Dark Chronicles: The Soul Reaver

Witches were pretty influential up until a few centuries ago, especially when you consider the amount of hatred some people had for them. In fact, they actually went as far as to burn them at stake for practicing magic, even if it’s pretty difficult to prove something like that. Moreover, few of them were actually self-declared evil witches, so it was enough to have tiny premonition about something in order to be categorized as a demon.

Dark Chronicles: The Soul Reaver is a hidden object adventure game in which you play the role of a man trying to investigate an urgent message received from your friend in a remote French village. In case you are not familiar with the genre, your goal is to search for useful objects in every scene and use them to solve puzzles, which is actually much simpler than it sounds.

As mentioned before, the story involves the French countryside and a witch, and your friend is the only survivor after some kind of entity killed his sister. It would appear that a dead witch has risen from the grave to gain revenge on him, but more details come to light over the course of the plot. Obviously, you shouldn’t expect a very complex story, but it’s interesting enough to keep you going.

The worst part about the game is the fact that it gets pretty repetitive rather quickly, which is not usually a huge problem in the genre. However, in this case even the mini-games are too similar, since you sometimes have to find the same objects and follow the same pattern. Repetition is not a big issue in HOPAs, but it needs to respect certain boundaries.

Thankfully, at least you get to admire a variety of scenic landscapes, even if most of them are shrouded in darkness. Even the cutscenes are pretty interesting, although the animations are quite rough and rushed most of the time. On top of that, the sound effects create an eerie atmosphere throughout the game, and the soundtrack is decent as well.

In the end, there are far better puzzle games out there than Dark Chronicles: The Soul Reaver, but this can keep you company as well if there’s nothing better on the menu. However, you should be prepared to deal with annoying and repetitive mini-games. NOTE: This is a downloader for the game. Once run, the application will automatically download and install the game on your computer.

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