Darkway: Murder of King Mere

I came into Darkway: Murder of King Mere expecting a modest indie curiosity and found something that genuinely rewards the kind of patient, cross-referencing mindset I normally reserve for grand-strategy after-action reports. The premise is tight and unambiguous: a king is dead, his brother August has been hastily convicted, and you arrive as the Apprentice of Master Detective Drake to figure out whether that verdict is even close to correct. What follows is a proper whodunnit built on overlapping testimony, political rot, and a city that actively does not want you asking questions. The mechanical heart of the game is the favorability system. Every NPC in the City of Ink starts with a baseline level of distrust toward you as an outsider, and cracking their deeper dialogue trees requires earning favorability points, mostly through fetch-quest-style favors. On paper that sounds thin; in practice it forces you to treat every errand as intelligence-gathering, because the residents' values and personal histories shape what they will and will not reveal. The writing is the reason this works. Each character in the cast feels genuinely authored rather than generated: their lies, grievances, and loyalties form a web dense enough that multiple suspects remain plausible well past the midpoint. When you do piece together enough overlapping clues to make your accusation before the Steward, the game supports multiple endings, meaning a second run through the same evidence with fresh eyes can land somewhere else entirely. The visual approach is distinctive: monochrome character sprites set against a voxel-style 3D cityscape, with hand-drawn portraits surfacing during conversations. The City of Ink is multi-level, and traversal involves light parkour, scaling rooftops and ladders to reach witnesses and evidence in elevated districts. That is also where the game's clearest friction lives. The lack of a full-screen map combined with clunky ladder controls means navigation across the city's vertical layout is genuinely annoying, and the fetch quests that feed the favorability system require a lot of backtracking through those same awkward spaces. Post-launch patches have added a sprint toggle and a variable-height jump, which helps, but movement still does not feel polished. Player reports of low framerate on high settings via Unreal Engine 5 are also worth keeping in mind on modest hardware. Context matters when weighing those rough edges: this is largely a solo-developer project. Programming, art, 3D models, music, and narrative were built by one person. Holding it to the locomotion standard of a well-funded studio would be unfair, and the early Steam user response, sitting at a strong positive rating from players who reviewed it, suggests the audience that found it already understands the deal. The developer has been visibly responsive post-launch, shipping bug fixes and quality-of-life updates quickly. If you are the kind of player who finishes one mystery and immediately wants to replay it with a different accusation in mind, the branching structure and multiple endings give you legitimate reason to go back. Darkway: Murder of King Mere is not a game about action or system mastery. There is no combat, no skill tree, no build to optimize. What it offers instead is a carefully authored puzzle of loyalty and political betrayal, set in a dark-fantasy world of anthropomorphized dogs that its creator has apparently been developing for over a decade. Strategy and RPG players who gravitate toward games where information is the resource and conversation is the combat will find more here than the modest scope suggests. Navigate the traversal frustrations, commit to reading every dialogue choice, and the City of Ink earns its time.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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