The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in “The Dark Eye” Bundle, along with The Dark Eye: Memoria and Blackguards 2. It is also in the Point’n’Click Lovers: Daedalic Adventure Bundle, along with Anna’s Quest, Children of Silentown, Deponia, Edna and Harvey: The Breakout – Anniversary Edition, and Life of Delta.)

For those who aren’t familiar with The Dark Eye franchise, it’s more or less Germany’s answer to the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop game, being even more popular than D&D in that country. And just as D&D has numerous videogames set within its fictional medieval fantasy world, so too does The Dark Eye.

One such game, Chains of Satinav, is a “Point and Click”-style Graphic Adventure released in 2012 on PC, and then in 2021 ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. This game puts players into the role of Geron, a young man and an amateur magician working as an apprentice to a hunter and trapper whose specialty is birds, though this job isn’t Geron’s main focus, as more than anything he wants to escape the stigma of being seen by fellow villagers as cursed due to an ill omen foretold when he was a child.

It’s not a terrible setup for a story, but unfortunately it makes Chains of Satinav difficult to get absorbed in. Nearly everyone you encounter in the game is rude and dismissive to Geron, and Geron is in turn bitter and morose. Given the unearned animosity he’s constantly on the receiving end of, this is perhaps understandable, but it still has the end result of making Geron almost as unlikable as everyone else in the game’s world.

The gameplay itself is pretty standard Graphic Adventure fare, collecting items and using them to solve puzzles. Some of these can be clever, but often the game doesn’t give players the option to explore what seems like it would be sensible options.

For example, one early task has you given a hint that pigs like acorns, and you’ll naturally assume “I guess I should get some acorns”, yet when you manage to distract a merchant who has collected a bunch of them, your character acts disinterested in them. As it turns out, you’re supposed to go through a series of manipulations to use the acorns in a game to win a wine to use on the pigs… yet I wasted a great deal of time on the stupid acorns without my character commenting on the fact that the riddle he was solving probably wasn’t meant to imply that the pigs literally wanted the acorns themselves.

One bright spot in this game is the presentation, with lovely detailed, hand-painted backgrounds and characters, decent theme-appropriate music, and solid voice acting for every character. The only real flaw I see here is the way characters’ mouths move in a silly unrealistic flapping manner that doesn’t quite seem on par with the rest of the presentation.

In the end, Chains of Satinav is a decent Graphic Adventure with a better-than-average presentation, but the gameplay is somewhat uninspired and the characters are universally unlikable. Fans of the genre may enjoy this, but I don’t think this is going to be a game most players will enjoy.

tl;dr – The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav is a “Point and Click”-style Graphic Adventure with a mostly-great presentation, but the gameplay leaves something to be desired and the characters are all pretty unlikable. Fans of the genre may still find this worth a look, but most players are better off looking for something else.

Grade: C+

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