Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wished that you could perform archaic forms of surgery with rusty tools as blood and pus flies everywhere? If the answer is 'Yes' then you're in luck! Yes, thanks to the fine people at ArmorGames now you too can lose yourself in a world of grimy pain thanks to Dark Cut, the internet's primary Horrific Surgery Simulator™!
If the answer was no, then I suggest you go somewhere else instead.
I've said before that these little games that you can find on tHeINtErnEt.com can be a fantastic way to spend a little time. Then they become a fantastic way to spend a lot of time. Then they become a time-consuming behemoth that will not rest until they've sucked the life out of you. I'd managed to kick the Curve Ball habit, and deal with my Nuclear Eagle addiction and was feeling pretty confident about not getting sucked in again. The thing is, this game is different to all the others and therein lies its allure.
The premise is simple - you are a doctor in the dark ages and must perform medical procedures without killing your patient. The controls of the game are very simple, at each stage of the level an appropriate tool appears and the mouse is used to control that tool to perform the required action - be that slicing the flights from an arrow, sawing an arrow shaft in half or hammering it all the way through the patient's leg.
Hammering wood through a leg. Yesterday.Fairly straightforward and easy. The only problem is that if you make any mistakes then you end up hurting the patient. So, say you're sawing the shaft of the arrow, if you're too vigorous with the saw you end up wounding your patient, but if not vigorous enough you'll never cut through. You have to find the right balance. This is made all the more difficult by the near constant blood splatters and twitches and by the very nature of the tasks you have to perform. Here's what your plague patient ends up looking like.
Pus and leeches and slit veins to relieve pressure. Lovely. And yet it stillmanages to seem cleaner than an NHS hospital. Ah-ha ha ha.[/satire]
Biting political commentary aside, I love this game. It may not be overly complicated or have that many levels but there's a definite atmosphere to the game that I find particularly absorbing. The crepy music and basic graphics only add to that sense of griminess. The ideal way to play this game is in the dark whilst slightly drunk. Sure, you can play it stone cold sober in the middle of the day but you're not getting the best out of it if you do.
Worryingly for any future plans of other activity I may have had, there's also a Dark Cut 2 that takes place in the American Civil War and requires you to remove shrapnel wounds and perform rudimentary brain surgery as cannonballs explode all around you. The patients react more vigorously with twitches and screams of agony which really throw your aim off. Also there's a level where you have to saw your own leg off.
I love me some of that Will-To-Live-Meter!Whoever knew that surgeons were so badass?
