I have found a lot of flaws to this game... - Artwork, background artwork is often correct and nice, but animated characters are poorly drawn and poorly animated. Just for example, at one point there is a character which is tagged as "ugly princess", but in all honesty, it is one of the less hideous characters of the game. - Puzzles are made artificially difficult, by providing clues only once (if you want to redo actions providing clues, most of the time, you won't get it again) and scarce. Solutions which would seem to make sense do not work and do not provide additional hint on what you would have to do. - Some reviewers found that the humor was good, but I did not find it fun. Clearly not to the level of what I could get with non-serious LucasArts games for instance. - You are just a jerk for the poet. I will not tell the details to not provide spoils, but really I did not want to do what the game forced me to do. - There is a long and boring introduction presented as a monologue by some hideously drawn and animated character. When the game start you spawn abruptely in a graveyard, without having much context excepted the blahblah of that intro character. Likewise for the ending.
The game is not really bad by itself, but it has no solid good point for it. It is a walking simulator, but you hardly ever have a good sight, especially in the end where you have a fog which is so dim, that you will loose a lot of time to orient yourself and go to the place you intend to go. There are some lanterns that you can light to help, but this won't arrange much the situation. For the immersion and interactive parts, you will find many objects, lanterns and drawers, but hardly ever useful. For lanterns and drawers, you will find tons of them. I initially tried to light all the lanterns, but as this seems completely useless, and there are too many, I quickly gave up with that "challenge". For drawers, why did they put so many, and so few really are interesting. The amount of drawers in that game is ridiculous… and most of them contain the same thing. As others said, the story is not interesting, and if it were, would not be worth so much wandering. Puzzles are poorly presented. I recommend to read the hints, because in all honesty, they will not spoil much and will provide better problem statements than the elements you will find out. As a summary, the game has no real flaw (beside some issues with some savegames, but you can still start from beginning of the chapter without losing much progression), but really has nothing for it. There are so many games in this category which are way better…
As some already wrote, the graphics are nice, but the gameplay is not that great. - You have 4 swords to play with, but each sword only has 3 levels, including the level 1 which is unusable (the first upgrade unlocks the ability to use the sword) - You can equip up to 3 gems amongst something like 8 possible ones, and each has 3 levels ("true" levels, this time) - You have a talent tree with some parts of it are locked until you unrevealed some "Truth" (there are 4 truths to reveal) - Each story make you go through something like 5 acts, each act having often 2 variants The annoying point with the gameplay is that it feels like a little unbalanced (not in the sense that some parts are ridiculously easy or hard, but in the sens that some present aspects which could be interesting, are in fact completely useless). Levels have check points from where you cannot go back, which means, that you cannot fully explore a level. There are 4 kind of doors, each unlockable by a different sword, but you will quickly get all swords, making the door system pretty useless besides making you loose some seconds to swap weapons. Also, you do not gain something really relevant by opening a door you did not opened before. Most of the time, it is just a chest which provides random stuff that any other chest could provide). I explored something like 6 or 7 stories out of the 25 possible, before unlocking the good end, and I see no point in doing all the remaining ones. After 4 or 5 runs, you have unlocked all sword levels and gems, and visited every level. The only remaining thing is the talent tree to complete, but at this point, there is no real stake as you are already strong enough to win every encounter, so that farming for last points is not that much attractive. In the end, this is a game based on choices for the story to explore, but when playing it, the choice aspect is not always where you would like it to be. I still enjoyed it, but it could have been so much better...
