Don't believe anyone who says this game is too short or doesn't have the complexity for replayability. The true depth of mechanics and gameplay of this game emerges at difficulties Expert and above. I and many others in the community have 1000+ hours in this game and haven't gotten bored yet. There's an active Discord community and a creative modding scene, too. This game is at its best when you're pushed to your limits in terms of difficulty (which is where mods come in to ramp it up even further once you've mastered the vanilla), forcing you to make tough decisions and think five turns ahead to get your agents out of a seemingly impossible scenario. But once you do, the success high is unbelievable. I haven't played any other game that lets me go from "Damn it I'm an idiot (for letting my agent get spotted)" to "Damn it I'm a genius (for making it out of there alive)" in the span of an hour that much. In that sense, it often plays like a series of tactical puzzles, albeit usually with multiple solutions. The random level generation keeps things perpetually fresh, and the deterministic nature of the gameplay makes it possible to plan ahead (you can predict what will happen if you know the variables, and the gameplay is largely about balancing information-gathering against risk). The game also has enough flavour and personality (in terms of premade, rather than randomly generated, characters) to satisfy those of us who like things a little more RP and story-heavy, especially with mods. The one gripe I have with this game is that the tutorial does a terrible job of introducing you to the mechanics that actually matter, and even outright forbids you from using some that are crucial are higher difficulties (like using movement through peripheral vision as a distraction tool). Once you figure out that the game isn't meant to be played by knocking everyone out, the true beauty of its stealth/infiltration nature emerges. Sadly, many players never figure that out.
Some old games have an interface that is clunky and uncomfortable to use. This is not one of those games. Some old games have graphics that not only look atrocious but also fail to fulfill their essential purpose of providing both atmosphere and easily accesible information about the environment by visual cues. Despite its age, this is not one of those games either. A tree may be a bunch of pixels, but you will still see it as a tree, and when standing in a bunch of them you'll feel like you're surrounded by trees. Some old games have an excellent quality of storytelling and a well-defined atmosphere. This is most definitely one of those games. Betrayal at Krondor tells many stories at once, and most importantly it does so with subtlety. Modern games display too much of the fear that a big part of the audience will fail to "get it", causing sales to suffer, and consequently approach their stories and content too crudely, with too stark a spotlight, causing even the best storytelling to still feel forced, engineered, artificial and out-of-place. This hidden gem originates in a time still free of that dependancy. This is a world in which its multi-faceted story unfolds. It is a linear story, and ultimately things happen the way they happen - no playing god for you. But your freedom lies in being able to choose what kind of story you want it to be. The characterisation is not in-your-face; if you want to find out what sort of people the main characters are, you'll need to interact with the world, watch events unfold and uncover tidbits here and there. There are many things happening around the world, but as part of that world, you may or may not bump into them and get a more complete picture. Perhaps the core of this game's appeal is the balance, the lack of pushing out any particular part into attention - it's all there, but it's your own call how much of it you wish to see. As for emotional impact... well, I'll just say this - I first encountered this game when I was little. Afterwards, I could vividly remember a scene towards the end animated in the game's usual way. Years later, when I played it myself, I was startled to realise that that had only been my imagination and the scene was shown in the form of prose as so many others. That's how vivid and real it seemed to me. False memories, heh. This is the game worth spending your time on. it's everything an RPG should be.
