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"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

I'm working my way through The Darkness on PS3 and I can fully understand where the game got its 9.0 scores from. The environments are detailed and the developer Starbreeze added a lot of nice touches in several areas in almost a Grand Theft Auto fashion. Using the Darkness powers is satisfying, the story is more interesting than I expected, and it's more intense than I thought it would be. It has already stunned me with what I'm guessing is the shocking twist that George and Joe said was headed my way during last week's podcast.

The demo for the game, still available online I'm sure, lets you play with all of the Darkness powers. You earn them much more slowly in the full game. Throughout the early levels I reveled in having the creeping Darkness power slither along and smash light bulbs so I could proceed with all of my evil majesty without the sound of light sizzling the serpentine heads over each shoulder. But every so often the serpents would do something on their own. Maybe they fought over a heart they'd ripped from a corpse to eat, maybe one looked like it was falling asleep so the other one snapped at it to wake it up, but the impression was the same. They're not part of you, they're coming along with you for the ride.

When I finally achieved the Darkness tentacle power that you can smash out nearby lights and spear enemies with I was happy but immediately spooked when both glowing black-and-red serpent heads turned all the way around and looked right out of the screen with horrid, blazing, hellish grins of celebration.

It's a very good game, but not for the faint of heart as it earns its M rating fully without a single bit of nudity.

From Aeropause.