Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth

I got this game a while back on a sale but only played it now. Daedalic made some pretty-looking but completely brain-dead games in the past and I probably wouldn't have bought this one after playing some of their other games. Fortunately, this isn't one of those bad games and I'm glad I got it. I read the source story a while back and I liked it a lot - the game seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation with beautiful artwork, great voice acting and good music. At first i wasn't sure what to think of the art style but it grew on me quickly and I decided that I love it. The detail is fantastic and it brings the story to life. A few reviews mention that this isn't much of a game but more of a visual novel - this is true, I guess. There aren't traditional point-and-click puzzles and the inventory is very limited. The story itself is also fairly linear but some choices do make a (slight) difference in how the story plays out. This didn't bother me, I got lost in the story and never noticed that I wasn't playing an "adventure game". If you like the the source novel, this is a must but I'd recommend it to anyone who likes historical fiction.

This is a beautiful game, worth of recommendation. The story is great, your choices do matter, the music , voice acting and especially graphics - are superb. Because its de facto 3 part game put into one, it takes some time to finish it, which is great because you get to immerse yourself in the characters stories and world of medieval England. For people who like adventure games - a must have.

I've read Ken Follett's historical novel (which is nearly 1,000 pages), and this game allows you to re-live the plot, and make your own decisions. you don't need to have read the book to play. It's similar style to point and click adventures, there are less object puzzles than usual, more dialogue puzzles. You can change the events of the story based on your decisions, so there's replay value. I've only played once, and not managed 50% achievements.

For me, this game is one of the best story-driven adventures I have ever played! Let me tell you, I have tried quite a few (Telltale etc.), but this particular game would surely belong to the upper top 3. And now, I will watch the TV series and read the books.

In The Pillars of the Earth each scene you have to solve a puzzle which will be your typical fare of using something in your inventory on the screen or combining items. After each puzzle scene there is dialogue in which you will be making dialogue choices. The puzzle parts are usually pretty straight forward but there is the odd time where I could see what they wanted from me but the solutionboggled my mind and didn’t seem logical. The visual novel parts were well done. The game did a good job of not making the choices black and white or good/evil. Some choices are timed where more important ones are not. At the end of each chapter you get a summary of your choices and some of the outcomes. If I have one gripe about the game was the story itself. It was pretty dry at times The ending was a bit different from what I was hoping as things seemed to go a bit darker before settling into a more typical happy ending. The animations, art and voice acting were well done The game required a file, “libpng12.so”, that wasn’t shipped with the game and after installing that the game started just fine. It opened on the wrong monitor. There was no config file I could find to specify which monitor to use and no in game option for it. Alt-Tab worked just fine. You can manually save whenever you want and there are checkpoints for those who don’t want to. While playing the game my total system RAM usage was 3GB, the total CPU usage was around 7% and my VRAM usage was 1.1GB. There were no graphics options besides resolution. I played using version 1.1.703 of the game from GOG. Overall whether you enjoy visual novels or 2D point and click games I can recommend The Pillars of the Earth. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it is very enjoyable for the majority of the playthrough and is solid on both fronts. I paid $13.99 CAD for it My Score: 7/10 My System: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 | MSI RX 580 8GB | Mesa 19.1.4 | Manjaro 18.0.4 | Kernel 5.2.8-1-MANJARO