Daedalic's Memoria out today, looks promisingly beautiful

Daedalic's got a pretty good pedigree in the mostly barren land of adventure gaming—its last release, Night of the Rabbit , was a wistful journey full of frogs wearing classy little hats (really, how could the softhearted animal lovers making up the PCG team say no?). The developer's new game is the "fantasy-crime" story Memoria , which looks a heck of a lot darker than the rest of their back catalog, but is certainly no less intriguing.

You'll play two characters, 500 years apart—whatever could an ambitious princess and a humble bird-catcher from different eras have in common? I don't know, but I'm happy to just get lost in all those gorgeous fantasy landscapes while digging around for the answer.

Memoria is set in that universe of The Dark Eye. No, not that Dark Eye . And not the Poe-inspired Dark Eye , either. We're talking about the Chains of Satinav , one of Daedalic's previous adventure games, which was home to such locales as the dragon-built temple Draconia (which we'll get to explore once again). A special promotion heralds Memoria's release, granting it a 10% discount to $18 on Steam for the next week. The Longest Journey was the last game whose fantasy beauty awed me this much—hopefully it'll live up to my now-solidified expectations.