Ask a WordPress theme to do full screen, motion led design and you will end up buying three more things. An animation addon. A slider license. A 3D embed service that loads a viewer from someone else’s CDN. The theme gave you a grid and left the interesting part to the plugin market.
Darkside Theme is $49 a year and ships the motion stack itself. Three.js and the complete GSAP plugin set are bundled. Not linked, not offered as an upsell, not a partner integration. In the box. Of the six themes in our comparison set, The7, Avada, BeTheme, Divi and Blocksy, none of the five bundles a motion stack at all.
Tokens, not a settings page you fight
Under the theme sits a control plugin generating around 2,100 CSS custom properties from twenty one settings sections, covering layout, breakpoints, page, rows, dividers, hyperlinks, pagination, shadows, borders, colors, text, backgrounds, scrollbar, preloader and timing.
Twenty one settings sections, and one token layer underneath all of them
That token layer matters more than the count suggests, because the builder reads from it. Change a brand color once and every element that references it moves. Divi and BeTheme have global styles. Neither has a token layer a separate builder consumes. The child theme is generated rather than templated, so your changes are yours and the parent can still update.
The builder is included
Darkside Builder comes with the theme rather than as a second purchase. Sixty nine elements, thirty eight of them motion: pinned panels, image sequence, velocity skew, split reveal, scramble text, typewriter, card stack, bento gallery, radial menu, path waypoints, curve swipe, image trail, infinite slider, horizontal gallery and looped panels. There is a 3D scene element driven by the bundled Three.js.
Eighteen Swiss grid arrangements, in the row layout picker
One feature no competitor in the category offers: you choose which editor opens for which post type, and you can switch off Gutenberg and its block CSS per post type. On an established site with a mixed editing history, that is the only honest answer to the mess, and it is a performance argument Elementor, Bricks, Breakdance, WPBakery and Spectra cannot make.
And the slideshow
Darkside Slideshow is also included. It draws on HTML canvas and moves with GSAP, where Slider Revolution, LayerSlider, Smart Slider 3, MetaSlider and Soliloquy are all DOM and CSS transform based without exception. It takes 3D models, video, SVG and WebGL, and it scales to the viewport rather than reflowing at breakpoints. Seven starter layouts, a layer timeline with keyframes and easing, guides, snapping and device preview.
The slideshow editor: a canvas, a layer list and a keyframe timeline
Theme, core, builder and slideshow. One license, $49 a year.