Dark Days: This is a really lousy experience. Essentially an “escape the room” game with a monster in some of the areas, Dark Days fails to deliver both interesting puzzles and tense scares, and its narrative suffers the classic pitfalls of indie-tier junk.

It opens with a jumpscare, not the most clever but certainly an effective one, as a monster in your front seat lunges at you while you're driving. Jade, your rambling character, pulls over at a motel and shenanigans begin, including introducing a monster who attacks when you “stare” at her. It's a fine concept, but this gal is WAY too sensitive because just having her on screen for an instant is enough to prompt her wrath. It's not very hard to manipulate, though; when you hear her breathing, you can just clam up and wait her out if you want. She'll go away and you can get back to looking for fuses or keys or whatever. You can also just look at walls and strafe when you know she's behind you. By her second encounter she was already no longer frightening to me.

That's the whole game: find the item(s) to escape the room while the monster waits for a reason to kill you, then repeat that a dozen-or-so times. Jade will be speaking to herself the entire game (and cannot be fast forwarded), awkwardly saying nothing to the men speaking to her at various points, and you'll learn a story about some cursed place in the desert and how Jade's wife is sickly. Is it interesting? Absolutely not, my brain was completely off for this game, and my subconscious/muscle memory still managed to get through this mess in under two hours. I love when the bad games are brief.

I won't spoil it, though I sort of will, when I say it ends in exactly the manner you'd think an indie game would. Apparently this game supports VR and I could see the horror working out better there, but even then it's so brief with zero replay value, what's the point? It's cheap, but it's not worth it at all.

I do not recommend Dark Days. It's a waste of time and hard drive space.