Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Morella Collector's Edition

Haunted houses are pretty regular occurrences in horror games, given the fact that they are pretty easy to design. Their backstories need more work, on the other hand, because it’s not enough to tell the players that there are ghosts in there without explaining why that is the case. Hence, the creepier the history of the house in question is, the easier it is to keep players on edge.

Dark Tales: Edgar Allan Poe's Morella is a hidden object adventure game in which you play the role of a detective trying to solve the case of a missing family. Naturally, things are more complicated than that, given the fact that dark forces are at play, and not your usual bad guys. Thus, you must explore a haunted house and deal with the spirits that haunt it in order to unravel the mystery.

Since the whole game is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, expect quite a few macabre scenes along the way, although there’s not much actual gore to go along with them. The somewhat bright color palette keep things from getting too traumatizing as well. The plot evolves as you uncover more clues, and there are a few twists here and there to keep you engaged.

The mechanics rely on your ability to investigate every scene for useful objects, as well as using them in order to complete puzzles or answer riddles. These puzzles are basically short mini-games, but they can be rather time-consuming sometimes, given the fact that you have to use trial and error to come with a solution. Thankfully, the puzzles are quite varied, so you are not confronted with the same problems too often.

As mentioned before, the environments are designed to be morbid and scary, but at the same time quite beautiful. The artwork quality is commendable, especially in terms of backgrounds and the objects you interact with along the way. The same can be said about the cutscenes, even if the animations are seriously lacking, and they usually come in low resolutions as well.

If you are already familiar with the Dark Tales series, then Edgar Allan Poe’s Morella won’t surprise you in any way when it comes to the gameplay. However, at least the story is new, and you have a plethora of new puzzles to tackle.

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