Heart of Darkness

About Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (1998) is Amazing Studio's cinematic platformer, supervised by Another World creator Éric Chahi, in which a boy afraid of the dark travels to a shadow world to rescue his dog after six years of development.

Heart of Darkness in Depth

In the vein of Chahi's Another World, it is a cinematic platformer with a linear story: the player guides Andy through hostile environments, solving puzzles and avoiding being killed by living shadows, hungry wildlife and deadly obstacles. Besides running, jumping and climbing, Andy at first has a plasma cannon that fires lightning to disintegrate shadows, though it is soon destroyed, and he then relies on magical powers that attack enemies and also grow and destroy trees from seeds. Lives are unlimited, and Andy restarts at the most recent checkpoint when killed. It has about half an hour of cinematic sequences, thousands of frames of 2D animation and pre-rendered backgrounds.

Andy, a boy with a fear of the dark, takes his dog Whisky to the park to watch a solar eclipse, and dark forces carry Whisky away. He follows in a homemade spaceship to the Darkland, crashing there, and crosses canyons, swamps, underwater caves and lava rivers, helped by a peaceful alien race, the Amigos, to confront the Master of Darkness and his treacherous servant.

Making Heart of Darkness

Development began in 1992 with the PC as lead platform; the game was first shown in March 1995, said to be near completion, and then spent years in delays and platform changes, at one point signed as a Saturn exclusive before that console faded. Chahi called it one of his hardest projects because of the shift "from working alone to working with a team" while CD-ROM and 3D were changing the industry. When Virgin Interactive withdrew funding in December 1996, Frédéric Savoir said "we couldn't throw away four years of our life". The cut-scenes were rendered in 3D Studio, and the characters were rendered and scaled down as sprites animated in Deluxe Paint.

It was released for the PlayStation and Windows in 1998. The PlayStation version received favourable reviews: GamePro called it "just as clever as Out of This World", while Next Generation found the play unremarkable and said "the wait simply wasn't worth it". It was a finalist for an Interactive Achievement Award for sound and music. Chahi said the six years exhausted him, and he left games until From Dust in 2011.