Editors’ Choice Games

April 2021

Classified Stories: The Tome of Myrkah

Reviewed by Angie Kibiloski

As you may know, I love a good adventure game, and will always be happy to share a new title with my readers.  Today we’re going to look at Classified Stories: The Tome of Myrkah ($9.99), from RVL Games, which just released on Steam earlier this month.  For the most part, it’s a standard adventure style game, involving exploring a mysterious environment, searching for clues to advance the story, and picking up items to solve puzzles.  Add to this a smattering of first-person-shooter moments, as you try to avoid being killed by the sinister things that sometimes jump out at you, and this title provides a nice balance of exploration and action.

You’ll play as Jim Morrison, a private investigator who gets a letter from an old friend, begging for help.  You travel to his farm house to find it seemingly abandoned, and set out to search for him and his daughter, or any clue as to what happened to them.  After coming across some disturbing things around the house, you’ll soon discover that it isn’t as abandoned as you thought, with the occasional weird monster attacking you.  Fortunately, you brought your gun, and you keep finding convenient cartons of bullets around the house.  Also, you don’t die as soon as they touch you, like in some adventure/horror games, and you can regain any lost health with the handy vials of medicine you’ll also find throughout the house.  I’m much more of an adventure player than a high-action survival game fan, so I appreciated the relative ease of walking away from these encounters.

There’s something about the design of the locations you’re exploring that feels a bit off-kilter, and combined with the atmospheric soundtrack and effects, the whole vibe is unsettling enough to keep your nerves on a low simmer throughout the story.  You’ll be wary of rounding that next corner, opening the door you finally found a way to unlock, or venturing outside into the surrounding unknown.  As you work your way through the narrative, you’ll uncover a disturbing paranormal truth, and learn what your old friend got caught up in on his property.  You’ll then understand that the unease you felt from the moment you arrived was justified, and poor Jim might wish he never left his office.

I really enjoyed playing this game, short though it was.  It’s a “micro-adventure” and only took about 2 hours to complete, but it was a satisfying 2 hours, and definitely worth the relatively low price tag.  As I mentioned, I’m a huge fan of classic adventure titles, but I liked having my exploration occasionally broken up by some shooting action, especially as it was a low-octane sort of action.  Classified Stories: The Tome of Myrkah is just the 1^st installment in this new series from RVL Games, and I look forward to their next offering.  Download your copy from Steam today, and keep up-to-date on future chapters on the Classified Stories dedicated website.

Minimum System Requirements:

• OS: Microsoft Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit)
• Processor: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i3 or AMD Athlon (64-bit)
• RAM: 8 GB
• Graphics: nVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870, 2 GB Dedicated RAM
• Disk Space: 8 GB