While perusing my local bricks and mortar digital media retailer I was interrupted in my musings on when this struggling species would be extinct at the sight of a game that has no business selling for $20.

The Darkness is fantastic, people should be offering their first born for this game, not fishing it out from underneath Fifa games and Wii shovelware. But though and behold, you can have it for a song.

Swedish game maestro’s Starbreeze had a hard act to follow with their spectacular Xbox release Riddick Escape from Butcher Bay. In 2007 they decided to create another FPS game and again buck the trend of war games and Halo clones with The Darkness, adapted from the comic book of the same name by Topcow. I read the comic from its first issue till about its twentieth and enjoyed it; as a companion book to the boob fest (as in ladies breasts) of Witchblade, The Darkness was flashy, exploitative and very violent. Jackie Estacado, a cocky twenty year old mafia hitman leading a playboy lifestyle has his life hijacked by a supernatural power that manifests itself on his 21st birthday and, as its named, only works in the dark. He is hounded by a cult called the Brotherhood of Darkness who worship his power and want to equally use him against and protect him from the Angelus, the nemesis power to the Darkness that works in the light.

Starbreeze took the concept and the characters and sucked out all the joy and light and flashiness and created a game even bleaker than the rusted existence of Butcher Bay. They left out the Brotherhood of Darkness stuff and instead made Jackie's main enemies crooked cops and the Mafia that had been his family for so long. One of the key things they kept and developed on, in a far more interesting way than the comic ever did, was the sentience of The Darkness power. After your power manifests early in the game it speaks to you, coerces you, even encourages you to cut loose and kill the people. While you can use a variety of guns in the game they pale in comparison to the power of The Darkness. When activated you have tentacles that you can use to whip out nearby light sources, yet are strong enough to toss around cars and skewer enemies, two serpentine heads hover at the edge of your vision and snap at enemies, these snakes can also be sent through small passages or around corners to ambush enemies and can eat the hearts of corpses to increase your overall power. As you progress you unlock more elaborate powers such as summoning black holes and The Darkness guns.

As in Butcher Bay you have a number of small side quests you can choose to do for people you meet from time to time which can unlock extra content. But the stand out feature of The Darkness is a single player plot that ranks among the best game storylines of all time. It’s like an intimate crime drama with a supernatural angle. But I must prewarn you, the ending of the game is one the most bittersweet moments you are likely to experience in the history of gamedom. Make sure there’s no one else in the room so you don’t need to use the old, ‘something in my eye’ line when you tear up. You may scoff now but just you wait, I can't look at a park bench again without getting something in my eye and I'm pretty manly, I open beer bottles with my nipples and not the twist tops either.

The bad news is that although Starbreeze were apparently making a sequel that would feature the Angelus, a character hinted at in some of the concept art work, it seems to have fallen by the way side in the last few years as the company has had a few problems. Their next slated game is based on the Jason Bourne franchise. But at least we have The Darkness to go back and enjoy again.

Once you’ve dried your tears head over to our forums to discuss The Darkness.