"Darkarta: A Broken Heart's Quest" is an award-winning adventure game made by Tuttifrutti Interactive. Not a new game (I mean, 3 years in gaming industry is quite a big time), but it is surprisingly well done. I played through the entire game, including main story and bonus story, and I can say for sure that if you like adventures, hidden objects finding, solving puzzles and riddles, making your brain work, and you want to enjoy a nice story with a happy ending - then you definitely don't want to miss this game.

An adventure of the loving mother who goes on a quest to save her daughter, filled with mystery, drama, puzzles and a whole cast of unique and memorable characters. Nice and easy little game.

Mary Creek, a heroine of this story, is bringing her husband and daughter Sophia to visit a long-lost relative. They go on a boat, and during the travel, Sophia is abducted by a mysterious man, and Mary with her husband are barely survived the boat crash. She managed to reach the land, and here starts her journey in a fantasy world steeped in Indian folklore. She is determined to save her daughter, but also she discovers that she is connected to a grim tragedy that took place around here thousands of years ago.

Darkarta: A Broken Heart's Quest is an enjoyable point and click adventure game with an interesting story, filled to the brim with various mini-games and puzzles. The variety of them is outstanding, it's not only hidden object search (although there are a few levels where you'll need to complete HO games as well). You'll find games like find a pair, align elements in a certain manner, find or decipher the code to open container, and of course you'll need to use recently found items and combine them to get a new and useful one. What I like about this is that you won't need to try to combine ALL items in your inventory, item which must be combined with some other will be marked and will not be useful until you find that other item.

There are four difficulty modes for you to choose - three of them are standard Casual, Advanced and Expert, each has its own timing for Hint and Skip buttons recharge time, as well as highlighting of active zones inside of mini-games and outside. Fourth difficulty allows you to setup the availability of Hint and Skip options and recharge time for them, or availability of other features which make the game easier like tutorial, text hints and so on. And if it's still too much for you - instead of playing a hidden object search mini-game you can switch to Match-3 minigame anytime.

In art aspect, backgrounds and scenery stuff are drawn very nicely. Faces of characters, especially Sofia's, however, could use a little bit more work. They look a bit... off, at times. But all in all, you get used to the graphics and animations. The soundtrack is nice, it fits the atmosphere of the game - magical, bewitching, mysterious.

You can get all the achievements in one playthrough if you know what you are doing. If not, a second playthrough might be required for achievements like "finish the game without using a hint" and like that. If you'll need to gather remaining collectibles - you won't have to start a new game, after completing the main story you can travel to visited locations and try to find them.

Sadly, native Linux version didn't work for me. I tried to do some troubleshooting, it turns out that my system lacks of a certain libraries mandatory for the game to play. These libraries are available in Ubuntu 20.04 or equally fresh Linux systems, so be sure to update your OS if you want to play the game.

It took me around 7.5 hours to finish the game, with some achievements left unlocked. Haven't skipped a single mini-game, but used a hint once, and there are also a dozen of collectibles left for me to find. There'll be a second playthough, I believe.
I totally recommend you to check out this game, get it on sale and enjoy the story!

PC specs

"Darkarta: A Broken Heart's Quest" is an award-winning adventure game made by Tuttifrutti Interactive. Not a new game (I mean, 3 years in gaming industry is quite a big time), but it is surprisingly well done. I played through the entire game, including main story and bonus story, and I can say for sure that if you like adventures, hidden objects finding, solving puzzles and riddles, making your brain work, and you want to enjoy a nice story with a happy ending - then you definitely don't want to miss this game. [h1]In short[/h1] An adventure of the loving mother who goes on a quest to save her daughter, filled with mystery, drama, puzzles and a whole cast of unique and memorable characters. Nice and easy little game. [h1]Details[/h1] Mary Creek, a heroine of this story, is bringing her husband and daughter Sophia to visit a long-lost relative. They go on a boat, and during the travel, Sophia is abducted by a mysterious man, and Mary with her husband are barely survived the boat crash. She managed to reach the land, and here starts her journey in a fantasy world steeped in Indian folklore. She is determined to save her daughter, but also she discovers that she is connected to a grim tragedy that took place around here thousands of years ago. Darkarta: A Broken Heart's Quest is an enjoyable point and click adventure game with an interesting story, filled to the brim with various mini-games and puzzles. The variety of them is outstanding, it's not only hidden object search (although there are a few levels where you'll need to complete HO games as well). You'll find games like find a pair, align elements in a certain manner, find or decipher the code to open container, and of course you'll need to use recently found items and combine them to get a new and useful one. What I like about this is that you won't need to try to combine ALL items in your inventory, item which must be combined with some other will be marked and will not be useful until you find that other item. There are four difficulty modes for you to choose - three of them are standard Casual, Advanced and Expert, each has its own timing for Hint and Skip buttons recharge time, as well as highlighting of active zones inside of mini-games and outside. Fourth difficulty allows you to setup the availability of Hint and Skip options and recharge time for them, or availability of other features which make the game easier like tutorial, text hints and so on. And if it's still too much for you - instead of playing a hidden object search mini-game you can switch to Match-3 minigame anytime. In art aspect, backgrounds and scenery stuff are drawn very nicely. Faces of characters, especially Sofia's, however, could use a little bit more work. They look a bit... off, at times. But all in all, you get used to the graphics and animations. The soundtrack is nice, it fits the atmosphere of the game - magical, bewitching, mysterious. You can get all the achievements in one playthrough if you know what you are doing. If not, a second playthrough might be required for achievements like "finish the game without using a hint" and like that. If you'll need to gather remaining collectibles - you won't have to start a new game, after completing the main story you can travel to visited locations and try to find them. [h1]Linux-version[/h1] Sadly, native Linux version didn't work for me. I tried to do some troubleshooting, it turns out that my system lacks of a certain libraries mandatory for the game to play. These libraries are available in Ubuntu 20.04 or equally fresh Linux systems, so be sure to update your OS if you want to play the game. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] It took me around 7.5 hours to finish the game, with some achievements left unlocked. Haven't skipped a single mini-game, but used a hint once, and there are also a dozen of collectibles left for me to find. There'll be a second playthough, I believe. I totally recommend you to check out this game, get it on sale and enjoy the story! PC specs [table] [tr] [td]OS[/td] [td]Tried to play on Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon x64, played on Windows 10 Home Edition x64 [/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]Processor[/td] [td]Intel© Core™ i5-9400F CPU @ 2.90GHz × 6[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]RAM[/td] [td]15.6 Gb[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]GPU[/td] [td]Palit NVidia GTX 1660 6Gb[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]GPU Driver version:[/td] [td]440.100 (Linux), 436.15 (Windows)[/td] [/tr] [/table]