Dark Communion

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone who’s seen the borderline-compulsive way that I can only either review zero or all games in an IF competition to learn that I can get oddly obsessive in how I approach other games too. Take immersive sims: the best ones, like Thief or Dishonored, offer a broad panoply of tools for engaging with multiple deeply-implemented systems, and are at their best when you improvise, roll with the punches, and enjoy the complex way all these interactions lead to emergent gameplay. Me? I prefer to hoard every consumable I come across instead of using a single one, and ignore just about every weapon or supernatural ability in favor of just hitting each baddy in the back of the head with a sock full of quarters. Since of these games aren’t designed assuming that you’re only using 5% of your options, this can often be quite hard, so I often wind up abusing the quickload key, running through particularly tricky setups again and again: maybe if I throw a crate over there to create a distraction, I can nab guard number one when he comes to investigate and create a hole in the patrol pattern to get the others? No, OK, so what about climbing the wall over here and getting the drop on guard number two when he briefly pokes his head into the alley? No, so maybe next time…

Playing Dark Communion is kind of like that – it’s a supercompressed horror scenario that sees you and another girl investigating an abandoned church, at which point things quickly go wrong and you’ve got to face a gauntlet of lightning-fast decision points to try to make it out. It’s clearly designed for multiple replays, inasmuch as it tracks your successes as well as your failures (plus some bonus achievements) so you can see how much of the possibility-space you’ve plumbed, and for me it evoked that same rhythm of repeating a familiar gameplay loop but intentionally introducing small deviations – maybe wait an extra beat before investigating the choir loft this time? – to see if I could get an optimal result.

Where the metaphor breaks down is that the choices you have aren’t purely about guiding your character through the scenario. In fact the very first one you’re offered asks you define your relationship with Lianna, the other girl: is she your sister, someone you’ve got a crush on, or just some acquaintance you wound up going on an adventure with? At first I was bit nonplussed by this choice, because of course the emotional connection you’ve got with Jane rando will be much weaker than the one you’ve got with a sibling, which feels like it should have a significant impact on the story. And it does! These different choices of relationship significantly alter Lianna’s motivations, and the options available to you at particularly high-stress moments. It’s a neat bit of design because the fundamentals of the narrative remain the same, which maintains the loop-y, accretive nature of the gameplay, but they get remixed and stay fresh by virtue of their new configuration.

As for what those elements are – well, they are fairly generic horror beats, though they’re worked through efficiently and effectively. The church is properly spooky, with the descriptions sprinkling in a light theme of alienation:

"A space that was made to hold throngs of people, voices joined in song, speaking and kneeling in unison, eating ceremonial bread and drinking ceremonial wine. Communion. Now it’s dead and silent, and you, who never even believed in God—you’re the last person who belongs."

The terrible thing, once it gets on-screen, doesn’t get much by way of explanation, which is usually something I dislike in horror – you can definitely take the lore-dumping too far, but one gribbly monster is much the same as another, so give me the tortured backstory and scraps of worldbuilding dripping with implications – but it works fine here since it means the replays aren’t burdened by the need to run around collecting information that the player already knows. The scope of the variation in the potential scenarios means that the thematic connection between the horror and the interpersonal stuff going on with you and Lianna is sometimes tighter and sometimes looser – because of this, I felt like the playthrough where Lianna was a potential romantic partner felt more canonical than the others – but the tropes being invoked are all sturdy ones for the supernatural horror genre, so there’s never too much of a mismatch.

It all adds up to a compelling experience that maybe doesn’t have that much power in any given playthrough, but winds up more than the sum of its parts as you experiment with all the different things you can build with this Girls in Spooky Church Lego set. Even if you’re not moved to exhaust every single possibility – I confess I didn’t get two of the bonus achievements – and the set of tools you’ve got to confront the monster isn’t that broad in any iteration, there’s still more than enough here to make for a satisfying half-hour of playing and replaying. It’s just a shame there are no smoke bombs to collect and never use…