Dark Cases: The Blood Ruby – Review

Dark Cases features a very exciting and engaging story which some might find it to be a little bit disturbing. There are a lot of murders right at the beginning of the game although no disturbing, violence images are shown – also, no signs of blood. It then gets more and more exciting as the game progresses and more secrets are revealed. The main storyline might not be the most original one, but it is indeed better than the ones used in HOPA games these days.

The presentation of Dark Cases is extremely impressive. The graphics are clear and detailed; scenes are beautifully created and the characters look natural with fine animations. Moreover, there is a perfect balance between the light and dark scenes. The music remains unnoticeable most of the times but it does a fantastic job when needed during action scenes.

The scene transition is smooth so as the gameplay. Dark Cases is a pretty straight-forward game, you simply move back and forth between locations either by feet or my the in-game map solving a handful of tasks. Dark Cases is not Hidden Objects focused, HO scenes are few and far between. However, they are very entertaining to play and you only need to go through each scene once. There is a nice mini-inventory in each hidden object scene where you can store items found and use them to interact with another object in the scene. We are totally in love with the puzzles in this game, not all of them are unique but a few of them are and they are awesome. All of the puzzles are also different from each other, most of them have some interesting  twists to fit the theme and the difficulty is just excellent!

One sizable flaw in Dark Cases is that it offers not enough Extras to be featured as a Collector’s Edition. There are no Achievements, Collectibles or Morphing Objects; no special tools or any other kind of special features. Luckily, it has a satisfying length and the Bonus Chapter is a very solid prequel.