DarkSwitch Review – Holding the Line

When it comes to mainstream games, the city builder genre has mainly focused on modern-day settings. Fantasy settings have largely been relegated to indie development. However, Cyber Temple proves with DarkSwitch that a fantasy city builder can stand shoulder to shoulder with the genre’s biggest names, thanks to its unique setting, clever twists on traditional planning and management, and a gripping narrative.

"What truly sets DarkSwitch apart is how it rethinks the core act of planning and building your city."

At first glance, DarkSwitch invites obvious comparisons with another narrative-centric city builder, Frostpunk. You have to plan your city’s build around a large, circular structure, make tough decisions across various aspects like research and resource priorities, and there’s even a hostile, seemingly natural phenomenon that contributes to an ever-growing “fear” meter that, when maxed out, essentially means game over.

What truly sets DarkSwitch apart is how it rethinks the core act of planning and building your city. The entire game revolves around building a settlement on and around the trunk of a massive tree. This means that, along with the 2D layout of the ground, you also get to play around with the Z-axis when figuring out where to put important buildings or how to plan your citizens’ daily commutes.

While it may sound like little more than a gimmick at first, just about every aspect of not only the core gameplay, but also the visuals and narrative of DarkSwitch revolve around this simple fact.

"The entire game revolves around building a settlement on and around the trunk of a massive tree."

When it comes to the second-to-second gameplay, things start off quite hectic. You begin with several homeless citizens in your settlement, and you need to figure out how you can feed them, house them, and put them to work. While the first two are simple enough, send them to forage for some raw food and set up a cooking house to turn it into more nutritious rations, that third one is where things get more complicated.

You have three types of citizens: laborers, scouts, and artisans. While seemingly interchangeable, just about every task benefits from careful micromanagement over who is assigned where. A fishing hut, for example, gets a productivity boost from laborers, and a penalty from artisans. Guard towers, on the other hand, benefit more from scouts than laborers. Just about every building and task has nuances like this that you’ll need to keep an eye on, especially since the harsh world of DarkSwitch also causes your available worker pool to fluctuate regularly.

After you’ve set up your core settlements, however, the general pace of DarkSwitch slows down quite a bit. You’re going to spend a lot more time waiting for resources to be gathered and processed or buildings to be built at this stage, and while this might sound like a drag to some players, I found it to be a fun break from a pace that would otherwise be too manic.

You finally get a chance to admire your planning along the tree trunk, after all. And make no mistake; while you won’t be doing too much in the mid-game, the tension never eases. Just as you start feeling a bit comfortable about your city, the game will start throwing new obstacles your way, be it the ever-encroaching magical fog, or a group of zealous templars looking to stamp out any form of resistance that might be hiding in your city.

DarkSwitch’s story has quite a bit going on. The world has been enshrouded by a fog that seems to have the magical ability to turn those caught in it insane. While the daytime seems to be quite safe, during the night, the fog tends to creep ever closer to human settlements.

If that weren’t problematic enough, there’s also a group of templars that seems to derive quite a bit of pleasure in “interrogating” regular citizens under the guise of investigating potential resistance. In the midst of all of this, you are tasked by the Archon to conduct some very important research, largely about the nature of the fog, in secret.

"After you’ve set up your core settlements, however, the general pace of DarkSwitch slows down quite a bit."

The first few hours of the story largely revolve around teaching you how to play DarkSwitch. Unfortunately, this tutorialization is also where the game’s flaws start becoming evident.

Rather than presenting players with objectives and gently guiding them by highlighting key UI elements, DarkSwitch instead stops you from doing anything and forces you to read a few back-to-back walls of text that will “helpfully” explain why you should, say, build housing to cure the homelessness crisis, or the importance of medical care centers around your city. While I have no problems with a game that wants to teach me how to play it, there has to be a better way to handle this than outright interrupting the player.

This issue persists for much of the game, since you’re also gradually unlocking brand new mechanics as you get deeper into the story. It gets especially frustrating when you start getting multiple quests to complete. For example, I was once planning out a lineup of Flameguard towers to make sure that the citizens I have working on the ground level don’t get engulfed by the fog during the dead of night. Right as I was about to put some of the buildings down, the game was interrupted by a tutorial message explaining how to scavenge discarded metal.

The building systems aren’t flawless either, but their issues are a bit more understandable. Since you are building your city around a massive tree and its surrounding areas, you often have to make decisions about whether the buildings you’re putting down should be on the ground, directly on the trunk, or on platforms built across the trunk.

Some buildings can only be built in one or two of these spots. While the choice is often easy, and you’ve likely decided on the ideal spot for, say, a new kitchen, well before actually clicking on the button, there’s extra friction because the game keeps trying to ‘intelligently’ guess where I want to place a building. A simple toggle for buildings that can be placed on multiple spots would have helped in this regard.

"The building systems aren’t flawless either, but their issues are a bit more understandable"

Interestingly, despite the complexity added to typical city-building gameplay by the existence of a vertical axis, the camera never really gave me too much trouble. You get two distinct camera modes that you can switch between at will, one that keeps the tree in the center and lets you navigate around it, and another that will feel more familiar to genre veterans, which lets you navigate in a more freeform way by using the WASD key cluster along with Q and E for rotation.

The visuals in DarkSwitch are also quite incredible, with its stylized take on the fantasy genre being a pleasure to look at. Seeing your citizens running around while they try to complete their tasks can often feel downright joyful despite the game’s generally dark fantasy setting. Of course, the fact that performance was stable certainly helped matters.

On a PC running on an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, a Radeon RX 7800 XT GPU, and 32 GB of RAM, I experienced essentially no slowdowns or hitches, with the frame rate holding steady at 60 FPS. Similarly, the moody audio soundscapes and music are also phenomenal, which should come as no surprise since it was handled by legendary Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka.

Thanks to its narrative focus and strong mission pacing, DarkSwitch does an excellent job of alternating between tense survival-driven stretches and quieter moments where you can appreciate the city you’ve built. Its tutorial interruptions and occasional building friction hold it back, but this is still an easy recommendation for city-builder fans and a strong one for newcomers willing to learn its systems.

This game was reviewed on PC.