Dark Arcana: The Carnival

It is an OK Artifex Mundi hidden object game. Not much to say as once you have played one of them you kinda played them all as they all work very similarly. Two annoying things to note are:
- you can't use the map to move between the difference scenes
- you have to play the game twice to get all the achievements
The Linux version of the game works without any issues.

Jes. (Yes).
I play game. I win game.
I play Extra game. I win extra game.
There is no map teleport... I got lost... Once. (That's an impressive record btw).
Game entertaining. Me likey. Woman says thanks. ^-^ :D :-)

Recommendation: A decent hidden-object game that marks one of the first games with "modern" Artifex Mundi features.
Critique: Dark Arcana: the Carnival features many of the hallmarks of Artifex Mundi games that had already been established in previous games - the sorts of mini-games you play, a crow prominently featured, a female protagonnist, many puzzles that require non-everyday items that are explicitly called tokens, someone being kidnapped, supernatural elements that include somehow communing with or restoring the spirit of a dead person - with hallmarks that I associate with later, more modern Artifex Mundi games. These include creepy deepfake CGI, where the characters aren't 3D animated objects so much as masks that are stretched and squashed in order to approximate human expressions and give the impression that a mouth is moving; a growing complexity in the hidden object scenes that is mostly developed by having ambiguous search terms and many items on screen that could match that description ("Cloth? CLOTH?? Cloth could be anything!!!"); and, most painful of all, an alternative game mode to the hidden object scenes tied to Steam achievements, so that you have to play through the entire game at least twice to get all the achievements.
In this game, the creepy deepfake CGI is particularly egregious, as the masks include clothing like the police officer's cap: as she talks, her cap stretches and distorts along with her face.
Nearly every hidden object scene has at least one item where you're just forced to click on the screen again and again until you find the particular piece of cloth (for example) that is intended by "Cloth" in the scene. That's a little frustrating when you want the challenge to be finding a hidden object, not luckily clicking the random one of eight items all of which you can see clearly.
Dark Arcana: the Carnival's alternative game is something that it calls "Monaco." As is typical, this is sort of a solitaire card game. This one is sort of a cross between Concentration and Tetris: you select two matching cards that are adjacent orthogonally or diagonally, they disappear, and the cards slide into the vacated positions. You can match any cards, but the only ones that count toward completing the level are the ones that are randomly marked with a red border. There's a teeny bit of thinking involved when the only matching red cards are far apart: then you have to make matches so that the cards will slide in the correct direction to eventually make a match. There's no time pressure even on the highest game difficulty, which is fine by me. What I don't like is having an optional game mode be a requirement for an achievement; the game isn't so interesting that I really, really want to play it twice.
Review: A traveling carnival comes to town, and a mom is separated from her young daughter, trapped in the house of mirrors and abducted as part of a hare-brained plot to resurrect a woman who tragically died decades ago in a knife-throwing accident. It turns out that the madman who is trying to resurrect his partner - the knife thrower, Jim - has been deceived by an ancient evil power who was imprisoned outside of the dual existence of our universe and its dark twin universe. This being of destruction has tricked Jim with promises of being reunited with his lover to enact the exact ritual that will break the bonds that prevent the dark power from entering the universe and destroying all creation: a mirror-reversed re-enactment of his assistant's murder. The mom is all set to be mind-controlled to become a knife-thrower in the mirror universe, and Jim, foolishly believing this is a way to restore his lover to life even it means his own death, is all ready to be killed by her. You figure all this out with the help of the Guardian, an undead cyclops who was put in charge of travel between universes before Time began. In the end, you interrupt the dark ritual and perform a different one, which destroys the Dark Lord in his prison. Why they didn't do that at the start, I have no idea. Their ways are inscrutable, I guess.

Fun and entertaining Hidden Object game with light horror elements in the story. Good scenes, good gameplay variety, the only thing missing is a fast travel option. For me one of the better games of the publisher so far. Recommended!