You're right. I haven't been the nicest person when it comes to issues with Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy, and I'm being a complete douche canoe towards the dev -- especially since, to my knowledge, this is basically a one-man team doing all the work on the game.

It's just that I honestly love this game, it was one of my favourite titles on the Gamecube, which I stopped being able to play when my console died. When it came to PC, I got absurdly happy to finally be able to play it again, just to be let down by the state this port was in.

I understand a remake has to feature some graphical improvements, but bear in mind this is a 128MB console generation title. Graphical improvements are welcomed, but keep the game from getting so bloated that it won't run on modest (or downright crappy) hardware. With each update the textures keep getting increased, which, while making the game look better, also increases the minimum system requirements, to the point that by now you actually need a pretty decent rig to run it smoothly. Why not give the option to downscale graphics, so those of us with worse machines can enjoy the game, too?

The dev is surrounded by fans of the game who are a bunch of speedrunners and tech nerds, so he's making the game for them, not for those of us who love the game but are not tech savvy in the least, and who enjoy the game for what it was, for the art, the lore, the gameplay, and not the technical aspects of it, the speedrunning, the ability to mod it. I honestly think this game is not worth my time anymore, as sad as that is, because it will keep "improving" graphically and technically, and eventually I'll stop being able to even run it.

Then there's the keyboard & mouse issue. Again, the dev considers himself a "purist", so I guess he wasn't expecting this backlash: the game was made for gamepad, so purists will want to play it with a gamepad, as well. But a lot of people are angry at the absolutely appalling keyboard and mouse support, and, in my opinion, rightly so. If games like Psychonauts (which was also made with controller in mind) have awesome keyboard and mouse support, we expect Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy to have something at least similar. Which it doesn't, despite a step in the right way by including full mouse support on the blowdart first-person camera mode. I'm not a dev, I don't even understand coding and programming, and apparently implementing all this is extremely hard, according to the dev, but it was a heavy blow to the game when it was released, and something that's not easily overlooked even after almost a year.

I apologize both to you and the dev, I praise his work, I applaud his continued support and the fact he hasn't neglected GOG customers. But I think he should stop only hanging around the modders and the speedrunners and the tech nerds and realize there are other kinds of fans of his game out here, and that he's developing and updating the game for us, too.