Great moments in PC gaming: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's rooftop chase

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Developer: Arkane
Year: 2006

I’ve praised Dark Messiah’s open sandboxes designed for brawling in before, but its linear sections are great as well. Early on there’s one where you’re hurled into a town as it’s besieged by the undead, running through collapsing buildings until you can get to a ballista and shoot a shambling zombie cyclops. The next one happens when the magic crystal you’re in town to deliver gets stolen right in front of you by a ghoul, and you have to chase it across rooftops in the darkness and rain.

To keep up you jump across gaps, clamber up chains, squeeze through windows, and don’t fall to your death as timbers creak and collapse beneath you. It’s like the chase from Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth only in reverse, because here you’re pursuing rather than being pursued and also you’ve got a snowflake’s chance of getting it right first go.

The glowing crystal leaves a trail of energy that draws the eye, and you’ve got a succubus in your head who gives advice like a cacodemon Cortana. Most of the time she’s there to deliver snark and sexiness—Dark Messiah is a fantasy game in the sense it has wizards in, but also in the sense hot ladies keep flirting with you—but in this sequence she gives advice, telling you when to jump and climb.

There are scripted moments where the ghoul will get away from you, by crawling straight up a wall for instance, and you have to frantically look around to spot a chain you can climb or a platform you can do a running leap off. You feel like an action hero who has the power to turn and have the camera conveniently land on a part of the environment you can incorporate into your next stunt. It’s like being a sword-and-sorcery Jackie Chan.

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The rooftop chase leads into a level where you have to break into a warehouse, a classic Thief map in miniature—the linear rooftop chase followed by a sandbox space full of guards who can be dealt with 10 different ways. There’s even a forge there where you can craft your own sword randomly thrown in. You have to use the bellows, pour the metal, and raise the water level to cool it. It wasn’t until Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 that I played a game with blacksmithing this involved, and here it’s just a throwaway neat thing.

Which is Dark Messiah all over. It’s constantly tossing new ideas at you. The rooftop chase isn’t a tutorial for a string of sidequests that are all based on repeating the same formula until you’re sick of it: “Hunt these 10 ghouls to collect all the magic crystals!” It’s just a strong idea, developed to its fullest, and then left behind like it’s sprinting across the rooftops with a come-hither glance over its ghoulish shoulder.

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