Don't expect a lot from this title. Comparisons to Grimrock and older dungeon crawls are apt, but this is a bite sized game. Plan about 4-5 hours at most for the run through. There's no character development options outside of picking the class, levels are pre-set, mechanics are lacking. Other than a few obnoxiously timed spike traps nothing is really hard and none of it interesting. Is it worth getting? Eh that depends. If you want a couple hours to waste and enjoy these type of games, maybe on a deep discount.
Okay, I grew up on Lands of Lore, Wizardry, Swords and Serpents, Might and Magic, and Eye of the Beholder series (and many more). I still play games like Grimrock. I love dungeon crawlers and grid maps. This should be an easy fit for me. It's not. the interface is terrible. Clunky doesn't even begin to cover it. There's no intuitive nature to this interaction. The manual is, predictably, of little help, and the randomness of stats is bizarre. I want to love this game. I can't. It's got all the right ideas, and all the wrong designs. The interaction to figure out how to go between screens is obnoxious, and the sound effects are ear grating. It's like Might and Magic III, but worse. A lot worse. Also, pet peeve: If you're going to translate spells, just go ahead and give them decent names. Funky non-sensicle names are pointless. I've always hated this about some of these games. If the spell casts fire breath, just call it that. It's not hard. Finally, why does the bishop only seem to start with Mage spells?
For whatever deity's sake that you follow, if you are at all sensitive to camera swivel and jerkiness, stay off the horse. Walking around will save you a lot of misery. You can adjust controls and most are bareable if not great, but that horse spins like a drunken mule. Learn to love your feet. The pace is a bit tedious and dialogue is mediocre after an hour or so in. Not upset over getting the game on a deep discount during a sale, but very much not worth full price.
The constant updates and change logs to this game often cause more problems than they fix. The developers often make bizarre decisions where one feature will really be neat, but is completely wrecked by the behavior of another. A major downside is AI that might look up to a turnip, barely above dumb as a rock. While others hate the burrowing worm, I find that after the updates to the cursed wolves is most annoying. You can pretty much kiss any dwarf that gets bitten goodbye and it's made the game almost unplayable in worlds they appear in. This should be a fun, light-hearted game, not an exercise in constant frustration. It isn't hard, but it is aggrivating. If you're going to get this, get it on sale.
The game is a good nostolgia kick with a lot of references to bygone games, notably Quest for Glory. If that is your thing, then yes, this is a good game for you. A few things I think are problematic? 1) The time. The game time flows eraticlly, and everything takes significant time to do, even talking or walking. Further you're really hemmed in by mandatory events such as class, dinner, curfew, and bed time. These break up the flow of the game quite badly, and you're constantly trying to figure out how to spend what little time resource you actually have. This annoys me somewhat because I see no reason to go eat dinner if I have a pocket full of 8 apples. I see no reason to not have the function to stay up all night. 2) The romance. This is just dumb. Why does every adventure game or RPG think we need a romance component? It's all but forced on you. Why can't you just not be into it? It doesn't really add anything to the actual story. 3) You. Honestly your character is a jerk a lot of the time, the options for responese are often lacking, and there are just flat out occasions where you know there should be a different answer, and all the answers it gives you end up with a bad end. Not that you can't happen some, but when your character SHOULD know something different, it'd be nice to act upon it. This happens two cnversations pretty early on. I would have liked a bit more of an alignment development where you could mold your character into one who was say studious, adveturous, wily, or some such in terms of his conversational skills. 4) The unnecessary hostility of the administrator. This goes back to the problems with Harry Potter-ism where the teachers and professionals in the school, well, lack professionalism or accountablity for their own actions. I find this a poor mechanic and really unappealing as a story device. So, it's a good game, just slightly flawed, and lacks in pacing.
There are certain mechanics I expect in a game, like tool tips. Your characters exist in the world, one would expect them to understand how to do basic things. You should be able to access that knowledge as well. I don't need to know what an unidentified treasure is, but when you can't even see what you're purchasing from the 'general store' on a first go round in a town, and the tutorial doesn't give you any hints about what you're doing? That's a huge red flag for bad design. I'll happily log hours on a rogue-like and take my lumps, but if I'm getting frustrated enough to have to google what the hell I just clicked on because the game doesn't give me a way it see what my items are or how they operate? Yeah, 25 minutes and I was done. Seems based on some other posts I found, I'm not alone in wondering what things do and it seems to be largely a PC-port problem. I don't care how innovative your game is. If you can't be bothered to run a basic tutorial that actually shows how to deal with inventory and character skills in the version I am playing, you're wasting my time. I'm not going to do a whole run through for the express purpose of "guessing" what the designers intended things to do.
