Grim Legends 2: Song of the Dark Swan

As far as the Artifex Mundi games go, this is probably one of the more simple ones to complete but only from an achievements perspective.

The story is in no way connected to the previous Grim Legends which is a majorly different approach from the Enigmatis series. This story follows a healer who has come to a castle to look into a sickness being suffered by the baby prince... however, like all things Mundi, shit goes wrong and the baby gets kidnapped and there is some kind of dark magic going on. As you explore the world, you discover that the there is a swan kingdom that was destroyed by evil magic and the swans turn into humans when they wear nettle shirts... but only for an hour??

It’s all really weird to be honest but as you can expect, you eventually save the day and the really obvious looking bad guy gets killed at the last minute and you save the day.

Game play wise, Song of the Dark Swan is slightly different in that you get three different companions throughout your adventure that all leave you for ridiculous reasons. The otter stops helping you because he finds a waterfall where he enjoys himself; the bird decides it can’t go too far away from his nest and the... forest sprite (who cannot speak English and just makes annoying noise every time he... talks?) can’t travel through magic portals. Which is actually fair enough.

Some of the puzzles in this one were an episode in monumental frustration. Not the puzzles themselves for the most part but getting from one scene to another and finding the items needed to progress was insane at some points, especially on expert. There were two reasons for this. The first being that some items were in specific scenes but, despite feeling very certain that I had clicked on every inch of the scene I had somehow missed what I needed to find... only to look up what needed to be done to find the thing I was looking for was where I had already looked. I’s very picky about where you click.

The other thing that was fucking infuriating was how fussy the game was in the hidden picture scenes. At points I had to click on an item up to four times in four different ways to get it to register – not great when there is a requirement to be accurate once in a while.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 26 Achievements

There’s no additional game to play instead of hidden picture scenes here so it’s just the single playthrough required. 13 achievements can be gained from playing through the story and another for completing it on expert. Another 9 are for doing the usual stuff of completing puzzles without skipping and not using hints for hidden picture scenes which just leaves three for the in-game collectibles.

There is basically one collectible per scene which makes it easy to track how far through the game you are and also relatively simple to know if you’ve missed one or not.

Downloadable Content – N/A

This is the first Mundi game where I’ve got the feeling that the series may start shitting all over itself. It is nice that some of the more recent ones only require the one playthrough though. Hopefully this follows on from the remaining titles in the series.