One Small Scene: “Jenny?”

Tell her you love her.

You, the player knows what ‘you’ want to say. You expect selecting this option will have you tell Jenny. In this mob shooter turned eldritch horror story, the TV on the cardboard box and sitting together has placed the character in a romantic setting. Jackie Estacado has been shot at, possessed by some vile demon feasting on whatever stands in his way, and the grubby concrete of New York City is the setting of The Darkness. And Jenny’s Apartment is probably the only warm place in this entire game.

There’s a sense of pain, earnestness, and regret from Jackie and Jenny when they talk on the phone, or are meeting in the apartment. He has admitted in the framing monologues that he will need to tell “someone so pure” he is a hitman, a “scumbag”. And you realise in the more grounded subway hubs, this game being a bit more than a linear shooter that obviously leaving an undefended girlfriend while mobsters are combing the city trying to kill her risks collateral damage. The newly moved in Jenny could get killed, in a horrific way to send a message.

Even the apartment is threadbare. It’s not moved in, fitting the art style and sensibilities of this period in gaming. Besides the fantastic voice acting filling the space, it’s a small set of two whole rooms. What works is where we have all been. Vulnerable. Whiling away the time. Even in desperate times, people rarely succumb to melodrama.

Jenny doesn’t take Jackie seriously when he tries to open up. In this adamantly real relationship, grounded, sentimental but not melodramatic, you can sit with her watching To Kill a Mockingbird, and if you select “Tell her you love her”, this is what is said.

“Jenny?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

It goes unsaid. It will never be said, and ultimately, Jenny will not survive. This little apartment, with a caring and devoted girl, utterly unaware of all the darkness outside, or the horror in what’s puppetting Jackie inside never gets explained.

Jackie’s heart goes out to this woman, and his feelings, his honesty, love and a future at the end of the night will be exactly what he eventually said.

Nothing.

Reference.

The Darkness. 2007. Starbreeze Studios.