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Gransys, the green and not-so-pleasant land through which players hacked and thwacked in last year's grand fantasy adventure, Dragon's Dogma, displayed a certain anonymity despite its rugged handsomeness. It had to do with environmental cliché: those blanketed meadows, weathered cliffs and sinister forests stretch across all fantasy fiction from Middle-earth to Westeros, a tradition that Capcom's game all too eagerly followed. After 60 years of landscaped tributes to Tolkien's imagination in books, film and video games, there are few hills and valleys you could scatter with orcs that wouldn't feel wearyingly over-familiar.Bitterblack Isle is a cove that leads to a cavernous underground network of halls, runnels and spiral stairways and the heart of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - Capcom's part-expansion, part nip-and-tuck of 2012's blueprint. It isn't a cliché in the same way, but it is nevertheless familiar.
It's in the ghostly messages that sound out when you walk past the smoke-gripped corpses that punctuate its hallways, offering mortal warnings of what lies ahead - or of what, for that particular cadaver, lies behind. It's in the rangy skeletons that lunge at you with cricking knees and the hollowed knights (seemingly quickened by their demise) who hop and jab with rapiers. It's in the curious helpers you meet along these mossy, cobbled pathways, who speak in off-kilter regional English accents and who will happily sell you useful herbs and armour, yet never quite convince you of their trustworthiness.
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