Darkiologist
The Darkiologist investigates strange leads from the dark web in the hope of unusual artifact discovery and riches. Venture into strange places, carefully excavate, crawl to discover and escape with as many artifacts as you can! Don't go to hard on your inhalers as you have a limited amount.
This build features and introduction level and a main level. Many thanks for all the feedback kindly provided so far. I have made some bugfixes based on this to the elements that were not functioning as intended.
KNOWN ISSUE When playing in browser: Godot's web build tends to lag with VFX and some new meshes on scene despite the preload precaution taken. I hope that this doesn't impact the experience. In addition some players have reported a occasional jumping of player view in browser. There is a windows executable download available to get the full intended experience.
Controls
WASD to move. Mouse to look. E to interact. Click to use selected tool on a excavation site. Q to use your inhaler. C to crawl. Shift to Sprint.
Background
The game was developed for the Brackeys Game Jam 2026.1 to fit the theme: 'Strange Places'.
Developed solo by peach3yd
Credits
SFX and Music: All creative common 0 resources from Freesound.org
Font: https://www.fontspace.com/fortyseven-nbp-font-f15533
Meshes:
https://mcpato.itch.io/house-interior-psx-assets
Download
Install instructions
Extract the exe and .pak to run the game
Comments
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Hi! Regarding VFX issues - this is a well known Godot issue and it occurs because materials and particle shaders has to be compiled for a specific device once they first appear in a scene. The solution is simple - create a scene that will show up on game start and under the overlay spawn every material (can apply to a cube for example) and particle system for a few frames, this way the shader compilation will happen before the game start and there will be no lags during the gameplay.
Quite scary game actually, you really nailed the ambience, and overall a great game!
Although i found it hard in the beginning to find artifacts, so a tutorial for that would have been nice.
Thank you very much for your feedback, I am happy that you enjoyed the experience! This is great feedback and I agree this is something to improve on to make it clearer to the player so they can enjoy the core mechanic
It hard to see anything, I could not remember if I could have a flashlight or not but cool little idea for the excavating mechanics !
Your font is missing a character to fallback to
Thank you for playing! There is no flashlight feature, to be honest I need to add a brightness setting to help as I now realise I created it based on my own settings without thinking. Thanks for the heads up on the character issue also