The Romans brought shields as a distraction for the gravity gun. To their dismay, it was not a gravity gun at all.

I received an unexpected gift for Christmas, courtesy of my friend J.B. / digital_pariah, who you may remember as one of the players from our RPS Ascension game of Dominions 3 (which I am terribly behind in talking about here on Space-Biff!). It was the time-traveling romp Darkest of Days, a game about anachronisms that strikes me as an anachronism itself. It’s a much-ignored gem from 2009 that, for the most part, looks as though it has arrived on your PC after an arduous time-bending adventure, in which a serviceable gaming engine from 2008 stole the discarded textures of 2005, kidnapped Harry Turtledove’s doppelganger to pen the plot, and then decided on a pit stop in 1862 to get the Battle of Antietam just right.

Any game that channels that one good part from Timecop is a game in which I’m interested, and it’s fair to say I was looking forward to Darkest of Days in the same kind of way that I used to look forward to having my modern army men gun down my pirate Legos (read: very much). I didn’t expect it to spin me around and teach me a life lesson (or at least try really, really hard to). The review, in three parts, follows.

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