Don't understand some of the negative reviews yet, for early access it has been a great experience for me, no terrible technical bugs, the game is challenging but it doesn't go to far, I feel exploring is dangerous but really worth it. Loading times are a bit long but nothing terrible. For early access I can really recommend it, I had much fun with it so far.
...for me it captures my experience from playing the tabletop in the past really well. It's very important to only buy this with the right expectations, it is like a visual novel with a preset main story, in which you make small but significant decisions, it has still images with little animations and the art is very beautiful. The sound design makes a really nice athmosphere and it''s really well fit for a certain kind of people with a specific sense for athmosphere. I recommend playing this sitting at night in the dark and let the sound an artwork sink in, it really feels great for me. But keep in mind this is no action RPG or something like bloodlines whatsover, like I said it resembles a carefully written tabletop story trough which you are guided by a gamemaster just like my experience playing the tabletop years ago. I recommend it highly for people who like this style.
As a big fan of Gothic I'm happy to see Pirhana Bytes making still games in their classic formula, but with huge improvements. I didn't hear much about this game when it came out and simply overlooked this, and I'm glad that I discovered it now. It is really fun if you know how to play a Pirhana Bytes Game. In some ways it's also an old school RPG (which is a good thing!) and some bad reviews seem to be because some people nowadays don't get it, if the game does not explain everything. The story (as far as I played) seemed very inspired by great classic Sci-Fi/Fantasy like for example Dune, Gamonghurst etc. I really love that. Maybe graphics are not 2020 standard anymore, but I don't care anyway for that and most games nowadays prefer graphics over choice, immersion, story etc. so this game is much better for me in that regard. Just an opinion, but really fun for me.
Had bought this with the original package and the really great tech tree posters it came with (yes I'm that old, but I was quite young when it came out...) and today I can still say it was the best Sid Meier game in the series and probably one of the best firaxis games. They really showed their potential here, other sid meier games had some minor flaws, but this game made it mostly better than many others. Sadly in the time this game came out it was totally underrated and next to no one I knew played it. It was hard to get in and learn all the details but the learning curve is worth it, because then you can play this game like me for 20 years and it doesn't age much. The plot is quite philosophical (New Tech Pop Ups frequently citing Kant, Sophokles, Machiavelli... you get it ;)) and it has the deepest lore and complex mechanics of any game I played till then. I think it's a beautiful masterpiece, which tried hard to scare away anyone on the first look. A think this was always a problem of the game, but if you have patience to dive into this it's very rewarding. It became a chore after a few years installing and patching it from the original CD I had, even if I tried to keep this on my hard drive all the time. I was so glad I found the digital copy and it was the first game I bought from GoG actually. Thought I really had to write a review at last. Only flaw: next to no music, mostly gloomy sounds. Best play some modern soundtrack while playing this. ;)
I played the beginning of this game with a friend and was quite looking forward to play it myself and first I enjoyed it very much for it's gameplay, dark story and art. But after playing it quite some time to higher levels, sadly I found to many flaws for this game to be enjoyable for me any longer... this game revels so much in it's hard "dark-souly" unforgiviness that the "endgame" becomes almost unbearable... it just depends on bullshit random rolls to crit you all the time, to just show you how hard it is, but on this point is just sucking out all the fun because there is no longer any skill involvement at all. It's just way too random for my taste. To a certain point it was really fun, but the endgame killed it for me. A shame because I really wanted to see how it ended, but now I will probably just watch a let's play and be over with it. In my opinion there are certain game mechanics which are just more marketing than fun. And I really have no problem with playing games in ironman mode, permadeath and such. But at least I want to be punished hard for mistakes I really make, not because to be killed by random rolls all the time, because the game wants to show off. There is no skill or stategy left on some point and I had no fun anymore playing it... I will certainly not buy any dlc and sequels to this game for this reason. I think it's wasted potential at this point... following some trends. If you have fun with the endgame fine, it's certainly not a bad game, but would not recommend it to anyone because it just hits you hard after playing many hours and this is just a serious let down.
Played this back in the days multiple times and have not been able to for a LONG time, as I don't own the CD anymore and had no way of running this. Wislisted this for years now and started giving up hope! Bringing this to modern PC is really awesome, being a really good point and click adventure in it's own right, it's even quite as good as the movie itself, which is my favorite movie of all times (admittingly dystopias are my favorite genre) and best movie tie in game ever made in my opinion. If you like point and click adventures (with classic nostalgic graphics of course) and the before mentioned genres, never have played this definitely try it out!
