Dark Seekers - Dunkelschwamm

  

    Inspired by 'I am Legend' players fight the eponymous Dark Seekers in an abandoned city. Solve puzzles, find a way to escape, and beware the large amounts of high health enemies!

SCMapDB page

Authors: Goanna

Date of release: 2008

Maps in package: 2

Map review of Dark Seekers

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by dunkelschwamm | January 7, 2024 | 4838 characters

    Dark Seekers is a duo of horror maps based loosely on the I Am Legend scenario. In the first map you search buildings to find necessary items to solve puzzles while being harassed by the titular dark seekers- zombies which run and take quite a bit of damage to kill. The second map takes the players through a dark seeker infested subway tunnel, until they surface into a warzone where hostile soldiers battle dark seekers in the streets. Both maps are very different in gameplay tone, but manage to feel appropriate together in atmosphere and theme.

    The first map is slow in pace, with players being forced to slowly cure streets and buildings of swarms of the moderately beefy dark seekers, using only boilerplate weapons at first like the glock and shotgun. There's a rather mean trap early on where players can fall into a sewer where two especially beefy dark seekers certainly kill the player. We killed the seekers by firing on them from outside the sewer, but then when we jumped back down to explore we learned the dark seekers were there as a substitute to a kill mask- the sewer is inescapable.

    Exploring the map isn't terribly difficult or annoying because there's a checklist in the spawn of each map telling you exactly what to do. Also doors are fairly obvious in the simple, blocky city. There's one door in particular that doesn't work unless you crawl through one of its glass panes, which is strange. Most doors teleport the player to a separate interior location, which is a tad disorienting, and very distressing when it leads to players telefragging one another. Players can find a wealth of supplies and a couple new weapons in the warehouse, where I think the puzzle reads the most poorly- players are meant to interact with big wood brushes that are actually planks, to place on the steel shelves after finding their way on top of them with a fork lift, so they can cross the steels to a row of windows, where only one window is destructible, leading to a big room with a few dark seekers and a door that must be unlocked with a key found in another building. Meanwhile, the warehouse constantly floods with headcrabs reskinned to be giant bugs (I think I missed that part of the source material).

    The second map has its own share of annoyances. Running along the subway tunnel, until the subway car is freed from its gate, means staying clear of the rail to avoid electrical damage. It's not the most compelling environment to battle running, health-heavy zombies. The doors here are also a little more confusing- one didn't seem to work, and one seemed to lead players to a drop to their deaths. There's switches which don't have obvious consequences, which made running through this part of the map kind of a random rush of pressing and crushing everything we came across without much thought.

    Then we go topside, and that feeling is amplified. Fighting endlessly spawning soldiers and dark seekers until we find our objectives is a frantic scramble. It's very rewarding when it leads to the arsenal in the gun shop which allows us to battle the military osprey shortly before the map ends.

    The brushwork of these maps is mostly simple and lacking in detail- with the exception of some bathroom props that look great. However, it's always easy enough to see what everything is meant to be, and the dim lighting and gritty textures carry a discernable mood throughout the maps.

    While a lot of what I describe when recapping the maps is annoyances, I had a lot of fun with Dark Seekers. A lot of the annoying bits are over quickly, any of the weird jank that made progress unreadable was discovered through quick experimentation thanks to the overall simplicity of the visuals, and there's a sense of satisfaction with the escalation of each map.

    Overall, I would recommend Dark Seekers, especially if you can get a nice group of players with you. With two players I could see this dragging just a little too long, but we had three and that felt like a magic number.

Pros:

• The Dark Seekers never get terribly old as enemies, even when the map keeps throwing them at us
• The atmosphere is memorable and has character
• The drivable vehicles in the second map are great
• Good steady escalation of action
• The checklists at the beginning of the map really help keep players on task

Cons:

• The maps are kinda blocky and ugly
• Some progression isn't really signposted, like players are just supposed to intuit what to do next
• The respawning headcrabs sucked
• The tunnel with the electric rail was annoying and lasted way too long
• The doors teleporting the players were disorienting

Score: 6 / 10