Dark Arcana: The Carnival

Following the sizeable completion that was Mafia II and my ongoing battle with ESO (Probably never to be completed) I decided to take some time investigating some more relaxing games. During this investigation, I stumbled across Developers Artifex Mundi who have released several Point and Click adventure games. I’ve been waiting for a while for one of their titles to go on sale so I can try them out and Dark Arcana: The Carnival was the first reduced title so I jumped on it.

Dark Arcana follows the story of an unnamed investigator who is looking for a woman who goes missing in a carnival. The investigation leads to Jim something, a knife thrower from the 70s who accidentally killed his lover performing a trick. He is trying to resurrect her but in actual fact he is being tricked by the Evil One who is trying to break into our world to destroy us all. The storyline is hilarious in its wildness and really plays on the fantasy behind the carnival. It’s actually really well executed too and adds value to finishing the game.

The gameplay can be broken down into two categories; puzzles and hidden picture scenes or Monaco. The puzzles very nearly achieve that measure of being challenging while not impossible and what I love about them is that some of them employ elements of common sense for you to solve them. A nice little touch is when you are unlocking a door you have to click to put the key in, click again to turn the key, again to remove the padlock and again to open the door. It’s one of those things where I can imagine a player clicking on the door, having it not open and then getting upset.

The hidden picture scenes are the best bit. I am guilty of having wasted several hours on application games and Facebook games because of my secret love affair with hidden picture scenes, so having an Xbox game where I can earn achievements for doing them was awesome. Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you have the option of playing a really shitty card game called Monaco. I didn’t really get the point of this one if I’m honest. It’s basically snap on a 3 by 4 grid where the cards have to be next to each other for you to make matches. There’s no real skill in manipulating the grid and it’s slow and unrewarding.

Another thing that I wasn’t keen on – but do understand – is that the items you can use during the adventure pointlessly break or disappear after one use. This feels annoying when you get, say a hammer, use it to break something, then come across something else that needs breaking only to not have a hammer anymore – a seemingly useful item – gone for no reason!

Musically, they have gone for a sinister backdrop for most of the game but sometimes the pace increases for no reason and it feels really out of sync with what you are doing. The graphics feel like you are within a comic book and this is very suitable for the gameplay style which is great as it doesn’t sacrifice gameplay for graphics.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

On to the fun bits – there are six achievements for playing through the story of the game and the bonus chapter, and another for completing the game on expert mode. Now this is where I fell down in terms of making it easy for myself.

You need to play through the game twice to get all the achievements but I didn’t check this and just kicked off on expert mode straight away. In expert mode, the game doesn’t give you any indications of where to go and what scenes you need to go to in order to progress. I stubbornly ploughed through the game when in reality, playing it through on casual first would have made the whole thing a lot easier.

There are a lot of missable achievements too and this is where the two playthoughs come in. You have to do all hidden picture scenes as hidden pictures and you also have to play all the scenes as Monaco. For Monaco you have to complete three games without shuffling which is relatively straight forward although it does depend on luck. You also have to finish a game in less than a minute which I think is impossible due to how slow the cards move. What I did was play the game as a hidden picture scene until I only had one item left to find then switched to Monaco and finished the game. Thankfully, this counts as completing a game of Monaco in less than a minute.

Playing hidden picture scenes, you have to do the same things but also find 3 objects in 3 seconds and find all objects in all pictures without using hints. You also have to complete a scene making less than 5 mistakes but this is simple if you can actually find the objects and don’t just randomly click everywhere.

Outside of this there were 3 achievements that I missed on my initial playthough. One was for witnessing the evil world trying to take over ours and to do this you have to not go in the right direction at a specific point. You have to finish a puzzle in less than 15 seconds which is easy on the claw machine at the beginning but I inexplicably fucked this up and had to replay it. The last one was for completing the shooting mini game first time and this is really stupid because you need to know what you need to do before you do it in order to get it right. Again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I enjoyed Dark Arcana for what it offered in terms of story and gameplay. It’s also decent value for money at £7.99 (RRP) and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It took me just over six hours to complete the entire game and not a moment of it was dull. Even a second playthough didn’t feel like an arduous task. I will definitely be trying out some of their other titles.