Everything's a bit funny with the chunky pixels of The Darkside Detective

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The Darkside Detective is a point-and-click adventure set in Twin Lakes City, where demons, the undead, and cultists are a regular problem. The Darkside Division are tasked with dealing with occult crimes in Twin Lakes, but there's only enough room in the budget for one detective: Francis McQueen.

The Darkside Detective uses pixel art to make the strange seem mundane, to bring to life a town where zombies on the lawn are just one of those things, where ghosts in the library are the purview of one detective and a uniformed cop who sometimes buddies up with you, Sam & Max style.
 
Creators Spooky Doorway released The Darkside Detective earlier this year, and it earned a mention in our list of the best detective games thanks to its winning writing and a soundtrack by Ben Prunty of FTL fame. But its chunky graphics are worth celebrating too, perfectly crafted for an adventure game where you don't have to pixel hunt for tiny details. Everything is upfront, and its faceless characters aren't hiding anything. 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.