Developer: Daedalic Entertainment
Publisher: Daedalic Entertainment / Deep Silver
Rrp: £15.99
Released: 22nd June 2012
Available on Steam, Amazon and Gog.com
Played using: Mouse and Keyboard
The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is set within the fantasy universe of Germany’s best selling tabletop roleplaying game, The Dark Eye. You play as Geron a young lad who lives in the land of Aventuria, specifically in the Kingdom of Andergast.
Once you decide to start a new game a screen will appear with two options for difficulty, those being standard or experienced. On standard the game can be challenging but it’s not that bad but on experienced… Well even after completing the game I still had trouble knowing what to do next.
Mechanically this game works the same as most point and click games, although in this game the trick is to pay attention to the dialog, which will give you clues as to how you can solve a puzzle.
It also sticks to the standard formula for the point and click adventure by having a menu system, but it does have one key difference in that Geron has a slight amount of magical power. He can only break small objects at first (as the plot demands) but acquires more as the game goes on. Sadly these powers will only work on the tie,s and objects that help progress the story rather than everything.
Each scene you visit is highly detailed, looking almost hand painted. This would mean that finding the items you need to interact with would be difficult except that holding down the space bar (or the middle mouse button if you have one) reveals items that can be interacted with. Sadly the facial animations of the characters is don’t match the same level of detail and quite disjointed and look out of place.
The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is sadly laden with quite a few flaws. For example, the quality of the English voice acting varies from character to character, some are very well acted while others sound like they’re unused to reading aloud. I can’t speak to the German voice-acting as I didn’t play the game with that enabled (and I don’t speak German beyond a few basic words).
I didn’t find the story wasn’t that interesting, in fact it was very simple and predictable. That isn’t to say it was bad or that the world in which it were set were uninteresting, just that there wasn’t anything particular special about it beyond its setting. And strangely the further you get into the game the longer the loading screens become, never more than about ten seconds but the change is very noticeable.
I have to say playing this game has certainly left me intrigued about the world of the Dark Eye, I definitely want to know more about it. On the whole I would only recommend this to either someone who likes world of The Dark Eye or people who really enjoy point and clicks. If your looking for a game with a lot of humour you’d be better served looking at the Deponia or Monkey Island series. Is it worth the Rrp though? Well… I don’t think so. If you play both difficulty settings maybe but I honestly can’t see why anyone would.
If you liked that then perhaps try;
The Night of the Rabbit
The Deponia Series
The Dig
