Dark Arcana: The Carnival

The Good
This game is a decent mix of puzzles and hidden object scenes.
It has good artwork, decent music, a good hint system, a walkthrough, achievements and voice acting. It is not groundbreaking but it does everything I want from a casual game and it does it well.

There were a couple of occasions where I was floundering around wondering what to do next, they were frustrating but they were entirely my fault because I'd forgotten about the in-game map. There was one other occasion where I had to resort to the walkthrough because an item, a piece of chalk as I recall, was so well hidden that I just could not see it.

The Bad
This is down to personal taste but in the beginning in one of the early scenes the little girl cries pitifully "Will you find my mommy?" in a whinging American accent. I think she was meant to be cute and endearing but it felt like a really bad moment from a really bad American film.
Apart from that and being shorter than I expected there's nothing really to dislike about this game.

The Bottom Line
It's a decent game that passed an afternoon but in a week's time I'll probably have forgotten it.

I started the game at 2:30pm and playing on the 'Advanced' mode, the middle difficulty option, I finished before 7:00pm. Allowing for the usual coffee and comfort breaks this means there's about three and a half to four hours gameplay in the main game. The bonus adventure was completed in under an hour. The game was enjoyable but it just didn't seem long enough, if I'd paid full price I would have been disappointed.