Grim Legends 3: The Dark City

My first impression when stepping into The Dark City was that Artifex Mundi had finally committed to a tone. Where the earlier Grim Legends entries still had a fairytale brightness to them, this one leans fully into rain-soaked gothic atmosphere, and the hand-painted art does serious work to sell it. Soaring cathedrals, flooded streets, corrupted citizens with mirrors fused to their chests, the visual design earns every pixel of its "dark city" promise. You play as Sylvia, a young member of the Order, a secret society of monster hunters, who arrives in a city that has been overrun after a rogue colleague steals the Incarceri Stone and unleashes a demon called the Koshmaar. That setup sounds straightforward, but the story threads in a genuine amnesia mystery around Sylvia's past, family secrets, and a plot twist that reviewers and Steam users alike flagged as legitimately surprising for the genre. The narrative does more character work than most hidden object puzzle adventures bother with, and that alone sets it apart. Gameplay sits squarely in the point-and-click hidden object puzzle adventure (HOPA) mould. You move through beautifully illustrated static scenes, picking up inventory items, triggering hidden object scenes where you hunt for a list of items embedded in the environment, and pausing to solve standalone mini-games. The mini-game variety here is a genuine strength: you will mix chemicals in a potion-crafting puzzle, work through a sudoku-style eyeball grid, reassemble stained glass windows, and face off against Maskwraiths, corrupted humans, in rune battles where you have to find the one pair of symbols NOT present in the enemy's arsenal. That combat mechanic is light but adds a welcome rhythm break. There are also Memory Mirror sequences inside defeated Maskwraiths where you solve layered picture puzzles to uncover each victim's backstory, which is a clever way to pace out the lore. Four difficulty modes (Casual, Advanced, Expert, Custom) with adjustable hint and skip timers mean the game meets you wherever you are, though the difficulty curve between puzzle types is uneven, some are trivially easy, others land harder than anything around them. Honest caveats: the main adventure runs roughly three to four hours for genre veterans, with a bonus chapter adding under an hour. That is short even by HOPA standards, and the bonus content, while offering some narrative closure, is thin. Collectibles (30 skull-headed dolls hidden in sub-scenes) give completionists a reason for a second pass, but the game does not track which ones you have grabbed, which is an oversight. Voice acting quality is debated across reviews, some find it convincing and well-cast, others find it uneven, but it is a clear step up from Artifex Mundi's earlier work. There are also occasional cursor hitbox issues on some versions where clicking the right object does not register, a persistent genre problem that has not been fully solved here. If you have never played a Grim Legends title before, that is not a barrier, the story is self-contained. And if hidden object games have always seemed too casual, this one is a reasonable place to test that assumption: the puzzles are varied enough and the narrative engaging enough that genre newcomers regularly report being hooked before they expected to be. For dedicated HOPA fans, it sits near the top of Artifex Mundi's catalogue for atmosphere and story, even if it leaves you wanting another hour or two of content.

Alex · Scout Team

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