Developer: Artifex Mundi
Publisher: Artifex Mundi
Platform: Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry
Nightmares of the Deep: The Cursed Heart – Review
What could happen when you excavate one of the most feared and devilish pirates? Nothing, right? Well, what if I tell you that the pirate came to life, took someone dear to you and sailed to a haunted isle? Impossible you say?Then I would recommend playing Nightmares of the Deep: The Cursed Heart!
Story
You’re a curator of a museum and you get the chance to keep an exhibition with a legendary pirate as main act. Your daughter is interested in this wonderful opportunity as well and wants to take a sneak peek. When the corpse of this long lost bandit is revealed, strange things are bound to happen. When fate strikes and the lights go out, you need to let a miracle happen (just fix the fuses) but when you return, your daughter has been kidnapped by the zombified robber with mystical powers. The pirate summons his mighty steed –urgh- ship and wrecks your museum. As a good mom, you climb on this ghostship, sail the seas, venture on a skull island and try to free your daughter.
People might recognise some parts of the story in Nightmares from the Deep from the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movies or good students might have read about it in history books. I’m not going to spoil too much from the storyline, but when I mention the name Davy Jones, it should ring a bell.
Graphics
The graphics are as expected from a point and click adventure game. The different places are nicely done and the items you’ll mostly find aren’t quite ordinary, which all emphasizes the feeling of a shady and haunted island. The environment and click-events are, although it’s all very dark, really colourful and detailed. The cutscenes have a decent quality and are fun to watch.
There aren’t any possibilities to alter graphics settings, but you get the option to switch full screen and to alter your cursor. You can choose to play with the custom mouse cursor or with the fancy one the game provides.
Sound
The game contains some decent music that takes you back to the era of pirates or just to your latest ghostship vacation. There aren’t a lot of soundtracks available but you’ll focus more on the puzzles instead of the music. The sound effects are nicely done and give the game a nice dimension. The voice acting in the game is quite good and the voices fit the different personages. Sometimes the voice acting doesn’t always match with the written text, but this wasn’t very disturbing.
You get the possibility to change the volume of the sound effects and music although the original settings were alright.
Gameplay
Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart is a pure point and click adventure game with quite some nice additions. The game has two difficulties and there are a few differences between them. The easy mode has no misclick penalty, active zones shine more frequently and the hint and skip button reloads faster.
The purpose of the game is to save your daughter by finding key items and solving puzzles. When you’re going to venture the ghostship and the haunted isle to find these critical things, a GPS would be nice, right? Well, you get a nice map with every available room or place. When you play the game in easy mode, the map even lets you know when you can perform an action in a specific spot.
The second cool addition is the possibility to find your items by playing Mahjong. If you’re tired of gazing at your screen, you can choose to start a game of Mahjong and when you click away certain special tiles, an item is found. If you complete the game, you’ve found all the items and you can continue the story.
If you still want to stare at your screen but you’re stuck, there is always the hint/skip button. For the die-hards that want to find all the items on their own, but still want a tiny bit of guidance, there is always the Sonar function. When you hover over the missing item, you can find the silhouette at the bottom right.
If you don’t have a clue what to do, there is always the guide. This gives you a detailed description of every action you should perform to advance in the story. This can give a peek into the future actions, so it’s not ‘spoiler free’.
Another nice surplus is the mixture of puzzles. You sometimes get prompted to find different pieces of one specific item in a hotspot. This is a great way to bring some variation in the game.
Our curator is not only a fine adventurer, but she also keeps track of the different events. This diary is very detailed and structured, which makes this an important tool to find clues or to look back on the recent events.
Some of the puzzles are too difficult and you’ll have to guess the solution (if you don’t want to use the skip button). Others on the other hand are too easy and are solved quite quickly. If you’re a reincarnation of Sherlock Holmes, it would be wise to start the game in expert mode. If you’re having troubles, you can change the difficulty in the options.
Conclusion
Nightmares of the Deep: The Cursed Heart is a pure point and click adventure game but it has some nice additions. The game contains a mixture of puzzles, help resources and is combined with decent graphics, music and cutscenes. Add a nice plot and you have a decent point and click game for some extra strategy thinking!
Nightmares of the Deep: The Cursed Heart - Review,
No Comments