Dark City: London Collector's Edition

Books, video games and movies understand the fact that, for some reason, watching detectives solve cases is very entertaining. Not only that, but the subject is very malleable and versatile, which in turn allows writers and developers to create all sorts of different detectives and cases for them to tackle. Hence, theoretically, there’s an infinite supply of such stories, but in practice it’s very difficult to avoid similarities and thus reach a point of stagnation after the genre is saturated.

Dark City: London is a hidden object adventure game that throws you in the middle of a mystery taking place in 19th century England, while you play the role of a detective. It’s not a realistic detective story, however, since the culprit you are trying to catch is actually a headless ghost. Thus, you must use unconventional methods in order to gather clues and somehow stop the ghost’s killing spree.

The story begins when the city of London gets ready for the unveiling of its biggest clock tower, except that a headless ghost pops up and murders hundreds of people attending the ceremony. Naturally, your goal throughout the story is to find this ghost by gathering clues along the way, and it’s also important to come up with a way to defeat or banish it once you are confronted with the headless apparition.

Although the majority of time is spent examining scenes and picking up objects, there are also the puzzles you must overcome in order to operate machinery, open doors or simply progress to the next scenes. These puzzles are actually mini-games that require you to spot objects in a clutter, find patterns or simply engage in various other activities. Naturally, some are tougher to solve than others, but then again you can also use the hint system.

As for the visual side of things, Dark City: London is unquestionably pretty, especially for an indie production. The visual acuity is achieved thanks to the hand-drawn artwork, since there are no 3D environments to speak off. Hence, the artists were allowed to include as much detail as they wanted, all without impacting performance even on lower specced computers.

All things considered, Dark City: London checks all the right boxes required to provide you with a great experience, including an interesting story, neat puzzles and great graphics. Thus, wannabe detectives can have a blast while following the trail of the headless ghost of London.

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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