I would recommend waiting for a sale. Game can be funny and had me in good spirits. BUT, when I discovered what it took to win, I decided I wasn't interested anymore. To succeed, you will have to replay the game a number of times for each potential prom date until you figure out what you need stat-wize to succeed. The game does not tell you. It doesn't even tell you how far off you were when you lose. Polly, the Ghost-girl, for example, likes to party. You can assume this means you'll need a high "Fun" stat. But you'll also need high stats in "Boldness" & "Hearts" and the game does not offer any hint of this. In fact, some game *hints* can be contradictory: Polly mentions an interest in Russian books and you can buy items to help raise your stats. But the Russian book on sale will raise your "Smarts" - a stat that has nothing to do with Polly. Once you get playing and realise that there is very little time and money to do what is necessary to succeed, it can be very frustrating to find yourself wasting one or the other, or both. Overall, unless you short-circuit the normal gameplay experience and look up everything you need to know... or replay multiple times over for each individual prom date, you can't win. And when you do realise what is required, you'll find yourself focusing on stats rather than enjoying the humorous encounters, which is a shame and robs the game of what makes it fun.
This is a great game, you really feel the tense atmosphere - not at the start of a mission, but when you're backed into a corner, with no abilities left, guards closing in on you, and a dwindling number of rewinds left (the games undo button, if your last move goes all to hell). Maps are redesigned every time you play them for a fresh take every playthrough, though they can be a little cluttered and confusing. And upgrades are interesting and the timer in the game makes you debate whether you should be buying equipment or upgrading your agents. Personally, given the tense nature of the game, I think it would have been better if xp and cash were not one and the same, or had a toggle for that option. For their part, the developers have put a lot of tweaks into the game, where you can decide how much time you have, number of rewinds, knock-out timers etc, allowing you to make the game easier or harder, or just rebalance it by making one element more difficult while making another less so. The problem with so tense a game is that it can be frustrating. Like the "oh your controller is broken, were you playing Dark Souls?" joke, pouring a lot of time and effort in the game only to lose an agent will make debate the merits of breaking the closest thing to hand. Especially, since the game uses a checkpoint save after every mission and you cannot undo such a loss. So far, I have seen only one bug issue and unfortunately it was with the one thing that might mitigate that loss - the ability to enable mission restarts. If it all goes horribly wrong, you can do the mission again, however, upon seeing a mission go badly, the option - which had appeared before on a prev mission - did not appear, leaving me stranded and angry. So much so, I uninstalled the game then and there. Bugs like that need to be fixed asap, especially in this type of game! Aside from that issue, I enjoyed the game greatly. Its a lot like Darkest Dungeon; making the best of a bad situation, which I loved.
Important to note. Yes, the game is open source in it's original form, the difference with GOG is COMPATIBILITY! I find it funny and a little annoying when silly people overlook this. The same could be said for the Feist; Krondor RPG here. It's freely available online. So if you can get it, and can get it to work on DOSBOX, and can make your peace with it every time it crashes and you have to re-jig it to work again, that's fine. But for the rest of us, GOG handles the compatibility for a pittance with insurance that if you have a problem and contact them, someone will sort it out, and that's not something you get with open source. I just thought someone should represent the other side of the coin. Hope this information helps any unsure browsers. Anyhow, I'm not rating this game as 1 star, it's awesome and still holds up as what was probably the pinnacle of the genre for gameplay. Between a 4 star and a 5 star for me.
