Memoria

Overall a good point-and-click adventure game. Scenery, animations and music set the right atmosphere. The puzzels are balanced, there where a few tricky ones (just try everyhting), but no walkthrough required. The major let down where the increasing crashes towards the ending (once every half hour to not even starting up). The computer is not new, but with margin above the minimal specs. I had to install the game on my gaming rig to finish it, a bit of a let down.

First, let me answer the questions you really have, so you don't have to waste hours looking everywhere else. 1. Should I play Chains of Satinav First? Yes. This game proceeds from the story of the first heavily enough that you'll be missing out on some of the depth of this story if you skip it. Honestly, the prequel is pretty dull, but it makes this game better. 2. My game keeps crashing! What do I do? Your problem is that your computer doesn't have enough memory. Oh sure, you may have more RAM than the system requirements lists. But this game doesn't respect its system requirements list one whit. To get this game to work, I had to manually set my page file to a minimum of 12 GB [see google for tutorial], and turn on texture compression in the game options. Only with both settings did my game work, one on its own wasn't enough. And texture compression is a two-edged sword. The higher the compression, the more horrific the performance of the game becomes. I survived with "low" to get through the game. Onto the game itself. Production values: Excellent. Music. Controls. Graphics. A+, excluding the bugginess I mentioned above. Voice Acting: They were quite clever how they handled this. It's the same voice actors from the first game, but they have a smaller role, and are in an entirely different atmosphere, which makes the incessant whininess of the first game unnoticeable int his sequel. The new characters all have excellent voice actors. Puzzles: Fun and manageable. Nothing moon logic, I enjoyed working my way through them. Story: Well constructed, solid, but probably the weak point of the game. B+. Yet, despite this pull-out-all-the-stops effort... This game was just missing something for me. It felt like I was playing a game on a computer. It didn't feel like I was whisked away to another world on my own adventure, like the true greats do. I don't know what that missing "it" factor is in this game, but it doesn't have it. Otherwise, great game.

This is a heavy sequel-story to "The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav" PC game, which of course I could not play first on my MAC. So I was a little lost in the continued story, but with lots of great dialogue and pretty illustrated scenes, I could ignore that and plowed through it just fine. By the end however, the conclusion of the story still didn't make total sense, haha, but it really doesn't matter. It's a point-and-click game and you have mini puzzles to solve on each scene before you can progress to the next. As far as I can tell too, you can't choose any route that leads to dying. The game is relaxing and fun as you flip back and forth in time and tale between two main characters. I'll admit that in a few spots I had to cheat and look up how to get through the puzzle to the next scene (later in game). Anyway, hours of fun and the game ran fine downloaded on OS Yosmite (10.10.5).

This was a solid B. The story took a bit to get into and the ending was rather melancholy. The story does have a few decent rug-pull moments and keeps a solid pace, however it isn't anything to write home about. It does have the conveniences of highlighting of interactive spots and in-game hints, however there are a few places these fall short. Most of the puzzles are fairly straight-forward. There were slightly more clever puzzles than there were ones that didn't make much sense. Positives: The item list was generally fairly minimal, so if you reach the 'try every combination' point, it generally won't be onerous. I didn't encounter any serious bugs, though some flakey spots have been reported by others. They had the foresight to allow you to skip the potentially most obnoxious puzzle. Drawbacks: The cutscene art looked a bit weird and out of sync with the rest of the art style. There are a couple of places where the puzzle solution requires interacting with something that isn't flagged as an interactive spot and the in-game help was rather hit-and-miss as to actually being helpful.

follow-up and prequel to chains of satinav, should be played second, also takes about 10 hours. the story's fine, better than satinav's, the gameplay in places (mostly involving sadja) less so. the entire first chapter is about getting out of a dark tomb. really tedious, but not as much as the forest maze later. thankfully, there's a skip option that should come up much sooner. some quickish action is also required (the kettle in chapter 5), another thing that has no place in a point & click adventure. the towers in chapter 7 were also a pain and sadja herself was pretty annoying with the 'I'm only doing this so people will remember me' schtick. I liked bryda a lot more. voice acting is a mixed bag again. almost identical functionality and quality of life to satinav. autosaves (no indication), manual saving anytime over multiple slots, quicksave/load, hotspot indicator (doesn't always show everything for some reason), separate volumes (including one for cutscenes this time), windowed mode, resolutions, a few languages (subtitles and voiceovers separately), and even a combination indicator to avoid wasting time (no action indicator here). it's 100% mousable but has a few non-rebindable hotkeys. movement speed seems slower this time, still can't double-click to move faster, only to leave the area instantly and exits have names now. there are more animations too, making things look smoother but wasting more time before, after and during dialog and stuff.