D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die was one of our favorite games of last year, and finally it’s available on Steam. Thankfully, it’s much more playable off the bat than Access Games Deadly Premonition.

Dark Dreams Don’t Die was released last year and was exclusive to the Xbox One. After many fans asked for a port of it to PC, the dream of Swery fans and the curious passerby now have a chance to play one of the weirdest, but fun, gaming experiences available right now. I’m happy to say that the port is quite good.

Settings and performance

There’s a distinct lack of options. However, the game isn’t particularly demanding.

Frame rate was a bit interesting, but never detracted from the overall experience. For the most part, the game held at a constant 60 FPS, with some bits midway staying at an oddly steady 51 FPS no matter what was being displayed on the screen. All scenes where action is required (besides the exploration, the rest of the game takes place during quick time events) ran at a solid 60 frames.

The only other interesting thing that I noticed, which also seemed to be something that the Xbox One experienced, was when more than one frame was in the picture. When two frames (as shown below) are shown, the frame rate would dip to a constant 45 FPS, and three frames brought on 33 FPS. There were some exceptions to this rule where, for whatever reason, the game would sit at a stable 60 FPS. Everything for the most part was playable and looked fine.

Known bugs/issues/complaints

• BUG: Some people (including myself) have experience a light flickering in mirrors.
• BUG: Some people (including myself) have run into a memory issue if the game is left running idle for too long.
• COMPLAINT: There doesn’t seem to be a way to force a resolution higher than 1080 yet.

Controls

This is a port of a game that was intended for use with Kinect. The game is point and click for movement, and has quick time events for action. The entire game can be played with just the mouse, but camera movement can be controlled with the WASD keys respectively. I had to use this option as the default camera movement (Mouse 3 + Mouse Movement) didn’t seem to work for me, but after looking around no one else has reported this issue. During the quick time events, mouse movements replace the waving of a hand in a direction and clicking the grasping of said hand.

Video performance example

Below is the opening scene of the game running on the following system:

• GPU: EVGA GTX 970 SC Edition (No OC)
• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 840 @3.2GHz
• RAM: 8GB DDR3 1333

Overall

If you missed this because you don’t have an Xbox One, now is the time to check it out. The game is available for $15 on Steam,the Playism Store, GOG.com and the Humble Store. The Playism Store also has a demo available if you would like to see how well it runs on your system before purchase.

Ethics Disclosure: I was provided a Steam key by Playism (the publisher) so I could give the port a report.