Once Glorious Artahk
Bismuth Tales · 2025 · Adventure, Puzzle, Exploration, Lore-Rich, Mystery
PC
Positive95% · 40
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About Once Glorious Artahk
In Once Glorious Artahk, you’ll explore the ruins of the ancient city of Artahk in search of a way to save the world from an endless night. Solve a variety of different puzzles to unlock new paths, abilities, and forgotten lore, then read the lost stories you uncover to gain insight into a tangled web of mysteries. Using only your wits and your trusty torch to guide you, you must find a way to return light to a starless sky. Taking notes to help remember hints and puzzle details while you play is highly recommended! There is also a free prologue story, "Flowers Beneath A Starless Sky", available to read in the News section as a sample of what the game has in store!
EXPLORE
Explore crumbling ruins, darkened halls, and tangled forests as you scour what remains of the once-glorious city of Artahk. The game world is divided into five distinct zones that can be explored non-linearly and feature many puzzles that overlap and build upon each other.SOLVE PUZZLES
From piecing together the proper sequence to arrange ancient runes, to deciphering cryptic murals, or using mirrors to redirect the light from your torch in order to activate magical mechanisms, the ruins of Artahk are littered with all manner of puzzles waiting to be solved.UNLOCK ANCIENT LORE
Using the magical Tome of Apocrypha, you’ll uncover long forgotten stories that will give you insight into the many mysteries of Artahk. All you need to do is discover the right “words of power” hidden throughout the city. The lore presented here is more than just set dressing—you’ll need to use what you learn from the Tome to solve certain puzzles and piece together a way to restore the stars to the sky!Features- Explore 5 major zones and several subzones throughout the city, each interconnected and filled to the brim with puzzles waiting to be solved.
- Avoid the dreaded beast that prowls the ruins of the city
- No combat—you must rely on your wits alone to survive and find victory
- Discover 90+ lore entries within the Tome of Apocrypha, short stories that will give you insight into the many mysteries of Artahk
- Unlock 4 exciting abilities to augment your torch and open up new paths and possibilities
- Unravel the tangled mystery of why the world was cast into an endless night, and how the stars can be returned to the sky once more
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
This is a *wonderful*, 9/10 game for me. This game nails the atmosphere, making it feel like you're an archaeologist who is trying to decipher the mystery of the city of Artahk. The music is gorgeous, the writing is superb, and I was enraptured for the 20-some hours it took me to beat the game. No game is for everybody, but this game is more "not for everybody" than most, so lets go over the things that might prevent you from enjoying this game, to see if it is for you. 1 - There is no combat, only exploration, story, and puzzle-solving. 2 - This game will not hold your hand. There are no immersion-breaking tutorials. It believes in you, and your ability to decipher the puzzles in front of you, possibly more than you believe in yourself. I had to look up an answer once, but the clues were all there in front of me, I had just completely misinterpreted what they meant. 3 - You will need to be observant and take notes. Screenshots were sufficient for me, but having a small notebook in front of me would have been useful. 4 - There is a lot of reading. You are discovering the lore of the city of Artahk, and this lore is presented as wonderful, well-written stories which you unl…1 found this helpful
I'm a huge fan! Great story, and there aren't enough games so devoted to exploration these days. Wander, absorb, solve, repeat. I could say more here, but instead I'll say more here: [url=https://youtu.be/pmV-QvNPpDw?si=QNtE7CwSHuxivfS9]The One-Word Review: Once Glorious Artahk[/url]1 found this helpful
It starts a little slow but I had a lot of fun playing it. The story writing was very enjoyable and I truly hate that nasty emerald eyed trixter.
A great exploration-based puzzle game. I've heard it called a Metroidbraina, and while I don't quite agree, it was a wonderful experience still. I also saw that the dev added multiple options to the game to help various player complaints, which is a great touch. Good dev, good work. For a game like this, the worldbuilding was surprisingly interesting, I really liked the tales, the mysteries and the evocative way various concepts (such as the garden, or "white") were conjured in the imagination. I loved the experience, despite a few things I really didn't like. One was the beast. I understand the vision, but if, say, Talos Principle randomly killed you if you stayed on a puzzle too long, I'd hate it. Thankfully, the dev added an option to turn it off which I ended up using. The other thing I didn't like were the timing puzzles - the controls of "magenta" kept tripping me up, and I had to redo some of them way too many times, just because I found the input too difficult and the timing too tight (for two, I had to look up guides - I was doing the right idea, but my execution was lacking). Despite these, I still loved the experience to fully complete the game until every last …
Fun game.
Fun, engaging enough to complete, and not too overwhelming re: linking together disparate clues for a exploration-puzzle game like this.
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