Review of Darwin's Game
As a concept, a death-game has wonderful potential for great story telling. Imagine the incredible tension, high stakes and character building that could be experienced in a series of back-to-back life or death situations. The fear, anxiety and adrenaline knowing your life was on the line. The guilt, horror and exhilaration of taking another life. Perhaps characters could meet and connect under a strained encounter and deign to overcome their circumstance in the face a common enemy. Well, Darwin's Game ultimately decides to leave out all that good stuff and instead of getting a tense, thrilling, survival game we get safe, slow Darwin's Game broughtto you by Hasbro.
Ultimately the plot and story doesn't amount to much. The show pulls its punches so much that most of the episodes are uneventful filler. There are indeed deaths in this death game, but for much of the series these are things happening off screen or when we do see some kind of killing it's happening to nameless fodder, while the main characters run about achieving not much of anything with no goal, or direction in sight. There is no build up or tension here, any time there are fights or action scenes, none of it feels like it matters. The particularly bland animation and music do nothing to uplift any of the scenes either.
The characters themselves are blank, cardboard cut-outs. They have zero personality for me to even dissect. They barely react to the world around them, and when they do it's not helped by weak dialogue that is almost always expository. No one here has a sense of humor, no one struggles with the morale ambiguity of their situation. When characters are explaining their sad story they're telling it like they're reading from a cereal box. There's even a scene where someone loses actual limbs, and there is no blood, they're not in pain, they don't despair at being one more slice away from being a quadriplegic.
That is Darwin's Game in a nutshell - A show of bland, boring, uninteresting vegetable people aimlessly lumbering around not reacting to anything or having interesting interaction with anyone they meet or anything they do, lead by a spineless personality-void of a MC.
Darwins Game overall is an especially dull affair. The story is weak and uneventful. the characters are bland and uninteresting. Absolutely nothing about the art-style, animation, music or voice performances stand out. There's nothing here to enjoy or to sink my teeth into. There's no plot twists, intelligence or character arcs in its writing and the death game premise is wasted on a limp, watered-down mess of a show.