A few months back, Microsoft unceremoniously cancelled its upcoming Perfect Dark reboot and basically cemented itself as not caring about games anymore. After nearly a decade of dev time, the hotly anticipated follow-up to the legendary N64 classic was put on ice and, along with it, any hope that big-budget sci-fi FPS games might come back into style. It’s a shame we’ll never get to play what developers The Initiative and Crystal Dynamics were working on, but some new leaked documents give us a better idea of what the final product may have been.
As reported by MP1st, a slew of concept art sketches and a smattering of gameplay details have leaked from the Perfect Dark reboot. Coming from unnamed internal sources, it seems that one of the defining features of Joanna Dark’s next adventure would have been the “Adrenaline System.” Described as a finite resource that the player can regenerate over time, adrenaline would have given players access to abilities such as healing, increasing damage output, or reducing damage taken. There was also, reportedly, a slow motion/bullet time system in place as well as the ability to increase accuracy or speed Joanna up.
As for the structure of the game, one document refers to a Season One for Perfect Dark. While this could mean the story was planned to be episodic, I think it’s more likely this was referring to some kind of multiplayer component we didn’t know about. Alongside the Season One mention is concept art for a futuristic Cairo, which makes me think of Deus Ex: Invisible War. Notably, the documents mention the HBO series Westworld as inspiration.
Sadly, Perfect Dark is no more, and everything here will remain in the conceptual stage. It’s unlikely Microsoft will ever take another stab at Perfect Dark, so I wouldn’t get your hopes up of seeing Joanna Dark anytime soon. At the very least, you can still play the N64 original via Switch Online’s N64 app, and the Xbox 360 remaster is backwards compatible on Xbox One.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
