Darwin’s Paradox Review – Review
When I played the demo for Darwin’s Paradox, I was enchanted by the idea of a puzzle platformer based around crawling on walls. It was a unique way to engage with a 2.5D world, and I’m always excited for games that make the act of moving your character interesting in some way. The stealth gameplay of the demo–an homage to Konami’s Metal Gear series–was a bit frustrating, but it was fine as the gimmick for a single level. And surely that wouldn’t be a key mechanic of the entire game, right?
Surely.
Darwin’s Paradox opens in the ocean, teaching you about Darwin’s many abilities and how they differ depending on whether he’s underwater or on land. Not only can he climb on walls, but he can also move obstacles, shoot inky projectiles, and camouflage himself. Darwin and his unnamed friend are quickly fished out of the ocean by the sinister UFOODS corporation, and he later wakes up in a landfill, covered with mud that prevents him from crawling on walls and using other abilities. As the game progresses you’ll slowly regain those abilities and even learn a couple new ones along the way, taking advantage of every trick you can string together to find your missing friend and escape back to the ocean.
The art and animation in Darwin’s Paradox is delightful, even with the reduced graphics of the Switch 2 version. Every character is incredibly expressive, especially Darwin himself. The animation in this game feels reminiscent of Hollywood studios like Pixar and Dreamworks, and the combination of cinematic flair with rich, detailed environments is easily the highlight of the experience. The only real dud of the game’s presentation is its soundtrack, which feels like an awfully generic pastiche of Hollywood scores.
Sadly, actually playing the game doesn’t feel quite as refined. The puzzle platforming is a joy whenever you’re actually allowed to do it; puzzles are constantly evolving throughout the game, and each of the game’s chapters introduces a new idea to the table that adds new wrinkles to your journey. Sometimes you’ll need to carefully hop between steam pipes to avoid burning yourself on the ones that are too hot. Sometimes you’ll need to find a route that’s fast enough to get to the other side of the room quickly enough that the radioactive waste keeping evil rats away from you doesn’t wash off. Even the aforementioned stealth mission from the demo has compelling moments where you have to time your camouflage well so that you’re only moving while you’re in complete shadow.
Unfortunately, that stealth mission–which is roughly a third of the way through the story–is just a preview of what the rest of the game is going to be like. Stealth is not the gimmick of a single level so much as it is one of the genres that Darwin’s Paradox falls into. The puzzle platforming never goes away, but staying out of guards’ lines of sight is one of the main things you’ll be doing for the rest of the adventure, and it’s never nearly as fun as the first taste that’s in the demo. The initial stealth mission takes place at night, so guards all have a flashlight that clearly marks their line of sight. For the remainder of the game, you need to just kind of intuit where their vision cone is, and that’s easier said than done since Darwin’s Paradox is a 2.5D game where guards are able to move unrestricted through 3D space.
Some levels have even more drastic changes to the gameplay loop that just aren’t fun. In one level you’ll be running away from an anglerfish that will eat you alive if you slow down for even a second, forcing you to trial and error your way through a tense action sequence as you find the right path to escape danger. In another you’ll be piloting a robot suit that for some reason moves entirely based on momentum. You need to slowly build up to a brisk walk, and coming to a stop needs as much lead time as hitting the brakes while speeding down the freeway, which leads to an awful lot of deaths from falling into pits. When Darwin’s Paradox lets you slow down and think through its puzzle platforming, it’s wonderful. But far too much of the game is spent on tense action challenges that don’t mesh well with the game’s own mechanics.
Many of the game’s gimmicks lack polish, and unfortunately that lack of polish extends to the hidden collectables that are found throughout the game’s world. These are typically newspapers or posters that are locked behind the game’s toughest and most interesting puzzles, and they give a lot of exposition on what exactly is happening in the human world around Darwin. When viewing these rewards, you’re able to press a button to display any words visible in the graphic as plain text on a black background; a standard accessibility function that the game somehow fumbles on. The implementation of this plain text is incredibly inconsistent. Newspapers will be missing more than half the text in the article. Some posters describe the art pictured instead of any text (sometimes adding bespoke jokes that are only in the description), but most of them don’t describe the art at all. I got one collectible whose plain text version was almost entirely blank, and even one that had a typo that wasn’t in the plain text version. This seems like a small thing, but it’s very strange to see in a finished game and makes a worse experience for anyone playing in languages other than English since only the plain text version is translated.
On Switch 2, Darwin’s Paradox runs fine, but it feels more like the kind of performance I’d expect from a Switch 1 port. Not only is the game locked at a target of 30fps–which it usually hits–but the graphical quality has been significantly reduced from other versions, detracting from the film-like charm of the art and animation. Meanwhile the framerate is mostly solid, but it noticeably hitches when loading new areas, which does unfortunately happen during a couple of tense action scenes. This isn’t really a surprise since even my PC with an RTX 3070 couldn’t hit a consistent 60fps on the demo, but when other small-scale games are managing to look similar to their PC and PlayStation counterparts on Switch 2, the downgrade definitely stands out.
The store page for Darwin’s Paradox calls it “a grand adventure worthy of a true animated movie”, and I can’t help but find that funny when the game honestly reminds me a lot of the licensed movie tie-ins I grew up playing. I think of the section in The Matrix: Path of Neo where you’re in an attack helicopter firing a minigun at other helicopters, and it’s half-baked and plays nothing like the rest of the game, but it’s part of the movie so it has to be in the game! I think of the robot suit and chase sequences in Darwin’s Paradox and feel like they have to be sequences from an animated movie that doesn’t actually exist, and that’s why they’re in the game. It’s a shame that this game couldn’t be more focused on its puzzle platforming, because these half-baked distractions suck a lot of the fun out of what could’ve been something really special.
