The base game is pretty enormous and pretty addictive. Then they keep adding yet more content, often with little twists to keep it interesting without spoiling the base experience. This is an excellent game; it is also how DLCs should work.
I'm not sure where to start! This is a beautiful game: wonderful artwork, lovely music, but most of all amazing writing. I gather the voice acting was added later but that fits perfectly too. At its heart this is a story about love in all its variety: romantic love, of course, but also friendship love, love of place, of family and belonging, love of truth and beauty and all that is right and, most of all, love of life. The writing is full of humour and feeling, as the story starts with a failing friendship, moves through discovery, tension, loss and fear, and culminates in life and love - although with a small poignant reference to memory loss. It is worth waiting through the end credits for a lovely little epilogue to round the story off. Incidentally, the version here on Gog has neither nudity nor sex scenes, so those reviewers who moaned must have gone looking for the patch/DLC. I gather there are three different ending, based on choices made. I have only played through once so far: I suspect I found the 'happy' ending, but I'll try different choices on my next playthrough to see. If you love good writing and a story with a life-affirming message then I strongly recommend you play this game.
It took me a couple of goes to get up to speed on how to play the game - it helped when I took the melee character as he is significantly easier to play with. Once I got the hang of things the first few levels were quite fun. But as I went on the quests got duller, and grindier, and involved far to much moving from end to end of the map then back again. The description talks as though you get to choose your path - you don't. You certainly can't live by your conscience on the main quests - if you don't betray people for no discernable reason other than that the game requires it you cannot progress. It is very linear and, in the end, very tiresome. Oh, and no game should mention the term 'RPG' in its description if it doesn't have a manual. I'm not sure the options taken in the skill trees made any significant difference in practice, but it would have been nice to be able to read up on what they were supposed to do and how the game designers expected them to work. Overall, some nice ideas but, sadly, not recommended.
