The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav (PC) review "A “meh” game you can just get through, with some quality of life features"

When I decided to play this game, it was mainly because it had “The Dark Eye” in the title and I wondered whether I’ll see any connections with Drakensang… And, while I admittedly played Drakensang back in 2010, so it’s entirely possible that I forgot elements which would be connected, I’ll just get that out of the way from the beginning and say that I personally didn’t notice any such connection. And with that game being my only other experience with the universe, I have no idea how Chains of Satinav may possibly relate to anything else and judged it entirely on its own merits.

To start with the positives, the game has some nice quality of life features. A tiny one can even be found in the configuration tool, which has a button that opens the game’s folder in the user directory, getting rid of the annoying problem of trying to figure out where the saves are stored, though a couple of other folders are created as well, so anyone who wants to clean up after uninstalling will need to track those down. But what really matters is what’s actually in the game, and perhaps the most notable helpful feature is being able to go through the inventory with the mouse wheel, which saves so much time and ensures that you don’t miss anything when you’re trying everything.
Of course, the fact that you may need to try everything is a problem, but it’s a typical one for adventure games and in case of Chains of Satinav it only appears occasionally, most puzzles being quite easy and usually being solved in a single area, and even on a single screen. And the great thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to end up in a loss state or softlocked, at least in my experience, so even if there may be some potentially frustrating moments, the solution is always there for you to stumble into sooner or later. And if it gets to be too much or you’d just rather not stumble around, there are hint features as well, though using them felt like cheating, so I never did. I probably should have at least done so in order to see exactly what they did and be able to comment about it, but as it is, I have to limit myself to saying that they exist, but I can’t say how useful they are or how much they may spoil the game or story.

I resisted activating hints, not to mention looking for solutions elsewhere, even when getting that key in the swamp town stumped me for quite a while. But that’s just a puzzle, what I will list as a negative when it comes to the swamp town in general being that the developers seem to have put less effort into it, leaving me with the impression that they just forced together a bunch of puzzles, and some things may seem odd, some of them perhaps because I didn’t do them in the “proper” order, but some really seeming to just be forced in there for no reason. And then there’s the last part of the game, which also seems quite rushed. However, more than anything else, it was the romance that felt awfully forced. It just doesn’t build in any way, and the outcome appears unaffected by the couple of choices that give the impression that they should affect it.
Then again, the apparent choices tend to be false in general, and rather than allowing the freedom of different approaches, the times when different solutions were possible made me feel that I was missing something. But that feeling was even more pronounced in the conversations that ended the moment you picked the correct option to advance, without offering the possibility of going through the rest of the dialogue tree. And then there are the in-game achievements as well, which I find weird in an adventure game in the first place, and which include some that are mutually exclusive if you play normally, adding to the feeling of missing out. They’re probably there in order to encourage replaying the game, but I never replay games in the first place, and I don’t see how replaying one that won’t offer anything actually new wouldn’t be simply boring for anyone.
To get back to puzzles, a very early situation where you can end up at a loss is if you get the doublet without listening in first, since in that case you can’t go back and listen later to learn what to do, though I sort of randomly happened to stumble into the solution pretty quickly. On the other hand, one puzzle that did stump me was getting rid of the eye of the beast, and I only finally managed it by just trying everything, yet I couldn’t really say whether that was my problem or an example of moon logic. But what held me up the most was something from the fairy realm, though the issue there was that I had missed an item, so I assume that activating the hint feature would have gotten me through it right away, but as it was, it took so, so long to finally notice that item, though everything else went smoothly once I did. Yet there is one thing that I really think is a problem of the game, and that’s saving Olgierd, which seems to just be random. Now, it is possible that I missed something even while following a guide, because that was the one moment when I gave in and looked up the solution, but on top of being sure that I had followed that exact conversation path on my own as well, I did so again after reading the solution and it still took a couple of tries until it finally worked.
After all of that, I’m tempted to file the fact that I’m not exactly keen on the art style under miscellaneous negatives, and this is after all a matter of preference, others may well enjoy it, and it does suit the game’s overall atmosphere. The animation, which is choppy and limited to a few frames, may be somewhat more jarring at first, and the same goes for the voice acting, but after a while I got used to both, at least in the sense of getting to more or less ignore them. But one very small thing that made me raise an eyebrow was the lack of a confirmation prompt for quitting the game. Some probably find such prompts a nuisance, but I see their use, since there can be misclicks.

I haven’t mentioned anything about the story because, at least from my point of view, it’s forgettable but it does suit the overall atmosphere and is sufficiently serviceable to get you through the game. And Chains of Satinav is a game that you can just get through, with no risk of ending up in a loss or softlock state, puzzles that are generally quite straightforward, a hint system that should be of help if you do get stuck, and a few nice quality of life features. On the other hand, a few areas seem rather rushed, the romance is awfully forced, the few apparent choices are false, the artistic aspects are things that I for one just had to get used to, and plenty of conversations, as well as some puzzles and some achievements, may leave you with the feeling that you missed something. So, if you’re looking for a good adventure game, you probably won’t find it here. But if you just want to get through one, perhaps even more so if it’s not a genre that you usually play, you might as well give it a go.

Community review by Cavalary (March 15, 2026) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.