This is an excellent game. Puzzle games don't often offer choice in my experience, but this one does. You can engage with the story if you like reading and philosophy, or mostly ignore it if you only want to solve the puzzles. I started off the latter way: there for the puzzles, and thinking that the reading was just going to be extra fluff. I said to myself "I'm not taking homework from a videogame", and just moved on. The team did such a great job putting this together, though, that the bits of the world that I experienced just moving through the puzzles drew me in to the content that I thought was just extra, and it was so, so worth it. Don't feel like you have to do it, though. It's your game. Play it how you want to. I don't want to share too much (for spoiler reasons), but I will say that if you want to get the stars, don't feel bad about looking up the solutions for some of them. A few are crazy. The game maximizes puzzle fun, ambience (music and scenery alike), and minimizes some of the more annoying traps that puzzle games can fall into (i.e. pixel-hunting type things, which always felt more like a brute force solution than a clever one to me). I got the game on sale, but it's probably worth full price. I say that without having even touched "Road to Gehenna" or "Prototype". Buy it and enjoy!
I've never played a game like this. It's an amazing combination of history and the future, with all the awe of the distant past combined with the best of the philosophical questions that science fiction excels at. I found myself immersed in this archaeologist's life - sort of interested in the present, but driven by understanding the many mysteries of the past. Learning about this world was fascinating. Grappling with real challenges of history in a world that may not value an objective account of the past (as I'm sure many archaeologists can relate to) helped to ground this story. I often felt that the choices I made had genuine consequences. At times, I felt real danger. I didn't take for granted that the game would protect me from failing. This (combined with the single save file) made everything feel more real. I love languages, so I was thrilled to find a game that incorporated this. It does a good job balancing puzzle difficulty so that it's hard enough to feel like you're genuinely working through something, but you also don't need a linguistics background to do this. It's amazing to me that they managed to make a compelling game built around this core task. It pains me to not give such a creative and enjoyable game a perfect score, but the fact that pieces of the environment would sometimes fail to render until I was very close made early play a bit jarring, and entire walls failing to appear in key moments undercut what might otherwise have been a much more dramatic experience. I played this on a brand-new gaming desktop with a GTX 1660 Super GPU, leading me to believe that any graphical issues must be due to the game rather than hardware. The game's narrative quality was able to carry most of this weight, though. I'd give it a 4.5/5 if I could. Thanks for making a great game! tl;dr: If you like puzzles, language, history, and/or interactive fiction, I heartily recommend this. It's easily worth the 25 USD that I got it for. On sale, it would be a steal.
I never got deep into this one back in the day because of the annoyingly realistic feature that running makes your character tired. While Morrowind does appear to be a world best explored slowly, that patience only really pays off in reading through the lore. Walking - literally walking - around the countryside will get the player bored and/or frustrated and the character delayed and/or killed. HOWEVER - the GOG version comes the TES Construction Set, which is a program that you can use to mod the game (look in the folder where the game is installed). I used it to make running no longer tire out the player character (with some help from forums), and suddenly the game made a giant leap from unplayable to a pretty standard Elder Scrolls game. If you don't mind the old graphics, Morrowind's ... unique ... aesthetic (i.e. mushrooms, bugs, and ash), and you're looking to play more Elder Scrolls while we wait for Bethesda to descend from the mountain with Elder Scrolls VI, buy this on sale. Play it vanilla, mod it to pieces (I personally recommend giving yourself the ability to fly via the levitate spell effect), or select from the work produced by the large modding community. You can make it feel very much like Oblivion, or just turn it into your own crazy sandbox. (3/5 because some assembly required)
Fun, pretty chill story. Light fantasy elements on top of a very (if you'll excuse the choice of word) human story lead to compelling and relaxing late night gaming. It was particularly useful escapism during the depths of the pandemic. Solid example of a visual novel - more engaging than a book, but not as mechanic-dependent as lots of games are. You make drinks, but it's low pressure. I don't drink coffee, but some of the drink names and the pixel art make me want to try some fancy hot chocolate or something. I don't often feel the need to buy games at full price, but I did for this one, and it was worth it. For best results, play only when the sun is down.
