We knock on Death’s door in the Darksiders II demo at a THQ presentation and have a casual chat with Vigil Games Associate Producer, Jay Fitzloff, about balancing action with story, supernatural ‘humanity’, and the tricky parts in making sequels.

A game where you play as the Grim Reaper…

You would think that this had been done somewhere before Darksiders II, and it probably has, but having a full-on apocalyptic scenario in a mainstream title release (that has a decent script and everything) reduces the number of comparable games quite considerably.

It’s a story about the four Horsemen, those being War, Death, Fury, and Strife, whose appointed tasks are to act as guardians for balance between our world and the Kingdoms of Heaven and Hell. The Apocalypse got started earlier than planned in the first game and War, our playable hero, was blamed for it, which inevitably led to a quest for vengeance and clearing of names.

These are all themes that have cropped up in other titles over the years, but none more so than the Legacy of Kain series, which also put great emphasis on having a talented collection of voices breathing life into characters beyond the scope of human existence. Darksiders II looks set to carry on this tradition of balancing a heavy narrative with action – lots of action, with bloody tissue and other organic juices set to free flow – and enemies both ostensibly grotesque and beatific.

"Well, you want both gameplay and story,” Associate Producer for Darksiders II Jay Fitzloff later tells me as he enjoys a cool beverage, "If the gameplay is broken the game is no fun, and if you have a game that’s just raw gameplay without a story in this day and age it’s an arcade game. I think that nowadays when you say ‘action-adventure’ it’s kind of turned into an action game when you find a new weapon every so often.

"We want that feeling of being in a supernatural world; you’re dealing with stuff that’s not human, anything could happen because you’re dealing with forces beyond humanity, and we want that feeling of intense exploration, where an epic moment could be around the next corner, so you continue on. Your mind’s being blown all the time, so you’re thinking, ‘What’s next?’ That’s the kind of game we’re trying to create.”

The demo for Darksiders II opens against a sharp wintry landscape where Death rides to find a being who may, or may not, know how to find evidence to clear War’s name as the guilty party in triggering the apocalypse, and Fitzloff’s words ring true when you’re just looking around at everything.

When what a human mind can imagine is the limit in terms of design, gamers find themselves transported to some memorable arenas carved out of impossibility, and if games have taught creative minds anything it’s that the physically impossible can be absolutely beautiful. It can be ugly, too, but the world in Darksiders II looks to have found a happy medium between darkness and light. There’s evidence of comic book and graphic novel influences in the art style, not out of key with the work done by Frank Miller.

Death handles like a cross between ridiculously overpowered creations like Alex Mercer and fine tools of precision like Ezio Auditore; a reliable character body that feels just a touch more sprightly than War did in Darksiders. Being the iconic character that he is already, you wonder if some gamers will just be sat there star struck at the fact that they’re controlling Death.

Death represents darkness, a character who can bend and break the rules, walk in the underworld and interact with pure life force energy…Why not pick another Horseman who’s maybe a bit out of left field?

Fitzloff explains, "With Darksiders we had to leave a lot of features on the table. So a lot of these features in Darksiders II are stuff we wanted but just had to cut. We sat down and we wanted to make the fully-realised single player game that was kind of our vision, and we thought, ‘Let’s do that. Who should star in that?’

"Ask anybody to name the four horsemen and Death is the one they start with nine times out of ten; the most feared and the most well-known. So Death becomes the obvious choice. Then you go to the next stage and ask, "What happens in this?” And that’s when we came up with the idea for a parallel storyline where War is doing his thing, fighting Heaven and Hell, while Death is working behind the scenes and bending the rules, dealing with all these shady characters.”

Looking at that first demo level in Darksiders II one could form the impression of playing a less-than-subtle infiltration character. Death climbs up a gigantic tower clogged with ice and snow, haunted by skeletal warriors both great and small, and uses a pair of scythes to trim down enemies like a gardener who’s had far too much coffee to drink that morning. Not exactly the ‘classic’ look for the Grim Reaper.

I ask Fitzloff how the Darksiders II team came to terms with designing or redesigning a series of characters that – from the Horsemen to the denizens of Heaven and Hell – already have iconic visual status. How do you make characters that aren’t human engage with a human audience?

"Of course when you ask people, ‘What does Death look like?’ they think of the skeletal form with the scythe and cloak, and you still have something of that classic Death in the game through ‘Reaper Form’. But the reality is that if you’re playing that character you’re not going to relate to a skeleton as well as you are with someone who’s human-like, which is why at his core we designed Death to be a human-like character. That was purposeful; you want someone that everyone can relate to, even though they are immortal and outside the boundaries of normal human beings, at least they have a base in something we can understand.”

It’s clear, even through that initial period of gameplay during the demo, that the Death in Darksiders II isn’t a brainless hulk of grey flesh with a hockey mask.

Voiced by Michael Wincott, a man whose vocal talents are usually pushed into villainous roles (including the Prophet of Truth in Halo 2 and numerous film appearances as middle-weight baddies), Death evokes power whilst retaining conscience. His awareness of personal limitations is juxtaposed to War’s determination to fight against the odds, and that makes the character interesting from the moment he – presumably – opens his mouth.

Now that we’ve got Death as a playable character in the Darksiders universe, is there a danger that in terms of future narrative his journey could overshadow the journeys of the other Horsemen? How does a developing team keep surpassing something that’s as powerful as these cool, high-end supernatural characters? How do they move between the pressure to outdo themselves for any sequels they make and keeping the games as close to what the core fan base fell in love with?

Jay Fitzloff blinks a couple of times before answering, "You’ve just basically touched on the thrill and the intimidation of creating a sequel! Obviously if you have a second or third game you know the previous game was well-received and successful, and you now have a fan base. That’s very gratifying; you’ve worked very hard, and that’s exactly what you want. And now you have to sit down and think about how to design a sequel for fans who want to see the next game, you have to make the game both better and usually bigger or in a grander scale…So, how do we do it? That’s a good question!

"Basically we all have a sit down like we did when we started on Darksiders II, and we all think it’ll be great – we’ve got a blank slate, this will be awesome. Then it scares the hell out of us, because we have a blank slate and we have to figure out how we do this. And I’m sure that’s exactly what we’ll do with Darksiders III.

"But that’s what drives creation,” he shrugs, "You want that drive to make something better and bigger…And I know we can do it, it’s just a matter of how we do it. And creative endeavour, especially any creative endeavour that meets success – I don’t care if it’s a movie or a book, poem, sketch, it’s just like, ‘That’s my best piece. Now I have to do better than that.’ So, we’ll see!”