If I do escape, I immediately sell all my loot in the merchant menu and shove the gold coins in my stash while I take on the next run wearing only what I brought out on my back Dark And Darker Gold. This is where Dark and Darker is most similar to Escape From Tarkov; buying incrementally better gear from merchants and working towards permanent class upgrades is a familiar grind. I'm not one to throw around the word "Sisyphean" but the threat of my loot boulder tumbling down the hill seems even greater than other extraction games. Instead, I strive towards level-gated perk slot upgrades and swapping my active skills for the Fighter and Rogue characters I'm levelling.

Dark and Darker - Three players congregate to heal one another in a torchlit dungeon

Dark and Darker's first-person melee combat is a bit like Skyrim—slash, step back, slash, block, get hit with an arrow despite blocking, repeat. It means I spend a lot of time doing that W and S waltz with a skeleton while knowing I may stumble backwards into an enemy player (or hell, just a closed door) and have my run cut short. Weapons have a series of automatic combos indicated by your reticle—diagonal right, diagonal left, then a thrust for the sword a Fighter starts with—so it's above the monotony of yon Tamriel melee, but not as skill-based as Chivalry 2.

That's the common denominator in my complaints so far. Dark and Darker's punishing enemy damage, from AI and players, demands a lot more skill than its combat system allows me to exert. This is no Chivalry 2, nor a FromSoftware game. Every fight I've been in so far has been clumsy—unwieldy brutes slowly sidestepping while weapons collide with walls, barrels, and sometimes what I was actually aiming at. The fact that there's no way to fully block an attack (at least with base-level gear) means the first one to land a hit is probably going to win, and so far, that means archers are very powerful. I've died often, and though I'm prone to hubris buy Dark And Darker Gold Coins, even I feel the skill ceiling pressing down on the back of my neck.