My youth. Memories. Pixels over pixels. 320x200 resolution. DOS. IPX/SPX Lan. 486 DX CPU. S3 VGA graphic card.
I was at first attracted by the hand-drawn art, but when I started playing, the game turned out to be overly preachy, stiff, full of mundane inventory puzzles, improbable, hard to care for NPCs and a very naive view on the world's energy crisis. Years later, I finally finished playing, and... ehhh... I respect the effort, but I did not really like the game. It was like listening to a two hours sermon of a religion you don't care about. For the record - I think climate change is real and critical problem for humans to solve, but the game does not offer any real insights on the topic, just naive activism and virtue signaling.
A lot of attention to detail, complicated lore, interesting locations, but a bit wasted on a very plain RPG where you just go and fight monsters. Back in the day, though, a real attempt at genuine innovation.
The game is in terrible technical state, enemies are just spawning around you, etc. Looks like cash grab - and you can easily guess where the money go...
The game has one of the richest, deepest lores I have ever encountered. Moreover, the atmosphere of leading a small viking-like tribe is spot-on. You have to juggle food supply, trade, relationships with neighbors, raids and warfare, and most importantly, relations with gods, both ancestral and helpful as well as alien and hostile. Both music and graphics are also very good. Must play, IMO!
The setting and the slow start of the game are great, but gamebreaking bugs spoil the enjoyment - the biggest problem is the "wind up punch" feature that works only about in one time in eight attempts - which is a problem in a fast paced combat with limited ammo.
I hate bossfights. It's the plague inflicted on PC gaming by the McDonalds of console gaming. And this game is infested with them. I don't know who finds the idea of a hitpoint sack that you have to hit over a hundred times to kill it while dodging repetitive attack patterns attractive. I surely don't - it's dull, it's exhausting, and even if you put yourself through their torture, they leave no memorable experiences behind. I would much prefer this game to be a classical adventure - to be able to experience all the interesting characters minus the tedium of bossfights.
I have this game on Steam, it's been ages between updates, and frankly, the gameplay is way too random to enjoy. Random things randomly happen to you (mostly jumpscares), there is no narration or interesting characters, it's like the gamebooks of old. Gets old very fast, there is very little sense of actual discovery or progress. It tries hard to be stylish, but ends up just being shallow.
For a game about being a librarian, the developers did a really shoddy work implementing what seems to be the most important part of the game - a central database or journal that would store all the acquired knowledge. The game could be so much better with an illustrated, searchable encyclopedia that would let you browse and ponder over all the (deliberately cryptic and obtuse) lore. Instead, the developer just implemented an "copy to clipboard" feature and called it a day, offloading his job to the player - allegedly, you are supposed to ALT-Tab to external application and make manual notes. From game design point of view, that's insane, arrogant and lazy, hence the low score.
Next, please!
