Darkest of Days

In Darkest of Days (PC and Xbox 360), Alexander Morris is rescued from Custer's Last Stand by a time traveller and taken 300 years into the future by the time research/police organization KronoTek. The player, as Morris, must go back in time for various Save This Person Save the World scenarios. Time periods include Ancient Rome, The American Civil War, World War I, and World War Two. Usually the player uses period weaponry, but occasionally gets a futuristic BFG.

The game is most notable for the Marmoset engine, which (supposedly) lets it render hundreds of independent A Is on screen fighting at one time.

A film adaptation has been announced ^{[dead link]} .

Tropes used in Darkest of Days include:

• Artificial Stupidity: as said above: "supposedly".
• Army of the Ages
• BFG: Anything from 200 years in the future counts - especially when everyone else is using muskets. ESPECIALLY the FMG.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Dexter. As X-Play's Adam Sessler said, he "never met a swear word or cliche he didn't love."
• Cowboy Cop: Your partner Dexter's approach to KronoTek missions. He has no qualms about taking risky, potentially history-altering actions to achieve your objectives, and is rather carefree about handing you 22nd Century super weapons to help you out of particularly sticky 19th and 20th century firefights. In one mission he even has you save then execute a "blue-aura" soldier (historically important individuals who you're supposed to spend the game saving) in order to attract the attention of Opposition Agents so you can capture one.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Real Is Brown. If you'd like to see what's going on, don't use the recommended brightness settings.
• The Faceless: Mother, the leader of KronoTek, is only ever seen as a pair of vaguely creepy eyes on a giant viewscreen. Apparently, she thinks webcams are designed to be used about three inches from one's face. That, or the studio didn't want to lip-sync.
• Fan Nickname: The FMG is never named in dialogue, so it's called the "Zohf Gun".
  • Which is weird, because the name is written on the side of the barrel. It's Face Melting Gun.
• Good Bad Translation: If you can speak either fluent russian or german, listening to the soldiers in battle can be quite fun.
• Gray and Grey Morality: There is constant debate about whether it should be acceptable to use time travel to alter history for the better, or if history should rather be preserved to prevent unforseen, potentially disasterous alterations to the timeline. The twist at the end of the game is that the historic event you spend the entire game preserving is the global extermination of 99% of the White/European race (including Dexter's family) by a racial-selection virus engineered by Middle Eastern terrorists, and the resulting collapse of Western civilization, occuring some years after the September 11 World Trade Center attacks. The Opposition, whom you've spent the entire game battling, actually want to change history to prevent this global disaster, and the game ends with you and Dexter seemingly joining them to "finish the fight".
• Groin Attack: At the end of the first level, your character gets pinned to the ground by an arrow through the gonads.
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Wounded soldiers screaming for medics and trying to drag themselves away from the battle, citizens of Pompeii screaming as the volcano erupts or you burn them to death with the FMG. Also, the concentration camp.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: You never see Hitler, though you do lead a concentration camp breakout. It's stated multiple times that no-one should change history because things might change for the worse, no matter the intention. Although the ending does call this into question, without providing an entirely clear answer, by revealing how truly shitty history really is.
• Holy Shit Quotient: Any mission that features the player as one man in a 100-man army, going against another army. Which is most of them.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first level starts you off as a soldier in Custer's calvary at the Battle of Little Big Horn. That ends about as well as you would expect.
• Bad Bad Voice Acting: Unfortunately, a lack of sound samples makes Civil War battles sound like "Shoot them Rebs!" "You gon' die, Yankee!" over and over.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: See Testosterone Poisoning below.
• Instant Death Bullet: Averted, with lots of Nightmare Fuel.
• Invisible Wall: EVERYWHERE. It seems that the only way to actually get where you're going is to follow what your map considers a road.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The enemy time-traveler Opposition Agents have futuristic armor and energy shields that are invincible to your Civil War and WWI era period peashooters, so your only option is to run like hell. Later in the game you learn their shield frequency and are able to damage them, but they're still extremely difficult to fight when all you're carrying is a musket-loading rifle.
• Only a Flesh Wound: You're supposed to avoid killing "blue aura" soldiers, because historically they survived the battle and had significant descendants. Unfortunately, many of these guys are on the other side and will be happily shooting at you. One method of disabling them without killing them is to shoot them in the leg or arm. Granted, this is your least reliable option; the more reliable option are clusters of walnut-like stun grenades that you're given specifically to stun these guys.
• San Dimas Time: Mother talks about "sudden" occurrences and "immediate" danger - when referring to events that took place over 300 years ago.
• Save This Person Save the World: The game's main plot is divided into two main branches; locating the missing founder of KronoTek, and saving two key individuals who have been put in harm's way by the history-altering Opposition.
  • This is subverted in the end of the game: it is revealed that said individuals' descendants were responsible for developing technology that fell in the wrong hands and was used to create a bio-weapon that devastated the world's population. The Opposition is actually a future incarnation of KronoTek that decided to forgo their "Don't change history rule" to prevent the disaster.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: After you rescue Dr. Koell at the end of the game he takes two bullets to the face from Strinko, the leader of the Opposition, and apparently your new boss.
• Sniping Mission: With a 22nd century computer-aided sniper rifle. Oddly, only the bullets from this weapon are affected by wind and gravity, so you'd have been better off with a contemporary gun.
• Testosterone Poisoning: The "Hard" difficulty in the game is called With Chest Hair.
• Title Drop: At the end of the game, Dr. Koell makes a final plea against using time-travel to alter history, stating that "Who am I, or anyone else, to play God? I'm all for helping those that suffer, but Dark Days teach valuable lessons. The events of the past define our present selves, and to meddle around is to court disaster". he then takes two bullets to the face from Strinko, your apparent new boss, who disagrees.