Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart

So after enjoying Dark Arcana: The Carnival, I thought I would give this one a go too. It wasn’t on sale or anything which shows how much I rated the first game I played.

Nightmares from the Deep follows the story of a mother and daughter who are looking to put together a museum exhibition of Captain Remmington, a notorious pirate from the past who supposedly had some kind of devil powers. This becomes apparent when his corpse reanimates and he kidnaps the daughter to perform a sacrifice to bring back his dead lover. Sound familiar?

The game is similar to Dark Arcana in that you have to search hidden object scenes to find items to help you on your quest however there are a few differences. In Nightmares, you play Mahjong instead of Monaco. This was a bit better and it felt more like a game. It’s still not as good as actually doing the hidden scenes though. The other thing which I liked was that some items you could use MORE THAN ONCE!! How novel that I could use a useful item on more than one occasion! Why this didn’t apply to some of the more obviously useful items, like a crowbar for example, I still don’t know.

Some of the puzzles were really good too. A lot of them require you to find various items before you can progress to the actual puzzle. Once again they offer a challenge without being too obscure to be solveable – a major plus point, especially over that bullshit Mr Pumpkin Adventure.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements there are only three that are related to the main story. Four if you include playing it through on expert mode. I was clued up this time and aware that I needed to do two playthroughs so started it on normal to learn what needed to happen first.

There are the normal achievements to expect now for finishing a hidden picture scene in less than a minute, without making mistakes and without skipping any puzzles - which is essentially not playing the game. Once you finish the first playthrough doing hidden picture scenes and puzzles, you should only have the Mah-jong achievements left, and the expert difficulty if you played on casual first.

One of these Mah-jong achievements is the hardest achievement in the game and it’s for completing a game of Mah-jong in less than a minute. The trick for Monaco from Dark Arcana goes one further here. What I had to do was complete the hidden picture scene, then once I picked the last object, quickly switch to Mah-jong. This tricks the game in to thinking you have completed a game of Mah-jong and unlocks the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the shitty Mah-jong, Nightmares from the Deep is still another solid game. It took me just over eight hours to complete the game from start to finish so clocks in at about a £1 an hour in terms of fun pounds.