The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav

Chains of Satinav is the latest addition to the German multimedia series known as The Dark Eye, a German tabletop RPG penned by Ulrich Kiesow. It includes such other games as Drakensang and Kingdoms of Arkania, and is actually so popular in Germany as to have outsold Dungeons and Dragons. Chains of Satinav itself takes place in the dark fantasy world of Aventuria, and follows a humble bird-catcher known as Geron on his quest to solve the events that have uprooted him from his simple life as a peasant. Joining him on his quest is the fairy – another word for ‘naïve,’ apparently – Nuri, who gets him into all sorts of trouble by deign of not knowing jack-all about the world around her. Oh, and she’s also apparently the one thing that can either help or keep an evil wizard known as the Seer from taking over all of time and space. Puzzle-wise, the game excels at being as intuitive as it is obtuse.
Halfway through the first chapter I almost gave up in reviewing the game because I couldn’t pass a puzzle…only to find out that I needed to right-click on an item in my inventory to “look” at it. This enraged as much as confused me – the game literally has no instruction manual, so if you jump into things there is literally no context-clues for you to follow and figure this out. I played the game exclusively on its “hard” mode, but when switching to its “casual” mode to check the difference I found that only thing “casual” mode afforded you were options to see what could be combined together in your inventory, and what you could actually investigate on the screen. I immediately turned the latter option on because without them it’s insanely difficult to find the “sweet spots” for investigation, even on characters you want to talk to.