Well this, uh, mostly consisted of me just, like, walking around a mansion and delivering a letter. I get that this is meant to be a loose remake of Jack in the Dark — a quick ten-minute tech demo starring one Grace Saunders, meant to show the game’s engine in action — though I think the difference here is scale: while Jack in the Dark used all-new assets and locations, telling its own self-contained story, Grace in the Dark is in its entirety things that would go on to be in the full game: the mansion, the monster models, even one of the hallucinations you get where the mansion changes shape is one you get in the full game. Evidently, this is meant to give a sneak peek of the story, do a dramatic cast reveal of JODIE COMER and DAVID HARBOUR as the lead roles, and give an idea of what the full game is going to do… which means it loses a lot of its potential impact if you’ve already gone ahead and played the full game. I do like the little glimpse of a not-quite-on-kilter narrator in Grace, and I do like how certain things are utilized differently here than they are in the full game (the enemy models, specifically, and there’s a cool thing you can do on the stairs that you can’t in the main game), but as a whole… it would probably have been capable as a demo, as a little preview of what was to come. On its own, it’s a bit too short and a bit too straightforward to really be... much of anything. It’s no Jack in the Dark, that’s for sure.

Reviewed on Apr 03, 2024


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