Review for The Dark Prophecy

Written by
Matt Aukamp — September 12, 2022

It's no secret that we adventure gamers often long for the sweet nostalgia of the genre's early classics. We love to see pixels in our art and hear synthesized orchestras in our soundtracks as we point and click around screens, solving puzzles and experiencing silly and fantastical stories. If that's the whole of what you're looking for from an adventure game, you could certainly do worse than The Dark Prophecy. It's a bite-sized point-and-click adventure from Start Warp, which excels in creating the look of the early 90s classics that inspired it. Unfortunately, it doesn't bring anything else to the table and stumbles over itself in the delivery.

As a medieval peasant boy named Jacob, your goal is to deliver a message to the powerful wizard Merlin that “Prophecy #13” has begun. However, this simple task is hampered by a series of mundane and magical obstacles. The traditional point-and-click verbs are tied to the cursor, where you can right-click to cycle through the standard tools of “Look At,” “Walk To,” “Use,” and “Talk To.” You must overcome stubborn palace guards, cast magical spells, outwit a troublesome troll, and make some soup. The adventure is relatively short, lasting about an hour, in which you'll visit fourteen unique locations and meet around a dozen characters. Then, the game abruptly ends, leaving the experience feeling slightly unfinished. Its playful fantasy setting never seems fully realized as your dialogue options are terse and limited, never allowing any character's personality to shine through. Jacob himself feels like a blank slate with nothing but his design to endear himself to the player. Specific locations hint at deeper backstories and a grander world, but none of this is explored in a meaningful way, so when the ending erupted out of nowhere, I was somewhat in disbelief.

The positives of the game are readily apparent: The Dark Prophecy sports beautiful pixel art and a delightful fantasy soundtrack. I found myself sitting on the starting screen for far longer than I needed to just to listen to the title music, and the rest of the game didn't disappoint on that front. With no sound effects nor voice acting, it was nice to at least have a pleasant soundtrack to guide my journey. The graphics, similarly, feel like they were taken straight out of an early 1990s LucasArts classic. Slightly cartoony and full of pixels, the game's world is a treat for the eyes. 

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The negatives, however, overwhelm the positives. The game, unfortunately, feels clumsy and amateurish, suffering from a host of technical issues and other problems that made it a bit of a struggle to get through. In the English version, misspellings and grammar errors pop up constantly in the dialogue and item descriptions. At least one of the game's “death” screens was in a different language entirely. In certain situations, a solution popped up in dialogue with a character before the puzzle had even appeared. For example, if character X says they'll do a task for you if you get them Y item, the option “Give Y to X to perform Z” was present the first time I spoke to that character before I even asked them about the task. There were also moments when used items stayed in Jacob's inventory bar after being utilized, and when I clicked on them, he would simply walk to the corner of the screen with no further explanation.

The puzzles were also a shallow point of the game. Many were unintuitive and required a precise order with no particular logic. Dialogue options would only appear with certain characters after some preceding task that seemed to have no connection. Sometimes, objects sit conspicuously on a screen, but Jacob refuses to interact with them until another character mentions that he should. Other times, interacting with an object at the wrong time will cause Jacob to die instantly. Broadly, these “death” scenarios are played as jokes, and the game instantly reloads you moments before with all your progress intact, but I had to replay entire scenes. Other puzzles were trial-and-error without any hints as to what you should try or why.

The Dark Prophecy is a challenging game to recommend. While the art and music shine and trigger all the good and happy feelings of an adventure game classic, this sentiment fades quickly as the rest of the game fails to keep up. Overall, The Dark Prophecy is a beautiful but short amateur game that a long-time adventure gamer might have played on the Adventure Game Studio website for free in the 2000s. But it may just be worth a try for those itching for pixel art and a very traditional point-and-click experience, and who don't mind technical glitches or a brief, concise adventure.