Darwin’s Paradox! is a surprising game. You play as a cartoon octopus, for one, who finds itself thrust into an alien conspiracy to take over the world. Thankfully, octopi are surprisingly well-suited to infiltrating and destroying alien facilities, so that’s what you do. You stick to walls, avoid aliens, camouflage, sabotage top-secret facilities, shoot ink. You know, octopus stuff.
We should start with how the game looks, because it looks great. It’s particularly gorgeous when you’re underwater, but it’s not bad when you’re inside buildings either. The lighting effects are excellent as well and are used to great effect in the gameplay at times, such as one sequence where you’re avoiding mines when it’s pitch black, except for a light source passing by every few seconds in a tube. The cutscenes are suitably cartoony, the aliens reminding me of something from Ratchet and Clank when they’re not in their suits, whilst in their suits, they move robotically and occasionally take off their head to take a clipboard or something from their neck. They’re not experts at blending in, really.
Despite the cartoony style, Darwin’s Paradox! gets incredibly tense at times. The game plays mostly like a puzzle platformer, except that a lot of the time, the hazards you’re avoiding are vision cones of enemies. It’s quite unique, what with being an octopus. You can just walk/slurp/whatever-an-octopus-does up walls and across ceilings, which makes you think “how do I get up there?” a couple of times before you adjust to it properly. You can also camouflage against any surface, essentially making yourself invisible to enemies unless they walk into you. When you’re carefully picking your way through a crowd of enemies, each on their own patrol path, avoiding their vision cones and patrol, it’s at its best.
Darwin’s Paradox! gets pretty inventive mechanically and, other than the octopus’ abilities, it moves through ideas at a rate of knots. Early on you do a lot of finding your way through groups of aliens, but later there’ll be cameras and sharkbots to avoid, to mention just a couple. This means that if a particular section isn’t too enjoyable for you then you can rest assured that it won’t last too long. The same is true of the puzzles, which aren’t especially taxing but are enjoyable to solve. It’s not all slow-paced puzzling either, there’s sections involving chases and escapes that get pretty fast and stressful.
As is typical of games like this, though, when you do get stuck it gets pretty frustrating. It doesn’t help that the hint system that’s built into the game was never actually helpful, as whenever I used it, it just told me something I already knew, not an actual hint for what I was supposed to be doing to progress.
Thankfully, it’s a very funny game, which helps take the edge off the many deaths. There’s usually some silliness happening in the background, like a section where there’s a giant room full of hundreds of aliens practicing martial arts and you have to move across the room whilst their moves have turned them away. Even when something specific isn’t happening, things are just generally over the top enough that I was smiling most of the time I was playing. Except for the mushroom field. We don’t mention the mushroom field.
Darwin’s Paradox! is very short. I finished the game in two sessions, around four hours altogether. There’s collectibles you can look for, though I got half of them just playing normally, and you unlock skins for the octopus as well, including a Solid Snake one from Metal Gear Solid. Outside of this there isn’t too much replayability, it is a puzzle game primarily and once you know the solutions there isn’t really much to do but relive the experience.
There are also a handful of areas where the camera clips through the environment whilst moving, sometimes even blocking the player so you can’t see what you’re doing, which isn’t great. Some aliens have a sonar that you can see the range of when it pulses, but it fades out slightly before its maximum range, which was a pain to judge. Outside of that, there’s also a weird moment at the beginning where it gives you a tutorial for a few abilities, then takes them away and introduces them to you again for some reason, which is redundant and… just a bit strange.