[i]The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav[/i] is a bittersweet video game in more than just its ending. It does some things decently well and other less so, chief among the latter being its voice acting.
I imagine this was not a title that was granted an exorbitant budget and so they did what they could with its smaller team, especially those that voice acted the characters. It is perhaps the weakest part of the game, where every voice actor lands between dull in tone or coming across as though they are just trying too hard, with delivery either unevenly delivered or overly dramatic, especially during any laughing lines. But I'll still take the imperfect voice acting regardless over having to read every line of dialogue and trying to voice the characters myself. I much prefer to have a voice assigned to the characters even if they weren't the greatest at conveying emotional depth.
I think the game also does well enough to show some realistic progression within its two main characters. This is a narrative point-and-click adventure puzzle game and so there's going to be a heavy focus on story and the characters as you just point and click on everything to brute-force your way forward. It plays exactly the same as any other game of this genre, and its standout feature will be the gorgeous hand-drawn artwork, which I don't think anybody can really criticize because it's unique in how it is designed and fits the overall theme of the game. I don't know too much about the Dark Eye universe, but it seemed like there is plenty of depth in its fantasy world, likeable characters, and a sort of Brothers Grimm-style melancholy blended into it from what I can gather from this title alone.
The male PC is this downtrodden guy who is apparently disliked by the entire town he resides in, his profession of "bird-catcher" often being spoken in a way that just sounds like a slur against him, because he is also in possession of magic that can be used to break inanimate objects, like the glass containing the alcohol that the blacksmith just leaves laying at his feet while on the job, and so he is equated to that of a witch/warlock in a world that apparently has a history of burning these people at the stake. For whatever reason, despite the township knowing of his abilities, he is saved from that fate because I guess catching pesky birds makes him valuable and is something that you have to be specially trained in. Forget just shooting arrows at the birds or swatting your broom at them if they perch on your windowsill. That or maybe it's because he is trained by a dude who helped to save the world by defeating the evil villain prior to his conception or something, I really don't know, but the citizens seem to fear or disrespect him more than they celebrate him, and so you have a guy who is basically akin to a Naruto character trope as an outcast where his biological parents are dead or gone. The game makes some comments about how he was banned from a church for some sort of funny comment and that he was also banned from a magical academy for trespassing, with only one woman in the village really noticing him or being kind to him, although her relationship with him is very insignificant and not at all explored even as an alternative path to the story. But his neglect and mistreatment have resulted in him maturing into a prankster as he finds his own place in a world that seemingly disapproves of his presence.
With some NPCs, you can choose to respond to them in a few different ways where you are positive, neutral, or negative in that you can be sarcastic or rude, but in my testing of these different responses, I don't believe it actually results in branching paths that change the game's direction and your reputation or how you are perceived by the world around you. In fact, these extra dialogue options are mostly nonexistent in later arcs of the game, and even when it does feel like there might be a "bad" dialogue option, the game just recycles the same three or so choices and it's like nothing offensive was ever said as the NPC you are interacting with suddenly forgets the last five seconds. For instance, you will have a rather serious conversation with the female NPC the main character is intertwined with, and the game basically forces you to lie in order to progress to the next scene because choosing the other two options changes nothing and is basically pointless at that point.
Eventually, the second major NPC will be introduced: a female that is positioned as a potential love interest to the male character, but any budding romance between them isn't officialized by the game's conclusion and seems to be used as the main plot device to justify the game's sequel, which, to me, was disappointing. She is ditzy, naive, adventurous, and empathetic, and acts as a direct foil to the main character where she is friendly, playful, and easy going. Where he uses his innate magic to break stuff, she can use magic to mend it. Her presence is a bit too much of a contrivance as it's very obvious that she is meant to lead him to a more fulfilling path that is greater than himself through nurture and chastising him for breaking stuff, the main character even eventually muttering to himself about how she "won't like that he destroyed it" in regard to a blanket or something as you are trying to figure out the next puzzle. As has become rather common (this video game being designed during the peak of it), the female character is designed to give the male character a purpose and identity where his entire life up to that point flips upside down in sole service to her. But while the developer resorts to an overused trope in this game, the character development is realistic and charming and not really there to blatantly push an agenda in a way that is obnoxious.
The puzzling, for the most part, is pretty organic and sensible and makes logical sense as the two characters make their way to their equivalent of Mordor. What many old-school point-and-click adventure games suffer from is the illogical item-combination trap where there's also too much potential for soft locking yourself. I always have a habit of saving the game every time I enter into a new screen in these games for that reason, but here it was unnecessary unless you just wanted to see different dialogue options. While you still have the common theme of entering into your inventory and combining items together into one piece, you aren't having to guess the developer's private logic over following your intuitive reasoning. You see a red boulder that is cracked and you open your inventory and grab a tool that can chip off a rock where the description of the item is that it leaks red fluids which is why the water beneath it is blood-red, and so you can take that rock and you'll see another pool of water and can then insert that red rock into the pool of water to also turn it red. It's supported by a clear narrative chain, clues, and observing your environment, but the reason I stated "for the most part" above is because the puzzling eventually expands beyond single-area solutions and requires you to backtrack such as to unlock new options with NPCs you already spoke to, and this was when I had to rely on a few hints found online in the form of walkthroughs. But it isn't completely nonsensical like [i]Monkey Island[/i] where you can somehow use a rubber chicken as a pulley system.
I think the game had its moments of fun where only some of the puzzles became annoying to find the solutions to, and for a point and click puzzler, it's not bad at all.
