Fancy Fish Games has announced I Can’t Escape: Darkness, which is a commercial follow-up to its popular 2013 dungeon crawling horror game I Can’t Escape.
The best thing for you do to first off is to play the original I Can’t Escape on Newgrounds as it’s best played unspoiled and knowing as little about it as possible. It shouldn’t take you long. I say this as by playing it you’ll know if you’ll be interested in an expanded version of that concept.
Fancy Fish sums up what I Can’t Escape is about pretty well when describing it as “a quicksand trap for the senses.” You’ve fallen into a dark and dingy dungeon, and the more you look around, trying to find keys to locked rooms, after an escape route; the more you fall further into the growing horrors of these dungeons.
It seems that in this sequel, there’s more of a focus on obtaining light sources in order to fight back the Darkness. Once the lights go out, the Darkness consumes you, causing you to drop closer to its lair. The dungeons are procedurally generated so you can’t memorize paths.
What I found most terrifying about the original game is the idea that the dungeon is alive, and this is an aspect that Fancy Fish seems to have been working on to expand for this sequel. The dungeons watches you, with gruesome eyeballs lodged into its walls, and tries to trick and trap you. You’re helpless, really. I love that the doors have faces on them baring teeth, and that vines crawl over the walls and floors to give the impression that everything around you really is, well, alive and working against you.
Fancy Fish’s plan is to release I Can’t Escape: Darkness for PC in January 2015. It’s currently looking for votes on Greenlight to bring the game to Steam. You can find further information about the game on its website.
