Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones, Collector’s Edition (iOs) Review

Museum curator Sarah Black is back to once more tangle with the dreaded Davy Jones. This time it is Jones himself who shows up at the museum to take both Sarah and her daughter Cory as unwilling prisoners. Of course, Sarah will  fight to the death to free them from the cursed pirate’s clutches, but she’ll uncover a whole lot of unexpected information about the old sea dog in the process. As Sarah roams throughout Davy Jones’ island in search of all the pieces to set her daughter free, she soon finds out that to do so will involve many others as well.

In Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones, you’ll play as Sarah Black from start to finish. This being the third game in the series, Sarah will be a familiar character to previous fans – but if this happens to be the first game you’ve played in Nightmares from the Deep, you won’t have any trouble following along. It works well as both a standalone story, and as part of the larger story line that encompasses all of the Nightmares of the Deep games.

Early on in the story, Sarah’s daughter signs a pact with Davy Jones’, and finding a way to break that agreement becomes your main goal in the game. After all, you certainly aren’t going to leave your daughter to a life spent in servitude. It seems that the only way to break a pact that Jones’ has made, is to help him fulfill *his* quest. What that quest may be, you have no idea – but there are a number of stone guardians hidden around his island that will help you uncover the answer to that question, as well as so much more about the life of Davy Jones. Each of the twelve guardians gives you a small piece of the story, with the promise that once all twelve are unlocked you will finally find out the whole truth. And honestly, it does not disappoint. This is a sweeping story of love, loss, and redemption.

The gameplay in Nightmares from the Deep 3 is a mixture of a variety of puzzles. There are standard hidden object finds, where you’ll locate a list of objects (or shapes) within a fixed screen. A neat feature of this series is that you have a choice during those puzzles – you can simply do the object find, or you can switch over to a game of mahjong (a tile matching game) instead. You can switch at any point, so it’s a nice option if you get stuck and don’t want to resort to a hint.  There are also a number of usable objects just laying around in the environments – it’s up to you to discover which items are usable, as well as where and how to use them. Finally, you’ll play a number of different mini games, each of which relates to the story. These range from reassembling torn pictures to configuring pipes, and are generally fairly challenging. If those aren’t your thing, you do have the option to skip after a short time.

Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones is a game that is very well put together. There are tons of environments to explore, with a variety of different types of game play to keep things fresh as you work your way through the game. It’s also quite lengthy for the genre, with a long initial story as well as a bonus chapter that unlocks when you finish the game. Overall, it’s a great example of the genre, and well worth the time and money you put into it.