I had been eyeing this game for many years, debating whether to purchase it. Finally, I decided to go for it to play as a spooky game for Halloween season. What a mistake that was. Initially, I was somewhat enjoying the game, despite the marginal voice acting by the protagonist. The story was intriguing, and although a few early puzzles were a bit off, I was more or less having a good time and willing to continue. But the longer I played, the worse it got. One of the things this game does is chance what is interactable depending on whether certain story or game events have triggered. This means you need to backtrack a lot to recheck things after you've uncovered clues. Your character absolutely will not pick up certain objects, until there's a reason. But sometimes there's no clear reason why you would suddenly want an object. This means that instead of kind of piling up inventory and considering your options, you have to decide why you might suddenly have access to an object. There are a handful of actual puzzle puzzles in the game, and these are a mixed bag. Some are trivially easy, others are fun, and at least one is essentially impossible without 1) knowing the nature of the puzzle 2) knowing what a set of symbols mean and 3) knowing that they might need to be ordered in a particular way. There is literally no context in the game to explain this. If you're not intimately familiar with these symbols, which the vast majority of people would not be, you're basically guaranteed to need to look up a game guide to have any idea what the solution is. And then you still have to go through the tedious process of getting the puzzle into the solved configuration. The other ridiculous thing about this game is how many of the puzzles are literal lock-and-key inventory puzzles. I went through at least a dozen locked doors, gates, portals, and containers and matching keys, and I don't think I made it halfway through the game before giving up. Keys keys keys. There's literally a sequence where you unlock a gate to get into a tomb, get a key in the tomb to unlock a secret passage, then go through it and discover another locked gate. To unlock this gate, you need a special key, which is inside a house. You have to talk to someone and get a key to unlock the house, then solve a puzzle to unlock the container that holds the key, then return to the gate and unlock it. Oh, but you're actually kicked out of the tomb at one point, and can't get back inside the gate. The same person who is okay with giving you a key to the house doesn't want to give you a key to the tomb, because it will upset his wife. So instead he GIVES YOU ACID TO DISSOLVE THE LOCK. Because obviously this won't upset his wife. I was putting up with all this nonsense, and was willing to slog through, until I finally passed through all these areas, and interacted with a seemingly innocent object, only to be instantly decapitated and hit a game over screen. I hadn't saved in about an hour, and there was literally no warning I was in danger. In fact, the game had only had one other deadly sequence, and that's triggered by grabbing a live electrical wire. This death had no warning and no indication there was any danger whatsoever. After the endless tedium I had just gone through, I was absolutely done with this trash. I was planning to eventually buy the sequels, but I am so over this garbage. Please avoid this game, for my sake and yours.
If you're not obsessed with graphics, and enjoy sandbox games, you'll probably like this. If you're a bit OCD, you'll probably be unable to stop playing. The combination of combat, crafting, and exploring is phenomenal. Every time I think I've done everything, I realize I've only scratched the surface. Since I first bought the game, it has had multiple rounds of massive, free content additions, and there's so much in the game now, it's hard to keep up with everything. This will satisfy your urge to explore and just noddle around and build stuff. The boss fights are pretty epic as well. I've been playing this game on and off for more than a decade now, and I still enjoy it. There have been tons of big content updates over the years to keep it fresh and exciting, and the crafting system and other mechanics have improved as well. I'll put it this way: this is my most played-game in a library of more than 800, with nearly 2000 hours played now. It's totally worth it at full price. On sale, it's a no-brainer. Only negative, which is minor, is that I think the game has gotten almost too complex and bloated with content in the decade+ since it came out. But that's manageable, and exploring, building, and battling are all still fun.
This was the sequel to the groundbreaking Pool of Radiance, and basically fixed up all the issues of that amazing, but flawed game. It added more character classes, increased the level limits, and had a real story beyond just "Kill the bad guy." Your party was fighting for its freedom, battling multiple evil factions using you for their own ends. Basing it on the very good "Azure Bonds" novel as a sort of sequel was a great idea, as way getting cameos from Alias and Dragonbait. Just a masterpiece of its era, and one of my all-time favorite RPGs.
Terrible controls and interface combined with very dull, dark, uninteractive environments make this an absolute chore to play. I thought I could tough it out for the thirty minutes it apparently takes to complete this prologue to The Whispering Valley, but it is absolutely not fun at all and is to be avoided. I'm sure the main game is just as bad too.
I wish I could put into words how much I despised the experience of playing this game. I never played the original, so maybe I don't have nostalgia to see me through, but honestly it just became torture. Some parts of the world were very pretty to look at, some of the atmospheric audio was nice, and the brief musical moments were cool too. But I utterly loathe exporing Riven. I felt like I could figure out the logical puzzles quickly, but I got so sick of missing tiny details or hotspots over and over, which made me backtrack again and again looking for something I missed. And there were a few moments that seemed like potential softlocks, where I wasn't sure if I hadn't broken the game state. There was no indication of whether I was making progress. I just kept moving into new areas, seeing things, not knowing if I had seen everything, and then moving on. I found information, dutifully saved it, screencapped it, or wrote it down, but then never found ways to apply the vast majority of it. It got to the point that I didn't even want to use a walkthrough to complete the game. I'm just sick of it. I'm sick of the aesthetic, sick of the endless wandering, and sick of never feeling like anything significant has happened. This honestly ranks up there as one of the worst gaming experiences of my life. I'm so irritated that I wasted my money on making myself miserable for an entire weekend. I hope to never think of this game again.
The paper-thin plot is barely coherent, the puzzles are nonsensical for the most part, and it's barely just a bunch of random elements thrown together. It crossed over into "so bad it's good" territory a few times, like the kind of movie you'd see RiffTrax make fun of, but other parts were just tedious and annoying. I'm sure the developer worked hard on this, but more work on making a story that actually means something and puzzles that aren't arbitrary and goofy would help. There's apparently a sequel, and I almost want to check it out to see if it makes any improvements on the first.
There's definitely a lot of interesting story ideas going on with this game. As someone who never played it back when it came out, I have no nostalgia helping me to forgive its many flaws. I cut my teeth on the old Sierra adventure games in the 1980s, so I know how difficult adventure games could be. But even those games (with a few exceptions) wouldn't put you into unwwinable states. With this game, getting stuck in unwinnable states is the majority of the experience. And you'd never know you were in an unwinnable state, as opposed to just missing something, without outside information. The game itself will never let you know you've cut yourself off from progress. I found myself in impossible situations multiple times, and as I got closer to the end I used a guide just to make sure I wasn't doing something out of order so I wouldn't have to repeat sections of the game from old saves. And even doing that, I still got all screwed up a couple times, such that I had to go back to old saves. You can't even backtrack; once a piece of story has advanced, old sections and characters get closed off. Like I said, elements of the story are good, but the gameplay is so terrible that it sucks the enjoyment out of the experience. Only play this game with a walkthrough close at hand, unless you are interested in wasting hours of your life replaying the same parts over and over.
I never heard of this game back in the 1990s when it came out, and it's always a surprise to me to see how many companies besides Sierra and LucasArts made adventure games of this type back then. Essentially, this is a poor man's Indiana Jones, but despite that, it's not bad at all. I haven't finished it yet, but I've put in a couple hours and am enjoying it so far. The inventory puzzles have so far been very sensible, with no insane video game logic on offer. The graphics are very typical of the times, and in fact the game looks a lot like the LucasArts games being released then. My only complaint is with the voices. The guy who does Joe King, the main character, is absolutely intolerable. I turned off speech after about 15 minutes. Other than that, I really like this and can definitely recommend it for fans of the genre.
