Gamers are, by nature, a resilient lot, used to being promised the moon and weathering the disappointment when instead of gaming gold, the friendly UPS man delivers a huge, steaming turd of a game that is broken, buggy, inept, amateurish, graphically inferior, or reeking of gameplay that, well, reeks. Gamers bravely shrug their shoulders, hawk back a big wet loogey of sorrow, and hoof it to the local EB where they try to convince the clerk that, damn if they didn’t get two copies of DUNGEON LORDS for their birthday.

DARK AND LIGHT, the latest MMO from France (home of THE SAGA OF RYZOM), premiered with such a thud it made the bungled launches of Anarchy Online and WW2 Online look like events of Blizzard-y perfection. Literally nothing about this franchise—from the awkward translations on the website, through the frustrating and broken (some would say criminal) account management system, to the ridiculously unplayable game itself—comes even close to working.

Of course, in all honesty, I’m just repeating the disgruntled comments posted by thousands of disappointed players. Me, I was never able to actually log on. Oh, I downloaded the game, and managed to create an account; I even negotiated my way through “ClickNBuy,” the amusing little European credit card verification company that takes your personal information and immediately sells it to impoverished third-world governments. I had a choice of account types:

While I was waiting for ClickNBuy to verify my account, I had time read through the DnL web site, where amusing translations like “Your guide to playing Dark and Light is here, within these links. Find something for those who just discover the unique world MMORPG Dark and Light, and perhaps a bit for the most informed, too,” prepare you for what will surely be a stellar gaming experience. If they put that much care into their web pages, you gotta know the game itself is gonna be spectacular.

Well, as I said, I never found out. The server refused to recognize my account. Repeated attempts to contact customer assistance were greeted with auto-generated email responses that were never followed up on. Finally, I decided to bail. And here’s where it gets interesting…because…

There’s no way to cancel your account. Like some Mephistophelian pact disguised as a EULA, you are trapped in the dysfunctional world of DARK AND LIGHT forever. Actually, it turns out, there is a way to cancel. If you follow the verbal labyrinth of instructions on the DnL website, you are eventually led back to…the account creation page, where in order to cancel your account, you have to re-subscribe.

At this point in my experience with DARK AND LIGHT, I had an epiphany, my growing rage disappearing in a Zen-like moment of clarity, where I realized that the “game” wasn’t some lame bargain-basement sword-and-sorcery clone but this Proustian, existential, Orwellian nightmare world where you had to subscribe in order to cancel, where up was down and where…dark was light. Oh. My. God. I enjoyed this enlightenment experience just about long enough to call my credit card company and refuse all charges.

Follow-up: Recently (August 06), Dark and Light “subscribers” (which is DnL’s name for “indentured servants who haven’t yet figured out how to cancel”) were given three free months of playtime. In the garbled words of the developers, “it was perhaps the idea of players coming to the MMO DARK AND LIGHT that certain available options were not having successfully treated the experience. Plus, the game sucks ass.”