Darkest of Days

• 1. Introduction

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  Darkest of Days drops the player into one of the most desperate last stands in American military history: the Battle of Little Big Horn, where General Custer's battalion is being wiped out. The soldier at the center of the story, Alexander Morris, survives not because he is a great warrior, but because a stranger in futuristic armor pulls him through a portal before history can finish its work. That opening moment sets up a question that runs through the entire game: if you could change a dark chapter of history, should you?

  Developed by 8monkey Labs and published by Phantom EFX, the game was originally released for the Xbox 360 before coming to Microsoft Windows via Steam. On the 22nd of December 2010, Virtual Programming brought it to Mac OS X. As of the 24th of August 2021, it was no longer available for purchase on Steam. For a game centered on preserving history, the trajectory of its own release history carries a certain irony.

  The time periods it visits range from the American Civil War and World War I to World War II, Ancient Rome, and even the late 22nd century. Each battlefield was reconstructed with the help of extensive historical research, down to the weapons, locations, and layouts of specific engagements. That commitment to accuracy sits at the heart of what 8monkey Labs was trying to build, and it both defines the game's appeal and exposes the limits that critics later identified.

• 2. Kronotek and the Opposition

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  Morris wakes up inside the headquarters of Kronotek, an organization that has developed time travel technology and describes its mission as researching and protecting history. A figure known only as "Mother" explains that Kronotek's founder, Doctor Koell, has gone missing, and that disturbances have begun appearing across the timeline, placing historically significant people in danger. Morris is assigned a partner named Agent Dexter, another soldier pulled from history who is implied to have vanished on 9/11.

  Because Morris comes from the 1800s, he needs a crash course in weaponry spanning from World War I all the way to the late 22nd century before he can operate effectively as a Kronotek agent. His first two assignments send him after Corporal Welsh of the Union Army at the Battle of Antietam and a Russian officer named Petrovich at the Battle of Tannenberg. Both missions are complicated by a rival group called the Opposition, which also possesses time-travel technology.

  The Opposition's interference turns out to have consequences that ripple across generations. Petrovich, labeled a traitor for abandoning his post, produces a son who enlists in the Russian Army during World War II instead of becoming a scientist. That son is eventually captured by the Wehrmacht and sent to a POW camp, drawing Morris and Dexter into a new mission that ends with Morris himself being taken prisoner. The game's structure forces the player to understand that even small changes to historical lives can cascade into entirely different futures.

• 3. Battles and Breadth

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  The Battle of Antietam missions feature massive cornfield engagements that reflect the scale of what 8monkey Labs was aiming to simulate. The Battle of Tannenberg, set during World War I, includes set pieces such as the dynamiting of a train bridge and the hijacking of a zeppelin. These moments give the game its identity as a time-travel shooter: familiar historical conflicts played out with futuristic weapons alongside period-accurate ones.

  The Marmoset engine, built by 8monkey Labs specifically for Darkest of Days, supports over 300 characters on screen at one time, each with its own AI and pathfinding. Mark Doeden, Art Director at 8monkey Labs, described the goal as making these epic historical moments feel "eerily accurate," and credited NVIDIA PhysX, a hardware-accelerated physics engine, with helping the team achieve that sense of physical reality. The Marmoset engine also shares a common set of sensory data across all AI characters, covering audio, vision, navigation, teammate signals, enemy fire detection, and object-finding behaviors.

  Despite that technical ambition, critics noted a significant structural limitation: the majority of the game's levels are concentrated in just two time periods. Many reviewers, including Francis Clarke of ApertureGames, singled this out as a disappointment given the premise's potential. The wide open battlefields allow players some freedom of movement, but invisible walls and obstacles impose limits throughout each map that reviewers also flagged.

• 4. Pompeii and the Final Revelation

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  Morris and Dexter track Doctor Koell to Pompeii on the 25th of August, 79 AD, the day Mount Vesuvius erupted and buried the city. The developers reportedly recreated much of the city with accuracy, and the sequence places the player in the middle of a Roman town being consumed by volcanic disaster while fighting through waves of Opposition agents. Koell is found in the town's arena and accompanies Morris and Dexter back to the 22nd century without resistance.

  What follows is the game's most narratively loaded scene. A man claiming to lead the Opposition reveals that the Opposition is, in fact, a future version of Kronotek. He explains that the Welsh twins and Petrovich were ancestors of scientists who invented a DNA sequencer capable of targeting genomes associated with racial identity. That sequencer was stolen and used to create a virus targeting people of European descent. Two billion people died as a result, including eight out of every ten people in North America.

  The Opposition, he says, averted this future by interfering with the timeline. When Koell still refused to sanction changing past events, citing his belief that "dark days teach valuable lessons and define who we are," the Opposition shot him twice. Morris and Dexter are then invited to join the future Kronotek. Dexter turns to the camera and asks, "What the Hell do we do now brother?" The ending leaves the central moral question open rather than resolved.

• 5. Critical Reception

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  Metacritic, the review aggregation site, categorized the PC version of Darkest of Days as receiving "mixed or average" reviews. The Xbox 360 version fared worse, landing in "generally unfavorable" territory. The gap between those two verdicts suggests that the platform experience made a meaningful difference to how players and critics received the game.

  PC Gamer UK offered one of the more positive assessments, calling it "a unique first person shooter," a label that acknowledges the game's genuinely unusual premise even if it stops short of a full endorsement. GameShark's response to the Xbox 360 version captured the tension at the center of many reviews: the site wrote that "technicalities take a pretty good game and drag it down into the realm of mediocrity," while also conceding that "automatic weapons during a Civil War battle...it's hard to pass that up."

  That last line points to what Darkest of Days offered that most shooters of the period could not: the visceral novelty of anachronism. The developers had built an engine capable of populating battlefields with hundreds of AI-driven soldiers and had done genuine research on every historical period in the game. The question critics kept returning to was whether the game had delivered fully on its own concept, and the answer, for most of them, was that it had come close but not quite arrived.