The Dark Eye: Memoria (Oldies But Goldies)

The Dark Eye series of adventure games are based on a german role playing game with the same name. Memoria is the second game in the series, with the first being the Chains of Satinav and features a story within a story. The players are called upon to resume where the story left off, with our protagonist trying to restore his lover Nuri (a forest fairy) back into her former self. To do so, he goes to seek the help of a traveling merchant named Fahi, who tells the man he has the solution to his troubles, but as payment he has to answer a riddle.
There the second story unfolds, as we follow around the adventures of a female princess who wishes to be the world's greatest hero, and is, in fact, the sole focus of the riddle.

The gameplay is the time honed point and click adventure model. If it ain't broke why fix it right? Even so, the game manages to offer a few segments of "not so standard" point and click gameplay to spice things up. What is great however, is that the game knows what it is here to do and it does so greatly. It is here to tell us a story, and the gameplay never gets in the way of telling us that story, even going as far as to offering to skip over a "maze" segment for those that want to go back to the story rather than spent their time solving a maze

One of the surprises of this game is in fact the voice acting and music. Though it may come to no surprise to the adventure fans out there, but to me it was a pleasant surprise to see a small studio manage to pull off great voice acting, immersive sound effects and amazingly thematic music.

Sure the music is not the Halo theme, but it was still pretty amazing, emotional and managed to pull me in -perfectly-. My advice is to put on the headphones for maximum immersion and allow yourself to be carried away by the amazing story and sound/music wombo combo

You cannot talk about an adventure game without talking about the story right?
Despite the story being a sequel it manages to stand on its own, without much knowledge from the first game required, at least to my knowledge. The game spent's the first few minutes of the game catching you up on what is going on, and then dives into the main focus, which is the story of the princess.

The story in of itself is amazing (though personal preference may come to play). It has solid pace, lovable characters, interesting puzzles and an amazing emotional crescendo to the entire story. My only gripe with it is that it has no sequel, and that makes me sad.

I am not a point and click adventure fan. I really am not, however this game managed to grip me from the start. Not shying away from darker aspects of adventure, like murder and gruesome scenes, the game delivers a very well made story that is well worth all the time spent in it and deserves a mention on these series even though its not -that- old.