As it turns out, Davy Jones is very much alive. As a matter of fact he has an entire undead crew, all hoping for their imprisonment to end so they can move on with their lives. In Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones, you are looking to help free these people from their pact with Davy — but most importantly, to save your daughter.
You and your daughter have been researching Davy Jones for quite some time. While giving a large presentation your computer becomes cursed. Within a few moments both of you are captured and taken onto Davy Jones’ boat where the real story begins. Your daughter doesn’t listen to you — what teenager listens to their mother anyway? — and signs a pact with the ghost pirate, becoming a maid until the pact is broken. Through a bunch of point and click scenes, as well as puzzles and hidden object games, you’ll figure out what is going on with Davy Jones and how to break the pacts for everyone imprisoned, hopefully setting them all free.
Playing on the Xbox One, Nightmares for the Deep 3: Davy Jones is a very interesting and well-created game with a lot of puzzles to solve. You are able to go through various maps and scenes, unlocking new puzzles and forcing yourself to retrace your steps as you go. The game itself is a mix of point and click screens, various different bits of puzzles, hidden object games and scenes which are animated, providing you with snippets of story.
Everyone in the game is obsessed with Davy Jones pacts — although no one remembers how to actually break the pact. Through giving little doubloons to each of the twelve guardians of Davy Jones’ memories, you’ll start to build up the story behind exactly what the pact is. As it turns out, Davy Jones has a bit of a soft spot and actually just wants his family to return to him. As a result of incidents in the past he has given everyone else immortality, but was unable to save the one he loved. With your own daughter trapped you’ll need to actually solve his pact on your own, even if Davy seems to be too worked up in madness to actually help himself with his own goals. There are other characters who you can meet, mostly of them aware that if they help you they may get free, but they’ve been trapped here for ages and have no real idea how to get out.
There are a lot of puzzles in Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones — and when I say a lot, I do mean a lot — with quite a bit of variety and challenge to them. Sliding block puzzles, puzzles moving bits to reveal the exact picture, ones where you need to move and line up pieces, others where you must arrange blocks to reflect light in the right way — there’s just a lot. Even the hidden object puzzles have you sometimes interacting with various objects before finding exactly what you need. As the game progresses these puzzles have a nice amount of challenge, although there are some hints that you can use to help you along the way. If you ever get to a puzzle you cannot complete, you can complete a solitaire Mahjong game instead, allowing you to move on or even skip the puzzle completely.
It is these puzzles which are one of the highlights of the Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones for me, as there always seemed to be a new puzzle to solve — once I had all the pieces to trigger it. Each puzzle reveals small objects which are then used to serve bigger puzzles and trigger events. These events come in the form of videos or bits of story from the past. Videos are interesting to watch and introduce new characters, adding more of what is currently going on into the game. They are nicely voice acted and the graphics are alright, if dated. If you’re very interested in the story then you can also find bits of paper, diary entries and even more dotted around, giving you an insight into whoever wrote it and their perspective.
In Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones, you do need to backtrack. This was probably my biggest issue with the game, I have no patience to explore previous locations again to see if new areas unlocked. A lot of the time I found myself unable to go forward, which forced me to go back to the first area of the game and slowly move around to see if a new area has unlocked. On the other hand, I’d often play hidden object puzzles and see other items that I knew I needed, but could not get until the second time that I used that area to play another hidden object puzzle. This I found frustrating slightly, as I wanted to gain what I saw then, instead of waiting. There is a lot of content and very beautiful scenes in this game, which does make checking out smaller areas and viewing puzzles a bit nicer. Specifically the garden within the game is beautiful.
There are other random things to collect, like seahorses scattered around, pirate cards and puzzle pieces. These do not affect the story at all, but do give you something to do. Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones is also littered with Xbox achievements, which are pretty fun to grab up if you are into that.
Overall, Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones does have a lot of content and is a fun game. The story is one I have heard before, but it’s well presented, has a lot of perspectives and is fun to discovered. Again, I really loved the different puzzles and some of the characters were pretty funny. There are a lot of areas to explore, so you’ll need to really take a look around and make sure you didn’t miss anything!
You can purchase Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones for PC, Xbox One, Android, iOS and PS4. You can even grab a physical copy of the game!
