dark parables

Revisiting the Dark Parables Series

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swan princess
Promotional image for The Swan Princess and the Dire Tree.

I’ve written before about the Dark Parables series of hidden object games. They’re great games and I revisit them pretty regularly, especially since I started them out by buying the standard editions and was quickly converted to the more expensive collector’s editions, which contain an impressive amount of additional content. I still haven’t completed my collection, which means I haven’t played all of the bonus games. Since my PC crashed and burned in March and I’m operating on a new laptop, I decided it was time to get back to the games again. New installments of Dark Parables come out reliably once or twice a year, and there had been two new games released since I’d last checked.

 

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Search Terms Q&A

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If my search terms are any indication, there are a lot of frustrated people skipping over my blog. As a writer I aim to entertain and inform, so I took these suggestions to heart. And so I present, answers to questions I didn’t know people were asking:

  • “sunless sea warrant of redemption” – try Gamepedia’s Sunless Sea wiki, they have an article on legacies in the game. Personally, I recommend against the Correspondent legacy, no matter how badly you want to raise your Pages skill. Starting with a blank zee chart might seem like a pain, but the fragments that you earn from exploring convert to secrets, which are hard to earn otherwise early in the game. If you’ve created unique engines or cannons, go for those. You should know that 50% of a skill means accumulated skill, which doesn’t include the background-specific bonus at the start of the game.
  • “dark parables game order” – TV Tropes lists the games in order of release. If you’re a new player just trying the series out for the first time, skip The Curse of Briar Rose and start with The Exiled Prince or Rise of the Snow Queen. They showcase the games’ strengths much better, I think.
  • “barbara gordon porn comics” – uh, all right. I guess try scans_daily on Dreamwidth, they’re the best source for fancomics.
  • “that which yields is not always weak” – I assume this caught me because of my meta about diplomacy skills in Long Live the Queen. This is actually a quote from Jacqueline Carey’s delightful Kushiel’s Legacy books. I don’t have a review of these up, but I read them years ago and found them delightful.
  • “who is oracle in dc universe” – excellent question, anonymous Google user. Oracle is the second persona of Barbara Gordon, the Silver Age Batgirl. Along with Dinah Lance (the Black Canary) she founded a team called the Birds of Prey. As a world-class genius and master-hacker, she became a networking nexus for superheroes small and large, and maintained an absolutely alarming database of secret identities. She’s the best.
  • “how does dialogue develop hazel’s character” – I think I’ll leave this as a reader participation question. If you mean the character from The Fault in Our Stars (which I have never read) try SparkNotes.
  • “queen at arms romance” – well, I romanced James the first time around, and it was pretty cool.

[Image by Alexis Wilke via WikiCommons.]