The Darkest Tales Review – Chopping Up Your Favorite Fairy Tales

We live in a time where the darkness of Fairy Tales are starting to come back into the public eye. With games like Life of P on the horizon, we are seeing a new resurgence of darker tellings of Fairy Tales. The Darkest Tales happens to be the next dark telling of a Fairy Tale, and is similar to that same type of theme.

Game Name: The Darkest Tales
Platform(s): PC (Reviewed), Xbox, Nintendo Switch 
Publisher(s): 101XP
Developer(s): Trinity Team
Release Date: October 13th, 2022
Price: $19.99

The Darkest Tales takes place as Teddy the bear is awakened by a fairy named Lighty. This fairy is asking for help in waking up Alicia, who has been suffering from nightmares, which is keeping her asleep. To accomplish his goal, Lighty gives Teddy power in mundane weapons to take care of the evil-looking fairy tale creatures inside Alicia. The goal, defeat them all to get her to wake up. You get some great fights against monsters of all kinds and characters in Fairy Tale settings, Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, and Maleficent. You traverse into Neverland, the Giant’s house at the top of the beanstalk, and other places in the game.

Through the Dream World

The Darkest Tales is a 2D platformer that is very fast-paced. You start out with just a jump and slice with two swords fashioned from scissors. Along the way, you will get a boost to your inventory and your ability arsenal. You’ll eventually earn the ability to perform double jumps, dashes, wall jumps, and spike stabs to keep you up in the air along dangerous obstacles.

Each new area comes with a lot of new variety in how you traverse through its terrain. You get to kill gingerbread men zombies, giant wolfs, bears, dwarves, and a large arsenal of other Fairy Tale members. Each added weapon also adds an enemy to be overcome with the new weapon.

Each level has a shattered window that allows you to go anywhere else there is a shattered window in the game when you want to backtrack. It also has some save spots throughout the levels that allow you to equip skills you earn or find throughout the game. Each level also has a story of the realm you are in with each monster you get to fight. One, in particular, that was sad I can remember is Sleeping Beauty being cursed and is now no longer able to sleep due to waking up from the sleeping curse. She slowly was going crazy with basically staying up forever. You get these kinds of stories with many of the characters you meet in the world of The Darkest Tales.

Neverland

The graphical presentation was very smooth and hardly had any drops. To be honest, though, I actually played most of this game on Steam Deck as a test to see what kinds of things I would need to tinker with to get specific early releases to run smoothly. Luckily it ran flawlessly on my Steam Deck. Odds are The Darkest Tales won’t need almost any work for it to get verified on Steam Deck. On my computer, it ran at a perfect 60fps with an RTX 3060 graphics card, though the game doesn’t really need a whole lot to run it. The designs and the aesthetics of the horror elements were fantastical, and it portrayed the atmosphere of this game fabulously. Each level has a sense of dread, even with the more quiet moments in the game.

Teddy the Killer

I do have one big gripe with The Darkest Tales… It doesn’t have a map. On the early levels, this is fine as the levels themselves are pretty linear and only have one route you can go. However, once you get more traversal abilities and levels become a lot bigger, figuring out where you need to go or where you just were is frustrating. I love having the options, but it makes it much more challenging to figure out what I need to do in each segment.

In one level, I got soft-locked due to me exploring a segment of the level I wasn’t supposed to be allowed in, apparently. I had to revert to an earlier save to not go that route to be able to get down there later on. I was sad it happened, but overall, it only made me glad I was saving in more than just one save slot. Definitely make sure you’re saving multiple times to avoid a frustrating fate.

Overall The Darkest Tales is a fantastic game with lots of great moments for a game that is only about 6-9 hours long. And I enjoyed the end way more than I expected. I definitely recommend The Darkest Tales game who anyone who likes 2D platformer games with a hint of Metroidvania.

The Darkest Tales is available on Xbox, Nintendo Switch(EU), and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: The Darkest Tales was provided to us by 101XP for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy for more info.

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