The Dark Eye – Chains of Satinav 12+

I discovered this game by random chance and was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t know anything about the story at all going into it. The illustrations are the real star of the show here, absolutely gorgeous digital paintings. The animation is largely 2D graphics as well which is a wonderful change of pace if you’ve played a lot of 3d games. The scenes are broken up into different planes which move independently on pans and various elements inside are animated. It’s a really nice look. There are narrative segments which switch to a different art style, which I didn’t care for, but it’s not too bad.

Although I had trouble getting into the story at first I do like the fact that the game takes itself seriously and that there’s really no humor, no “winking" to the player and no breaking of the fourth wall. I had the same problems I have when playing any adventure game, but the puzzles don’t usually have solutions that make no logical sense. Well, logical within a fantasy universe that is.

However, the game does feature the Wilhelm Scream not once, but twice. I think this is unforgivable. I wish people would stop using that sound entirely, it’s not funny or clever and only serves to take you out of the story. I would have rated the game 5 stars but the use of Wilhelm takes one off. The only other problem is that by default "HD video” is disabled and I made the mistake of not checking the settings before I played. Consequently, the video cutscenes looked absolutely horrible. Make sure that HD video is turned on. The video parts are very few throughout the game, however.

The voice acting is very good and as I said, it’s all played straight with no sarcasm. One thing I found odd with this game is that there seemed there was no way to fail. You either figured out the puzzle or you got stuck indefinitely. It’s been awhile since I’ve played an adventure game of this type, so maybe that’s how they all are, but I thought it was strange. There are times in the game where doing something foolish would indeed have gotten the character killed, but it just never happens. So the game is extremely linear in that regard.

Chains of Satinav was a great game and I’d definitely recommend it. At the price you can’t go wrong. I will be checking out other games in this series or from this publisher for sure.

I enjoy this series (This one and Memoria) WAY too much.

I liked this story well enough, but the one after this is even better! I fell in love with the characters (Nuri especially!); I felt for poor, social reject Geron; I also liked the different environments (the places Nuri and Geron traveled to) and the beautiful concept art! People are so talented!

The ONLY downside to this was that I had to look up how to solve everything… This game REALLY makes you stop and think, and if you can’t figure something out—without cheating—it may take you many weeks (maybe even a month or so) to figure it out. It’s incredibly difficult, but it is TOTALLY worth it!

I am SO ANXIOUS to see what the masterminds behind Daedalic Entertainment GmbH comes out with next!! I would buy it RIGHT AWAY if it’s anything like "The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav” & “Memoria.” I REALLY hope they continue this series and create a game about Sadja next!! I have NEVER been so obsessed with a PC game as much as I am with CoS & Memoria!!!

If you love point and click you will love this game. The dark eye is a popular pen&paper role playing game in Europe and I played was playing it with some friends some years ago. Unfortunately they don’t sell it in the US. At least there are some great computer games like this. You should also look out for a title called Drakensang, which is unfortunately not sold at the mac app store.