. In this way, Walter Woods has created a chilling tale that will stick with players (and listeners) for some time.
Dark and Deep, developed and published by Walter Woods, was released on August 13, 2024, for Windows PC via Steam.
