Darksiders (2010)
Darksiders is a 2010 role-playing (rpg) video game made by Vigil Games and THQ.
Summoned to end a war between Heaven and Hell, the Horseman War arrives on Earth too early, and the apocalypse ignites without him. Framed for the slaughter and stripped of his power, he cuts a bargain with the Charred Council to hunt down whoever set him up. Darksiders swings a giant sword through demon-choked ruins and angelic strongholds, but its bones are pure adventure game: locked dungeons, clever relics, puzzle-gated progress. War is a blunt, vengeful brute, and the ruined city he stalks feels biblical in scale, littered with the bones of a world that ended overnight.
Quick answers
What is Darksiders about?
Summoned to end a war between Heaven and Hell, the Horseman War arrives on Earth too early, and the apocalypse ignites without him. Framed for the slaughter and stripped of his power, he cuts a bargain with the Charred Council to hunt down whoever set him up. Darksiders swings a giant sword through demon-choked ruins and angelic strongholds, but its bones are pure adventure game: locked dungeons, clever relics, puzzle-gated progress. War is a blunt, vengeful brute, and the ruined city he stalks feels biblical in scale, littered with the bones of a world that ended overnight.
When was Darksiders released?
Darksiders was released on 5 January 2010.
Who made Darksiders?
Darksiders was made by Vigil Games and THQ.
Similar games
Explore Darksiders guides
Darksiders in our writing
- Companion guide: Angels & the Divine
- Companion guide: Demons & the Infernal
A few thoughts on Darksiders
Fullmetal Alchemist shares the DNA, a world scarred by sin, transmutation, and homunculi named for deadly vices. For the apocalyptic grandeur, King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King carries the same dread. Then chase Spawn, the comic about a damned soldier bargaining with Hell for one more shot at vengeance.
Apocalyptic wars between Heaven, Hell and everything between
War rides out early and gets blamed for the end of the world, a scale of divine conflict that Constantine shares with its occult detective caught between angels and demons, and that Berserk matches with its own hell-spawned armies overrunning a doomed kingdom. God of War's Norse gods and The Witcher 3's supernatural Wild Hunt both pit a lone warrior against forces that outrank him.
Puzzle-gated adventures where every locked door hides a trick
Darksiders wraps its sword-swinging combat around Zelda-style dungeons, relics, and gated progress, the exact structure that drives Portal and Portal 2's test chambers and Half-Life 2's physics-based obstacles. Skyrim's ruin-crawling and puzzle-locked vaults share that same rhythm of exploration rewarded with a key, a relic, or a door that finally opens.
Epic fantasy sagas where gods and mortals go to war
Darksiders stages its fight between Heaven and Hell on a biblical scale, the same size of conflict that runs through Brisingr's dragon-rider uprising, Oathbringer's war among ancient orders, and The Song of Achilles's retelling of gods meddling in a mortal war. Wizard and Glass's quest across a crumbling, half-ruined world shares that same sense of an age ending badly.
Dark, mythic music built for a battlefield at the end of the world
Darksiders scores its ruined cities with organ-heavy dread, a mood that matches King Crimson's apocalyptic In the Court of the Crimson King and Fates Warning's The Spectre Within. Judas Priest's Painkiller and Cradle of Filth's IX Equilibrium bring the same theatrical, metal-clad menace, and the Return of the King soundtrack's orchestral scale fits a war this size just as well.