Dark Auction positions itself as a visual novel with one of the more intriguing premises tackled in the genre. Players comfortable with a rather straightforward pace and lack of challenge will likely enjoy the ride and some of the strange twists in store.
Dark Auction would have been right at home on my PlayStation Vita in 2013, sandwiched between the releases of Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.
Virtue’s Last Reward was my first adventure game by way of visual novel. I saw the universal praise the game received and, having a minimal number of titles on my Vita, decided to pick the game up. I was obsessed and played nothing else until I had accessed every potential time-hopping ending.
Over the years I’ve played a handful of chatty adventure games that relish in narrative and writing over discernible gameplay mechanics outside of clicking on options here and there. And despite the limited amount of interaction, there’s a welcome place in the medium for great stories regardless of the delivery method. Were I to actually investigate visual novels more, I would likely find many across the spectrum of quality, not just the ones that rise above the pile and receive high marks on review aggregators.
Dark Auction fascinates with its premise.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Dark Auction is a game more or less centered around items and people attached to Adolf Hitler. That being said, Hitler isn’t explicitly mentioned. Instead, developer IzanagiGames refers to this illusive figure as “Dictator X”. Additionally, the game was originally going to be called Dark Auction: Hitler’s Estate but any references to arguably the worst figure in Earth’s history have been removed from the game. IzanagiGames doesn’t hide this revelation for long. Shortly in, players are treated to an obscured photo of Dictator X and his trademark mustache. Set in the 1980s and referencing events in the 1940s, Dark Auction is meant to be a narrative about generational sins and trauma and how people deal with a past that haunts them.
As 18-year-old Noah Crawford, players step into the shoes of the young man following his father to Dictator X’s shadowy castle, one where a mysterious auction is taking place. Noah stumbles into the auction finding his father dead in a chair with a strange device attached to his head. The titular Dark Auction’s auctioneer–a parrot-headed figure–recognizes Noah’s desperation for answers and invites him to assist him in seeing the auction through, promising more information along the way.
Over the course of several chapters, Noah becomes embroiled in the Dark Auction and attempts to guide himself and the five other “bidders” towards ultimately winning their item. He is fed information by the auctioneer and directed towards finding out clues that will enable each participant towards telling the truth about their lives. As an added twist, a clandestine organization is working towards extracting the DNA memories of each participant for potentially nefarious purposes.
What makes Dark Auction intriguing is how it blends this science fiction premise with a kind of murder mystery intrigue, all in the backdrop of historical fiction. Within the first full chapter of the game, the player is presented with numerous questions that will take time to be answered. And honestly, that’s the fuel for continuing this 15- to 20-hour journey.
Dark Auction‘s cross to bear is that it straddles the line between a visual novel and a traditional adventure game. In the former, the player has some modicum of agency, perhaps able to choose a few responses to add color to the narrative and how they wish to react to the story, characters, and world. In the latter, players might try and piece together puzzles or dissect the narrative to dive deeper into the mystery. Either way, the result is usually the same and players may reach a canonical or good ending but the experience is still relatively linear.
An important thing to keep in mind with Dark Auction is that it is an extremely linear game. It is almost impossible to fail any scenario during its “gameplay” segments. While the player has the option to wander around the castle, it is devoid of life and purpose outside of where the narrative directs. Characters don’t wander around waiting to be talked to. Rather, Noah will stumble upon them walking to a destination or they will be waiting outside of a room. And when two dialog options are presented, the “wrong” one will literally just force the player to choose the “correct” one to continue the dialog.
Honestly, I’m fine with a straightforward narrative, a lack of involved gameplay, and a chain of interactions that lead from one story beat to the next. The issue is that IzanagiGames incorporated far too much repetition into the flow of Dark Auction. There’s no opportunity for the player to ask questions the game isn’t ready to answer. For example, Noah is told that he can come to the castle’s library and make an inquiry on whatever subject he would like. The player is told that Noah’s father is a writer who wrote a book that Noah has yet to read. Every instinct in me wanted to immediately go into the library and request to read that book but, of course, that was not a nugget the game wanted to reveal to me yet.
Some players may feel stifled by this forward locomotion when they realize there is no reason to do anything other than make a beeline towards the next objective marker. I was perfectly content with moving from one scene to the next but over the course of the game, navigating Noah through rooms, up the elevator, and down hallways can feel like padding.
But the more irksome element of Dark Auction‘s linearity was how it presented the flow of narrative. Noah wakes up, gets directions from the auctioneer, puts on a suit, goes down for breakfast, speaks to everyone, gets involved with a participant, speaks to the auctioneer who questions him, more exploration and investigating, then comes the auction phase. These steps are repeated, almost verbatim to Noah and the player. The auctioneer constantly asks the player who they are meant to look into and what the object is that’s being bid on.
Story and gameplay beats aren’t broken up enough early on and a feeling of repetition sets in. By the third day the pattern was starting to show itself, not only with the pace but with how characters were going to act. Noah would work to get to know a participant better, inquire about their past, engage in conversations with others, and eventually use information gathered over the day for the auction phase. It felt like the following chapters were going to play out exactly the same and that’s not the best feeling.
Dark Auction has a lot of interesting world-building and interplay between characters. Yet I think Noah gets a little too much plot armor to keep the action going. Noah is told by the auctioneer that he isn’t allowed to reveal that he is being given directions. But Noah’s actions and the desire to speak to everyone is waved off numerous times by him saying, “I just want to talk” or “I want to speak plainly” or some variation of that sentiment. Because of this, there seems to be no stakes for the player as Noah. No matter what, he is going to be the one assisting in the bidding because everyone wants him to provide support for their own individual reasons.
Some of this could have been alleviated with idle moments where the players could choose a few characters to interact and build rapport with. I enjoyed the cast and their motives and truly wanted to spend more time with them. But the writing makes them act in ways that has a tendency to rush the proceedings along despite the long runtime.
The secondary portion of Dark Auction involves the auction itself. Because the player is usually not allowed to leave a room without investigating or discovering everything, players shouldn’t fear not having required knowledge to progress. When the auction starts, the player is using all knowledge acquired to construct a participant’s “truth” by filling in holes in their memories or correcting what they believe to be fact.
The gameplay here involves memories played like still frames of a film. In one segment, players must place the correct item on a spot in the frame. In another, they have to arrange memories in the order they happened. In another, they must identify false elements in a frame to remove anything false. Incorrectly identifying a falsehood or misplacing an object will harm the participant’s memory and eventually the player could fail enough times to kill the person. But I can’t imagine that happening without intentionally trying to do so.
Dark Auction is a generous game and lenient with mistakes and saves. IzanagiGames wants players to press on with the journey and not put up too many roadblocks. These memory reconstruction moments during the auction aren’t particularly harrowing and come across as extremely simple. For the narrative implications, I was entirely fascinated by what the game’s mysterious organization was doing and how they had this technology. But being able to predict the flow of these moments did take a lot of the stress off for me.
And I have to say, while I enjoyed many character moments and the extremely strange story beats, it’s hard to ignore a few key elements that Dark Auction presents.
When dealing with what is a Hitler-adjacent character, one might expect IzanagiGames to touch on the atrocities of World War II. While referring to him as Dictator X does take some of the fangs away and make it somewhat more palatable to a broader audience, Dark Auction does some historical maneuvering to make it not entirely set in the world where the horrors of World War II happened. While the Dictator is an explicit reference, it’s almost alternate universe stuff and not just because of the science fiction elements.
Side-stepping this isn’t a sin unto itself but a few ways the narrative tackles the cast’s relationship to Dictator X feel a little too sanitized. Those bidding on items in the Dark Auction have an obvious connection to this looming character. Part of winning the auction is to receive these items in hopes they will heal some deep, years-long emotional wound. The build-up towards this resolution is intriguing but in a few instances feels too tidy considering the subject matter. Look, we know who Hitler was and the evils he committed. Even if Dictator X isn’t the Hitler, that’s what we are made to believe. Without spoiling anything, I will admit that some of the resolutions felt a bit unearned consideration the direct line to Dictator X and what kind of person IzanagiGames perhaps should expect us to see. However, I did appreciate the overarching theme of trying to build a better future despite the horrors of the past still haunting you.
A narrative can be digested numerous ways by any player. Despite my qualms with Dark Auction‘s storytelling, I still had a good time watching it all unfold, even if many things felt like placeholders or too convenient. I loved the character art and the moody music along with the jazzy tunes that blended the 1940s aesthetic with the 1980s. Character art was great but less stellar when turned into 3D models awkwardly walking around the setting.
All that being said, Dark Auction features some extremely blatant AI and low-effort art. The first item up for bid is a painting called “Girl With Flowers” and when it’s shown, it has that distinct “AI” feel. Paintings shown in the halls of the participants’ floors appear to be that faux-impressionist style. And when players engage with the memory reconstructions, it uses what looks like stock or generated images, except faces are obscured or eyes are given black holes to indicate it being a fuzzy memory. Plus, whenever these images were displayed during the gameplay, they always lacked a lower resolution, making them feel like copy and paste jobs.
Look, I’m not going to entirely discredit a game for using AI assets. A cursory look into Dark Auction has indicated that IzanagiGames is looking to update the game with different, original assets. When that happens it will be easier to be more immersed in the world and what is working to present. But right now it is hard to ignore on a game where there’s plenty of clever ideas and fetching art. It permeates the entirety of Dark Auction in a way that didn’t ruin my experience but merely made me wish I could have seen original art by the team. Again, these are primarily still frames presented in scenes meant to deliver an emotional impact. It shouldn’t look like they came from a stock images website.
Dark Auction positions itself as a visual novel with one of the more intriguing premises tackled in the genre. Players comfortable with a rather straightforward pace and lack of challenge will likely enjoy the ride and some of the strange twists in store.
