A Despatch from the Dark Ice Cabinet
A crate arrived this morning bound in iron and stamped with the seal of a small foundry I had thought long shuttered. Heavy, oddly square, and more expensive to ship than to make. Inside, eight slim dossiers and a smaller sealed envelope dated two years later, marked for re-evaluation.
The crate concerns Darklight: Memento Mori — a 2018 Kickstarter from Dark Ice Games that announced itself, on the back of its enormous box, as inspired by the classics of the '80s and '90s and then meant it more literally than most. Eighty percent Warhammer Quest, twenty percent Souls-born, served at the temperature of an indie pressing that could not afford to be polite. The dossiers move in order: an unboxing, a four-part solo run with the Exorcist that ends exactly as you’d expect a solo run against a dread worm to end, the review, a deep cut on the journey-and-settlement metagame nobody else had filmed, and — eighteen months later, in a different mood — a revisit.
The Keeper notes that the game is now effectively dead: the publisher has moved on, the print run reportedly underwater. Yet the designer remained on BoardGameGeek long enough to release replacement monster and hero cards that the community now plays with exclusively. Shelf-life and afterlife in the same crate.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Darklight Memento Mori - Take a Look — Coffin-box unboxing of a 10-chapter Act 1 campaign nested inside a random-objective-room engine.
- Darklight Memento Mori - Let’s Play - Part 1 — Solo Exorcist setup, Devotion skill, three random miracles drawn, first spike trap.
- Darklight Memento Mori - Let’s Play - Part 2 — Control Evil used to weaponise deviants against their own kin; oil flask one-shots the devourers.
- Darklight Memento Mori - Let’s Play - Part 3 — Dread worm in the Necros Stream room, then a darkness-roll-1 lurker ambush mid-boss-fight.
- Darklight Memento Mori - Let’s Play - Part 4 — Auto-max critical hit ignores armour; the Exorcist dies in one swing, exactly on brand.
- Darklight Memento Mori - The Review — The anti-Gloomhaven: randomness, cruelty, three radically different character chassis.
- Darklight Memento Mori - Journey and Settlement Phases — The first footage anywhere of the dread wheel, the haggle roll, and the Accursed Guild’s level-up cost.
- Revisiting Darklight Memento Mori — Two years on: under-tested but excellent, with a community house-rule sheet doing the balancing the publisher never finished.
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– The Keeper
Notes that a game whose designer is still patching it on the forum two years after release is, in its way, more alive than most games whose publishers have moved on to the next thing.