My husband and I have gotten into the ABC show “Once Upon a Time” lately (if you haven’t watched it yet and are a fan of Disney or fairy tails I would suggest giving it a try), so the Dark Parables series was something that piqued my interest when it came up on the Steam Winter Sale as a complete bundle. This review will be of the first in the series, The Curse of Briar Rose, which tells the story of Sleeping Beauty.
Dark Parables: The Curse of Briar Rose
Developer: Blue Tea Games
Publisher: Big Fish Games
Art: 8/10
Music: 9/10
Story: 7/10
Mini-games: 7/10
Hidden Object Puzels (HOP): 6/10
Overall score: 7.4/10
I found this game to be generally enjoyable and don’t regret the 3ish hours I spent on it. The minigames and HOPs were repetitive (extremely so on the HOPs) which didn’t keep me as engaged as I like from a game like this. Instead of finding random objects like in a lot of other point-and-click games, you need to find pieces of items in order to put them back together and progress along the story. I did like that mechanic, but I wish they would have used more than the handful of scenes for the puzzles. The mini-games were fun, but I would have liked them to be more challenging and, again, to have more variety. I was also hoping for some Steam achievements, but unfortunately those aren’t included with this game.
The music is quite good, and I’m pleased that it’s part of the extra content that comes with the Collector’s Edition. The art is also really well done, and that is also included with the CE. The only problem I had with the art was with regard to the HOPs, there were a number of times I had to toggle my game from fullscreen to not-fullscreen in order to find the last few pieces hiding in the puzzle because of the diminished image quality when the game is running in fullscreen mode.
One other note about the CE: This gives you the option to play the “additional content” and put the game in “hard mode.” This was super disappointing because it’s not additional content, it’s the same game you just played without the hint button and one or two new puzzles added. Don’t advertise additional content or stories if that’s not really what it is, that just leaves a bad taste in your customers’ mouths.
Hopefully the series improves from here, because I’ve got 12 more to go!
