Dragonsphere

This Point-and-Click Adventure isn't quite a masterpiece, but it is quite good! There are a few obtuse moments, but the genre is lousy with them; it's just something you have to put up with in the older games. The visuals are mostly nice, but occasionally, the sprites look almost like the cheesy digitized graphics you'd see in Mortal Kombat, but best I can tell, they're not; they don't have enough detail. The walking speed is a bit slow, too, and the climbing scenes just go on and on. All that said, the world, although small in terms of traversable real estate, has a lot of ecological diversity, as well as a rich lore with many different sentient species. Some of them are twists on old fantasy tropes, but some are completely new, and unique to this world. It also gets into the struggle of racial inequality a bit, and does it pretty well. This may not be a top-tier adventure, but it is absolutely worth your time, if you're a fan of the genre.

So, this is a good example of that particular type of point and click adventure game where you have a long list of actions to choose from, and you can collect a huge inventory of somewhat useless items, but the base of the game still comes down to figuring out the obscure solutions to some puzzles and particular dialogue path choices. If you're not into that type of game, this won't be for you. But if you like that sort of thing, this is a really charming period piece in gaming history. The voice acting is admittedly terrible, and at first I thought the story and art style were incredibly generic, but things take a good turn later in the story and things get much more interesting and inventive. If you're ok with adventure games, give it a shot. Especially if you received it for free from GOG.

Beautifully mastered POC adventure game, for its time it had amazing interface layout and options that some games today lack.

Dragonsphere was given out on GOG for free earlier. It is a well-done adventure game in its time, one that's made neither by Sierra nor Lucasarts. The graphic animations are competitive and the story has its fair share of twists to reward progress, as you take on the role of a newly crowned king to go on a quest solo to slay an evil magician that threatens the kingdom of humans, AKA the Fair. The most amusing surprise was that the direction I thought I followed correctly through the desert actually led me to a suicide fissure. The fact that you start back on the same scene, in case of death, makes the game rather forgiving enough to let you try different methods, despite the trial-and-error tendencies. The puzzle in the faerie labyrinth was rather tedious and counter-intuitive, being the only thing that got me to watch the rest of the gameplay/story on YouTube. But, blessed be those who endure through puzzles like these. I can humbly recommend this old, hidden gem.

A little sparkling gem of a fairy tale. King Callash must defeat the evil wizard before he himself needs to be rescued. It's quite entertaining, even if it plays out rather slowly— both because of the measured language and the fact that the king basically only walks and never runs (but it looks extremely cute when he scrambles up mountains or trudges through the desert sand). Although the speech is very slow, it is a pleasant surprise that there is speech at all – and that it is constant. The music is also tolerable, and if not, you can always turn it down. The puzzles are logical, but it's not always easy to find objects due to the “pixelation” of the image. All in all, you get the impression that you're being read a fairy tale, and that's not the worst thing. I definitely liked it.