I really enjoyed this game. Everything is conveyed through a combination of character animations and pictograms (emojis for you younger folks) through dialog boxes in place of text, but does it so well that I never felt confused as to what a character was thinking or trying to communicate to me as the player. The story and environments take on a feeling of sadness and it's your goal as Dropsy to help people feel happy again, no matter how badly they may treat you initially. The puzzles are fair with plenty of context clues and practically no pixel hunting as long as you pay attention. It was very obvious that the developer took great care in accentuating important details while avoiding insulting the player's intelligence. There is a good amount of collectables, hidden visual lore, and even puzzles that are not essential for completion of the game, for those that like to explore every nook and cranny of games.
This is definitely an early 90s point-and-click adventure, with all the good and bad that comes along with the genre from that era. I never played this back in the day, having been at the age the age group targetted more by Humongous Entertainment games, so I went into this with zero nostalgia. As such, I can say that it was a moderately enjoyable playthrough. The setting and art are interesting, and I would say the story itself is good enough to not bore the average player. Where the game loses point for me is something that frustrates me with other older point-and-click adventures - pixel hunts, trial-and-error item usage, and having to leave the game to view a walkthrough. There are a surprising number of inventory items or interactable objects that almost completely blend into the scenery that I could not even even see and only found after getting stuck and consulting a walkthrough for that step. While some of the puzzles were satisfying and logical, with plenty of red herrings to lead you astray, there were quite a few that made me roll my eyes and feel cheated when I got stuck and had to look up the answer. Some tools you've successfully or unsuccessfully used for a purpose in one puzzle may do the complete opposite in the exact same situation for another puzzle, which felt arbitrary at best. There is also at least two ocassions that I can remember where you needed to give a random item to a character with absolutely no context clues as to why that would be a way to progress. Despite the flaws and showing of its age, for the price of free it still gave me over 4 hours of good entertainment.
As other have mentioned in their reviews, the Arx Liberatis mod is required to play this on a modern system. It might be worth GOG figuring out how to implement the mod in the base download, but I know this probably is difficult due to the GPL licensing. The setting is really cool and characters have a lot of charm. I actually like the inventory and interaction system, despite feeling very dated. You can build the main character into various stats that align with the 3 basic arctypes you see in most fantasy games: Warrior, Mage, and Thief. There's usually at least a couple ways to solve quests, some being very obscure. There are no quest markers and you have to really pay attention to books you read and things that characters say to figure out where you're supposed to go. The "quest log" is really basic and borderline useless unless you're coming back from not playing for a while to see where you left off. This could be a positive or negative, depending on what you're looking for in a game. There are some serious flaws that keep this from being a classic game gem, though. The "puzzles" are typically just finding items strewn about to advance. Advancement at certain points require either having enough magic skill to cast certain spells or a scroll containing said spell. Unfortunately, as with all resources, there are a limited number of spell scrolls in the game, so if you decided to use them before you could get stuck. The difficulty spike is also very high near the end of the game. As I specced primarily in melee for my first playthrough, the only way to really fight some end game enemies was use scrolls or spam healing potions (which are also limited) during combat. I am not ashamed to say that I had to enable invulnerability in the console to defeat these enemies once I ran out of healing potions. Despite the issues, Arx Fatalis is worth a playthrough if you aren't afraid to look up guides and are willing to spec into magic or cheat if you get softlocked.
