Dark Chambers Review

Wha, uh uh huh, whu? Oh, sorry, was I sleeping? I must have been playing Dark Chambers! That should be enough of a lead-in, so let’s get started before I fall asleep again!

Dark Chambers has some pretty sparse graphics for a late-release 2600 title. The mazes are incredibly basic. You have walls, doors and that’s about it. The colors are bland and mostly pastel with a series of different characters to fight. The best animated feature of this game is your character, who has a nice little, animated hat. The rest of the game is so bland and uneventful I can barely stand it. The majority of the creatures look fine except for the zombies. Is that what they are? I didn’t know fat men wearing green with big noses qualified as zombies. But the main problem is the general lack of anything. Haunted House, for example, used this problem of 2600 programming to its advantage, because it’s supposed to be in the dark. Dark Chambers, well, yeah better not make a pun out of that one, let’s just leave it at the graphics suck.

At least it had graphics, one of the main problems with Dark Chambers is you hardly hear anything. There are, it seems, only about three sounds total and no music at all (at least as far as I played). It needed at least some sort of incindental sounds or something like Haunted House (since I mentioned it earlier). All you get are the shots of your gun, a bleep when you collect objects and a short explosion burst for enemies when they die. Almost nothing to hear at all.

As for the gameplay, Dark Chambers is set up like Gauntlet. Your task is to crawl around each maze, find a key, if necessary, locate the exit and move on to the next stage while collecting various items if you feel like it. To take out enemies, shoot your gun. Wait, what? Why do I have a gun in a fantasy type game with label art reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons? Check it out before I complain some more:

The main problem with Dark Chambers is the play is entirely uneventful. Very little happens throughout each dreadful maze, all of which look the same. The mazes are bland, not to mention short, and the enemies, well you almost feel bad for them because they move so damn slow. Apparently, as I’ve read, this game gets more ‘intense’ later on, but I didn’t stay long to find out. I played around six levels on expert facing no challenge whatsoever and promptly turned it off. I don’t care what comes later, it’s not worth it. The only good thing they have here is the sort-of interesting two-player simultaneous option. It doesn’t really make it any more fun, but if you and a friend are having trouble sleeping, well by all means give Dark Chambers a go. If you’re looking for a good dungeon crawl for the 2600, however, Dark Chambers is certainly not it.

As for the creativity, due to the history of Dark Chambers, I have to give it a little credit. The 2600 certainly couldn’t handle the power of Gauntlet, so this is really the best you could have hoped for. Problem is, the programmers should have realized immediately thereafter that it just didn’t work.

Dark Chambers has no replay value at all. I doubt anyone in their right mind would be able to make it further than I did, it’s just too boring. Strangely, I felt an odd sense of calm as I played it, almost relaxing. It’s not because I was having fun, though, it’s because it was almost like meditation. All I really did was focus on my breathing because there was nothing to focus on in the game. As for length, Dark Chambers is way, way too long. If you start on beginner you have to go from stage A to Z, whereas you start later in the alphabet for the other settings. That’s right, twenty-six levels of the garbage you saw in the video above.

Dark Chambers should have been shelved. If Atari was trying to milk the last bit out of the 2600, this shouldn’t have been a title to do it. If you’re looking for a good maze-crawl-type game for the system, you’re much better off with Secret Quest, which is a great title. Dark Chambers is too bland and has not aged well at all. Heck, the day it was released it hadn’t aged well.