It's a relatively short, but honestly quite well paced stealth horror game. Areas are quite large without being overbearing, varied, and each providing a different challenge based upon pre-established knowledge. This is very much a beginner's first foray into gaming, and I would recommend it on that front. It's very easy for a seasoned gamer, but the visuals, music, exploration, and loot goblin tendencies with collectibles will be sated for the price. I did experience a weird issue when I somehow fell through some fencing to an older area, in a place you shouldn't be able to enter, and became stuck. This required me to really bump up against walls, so it might've been a glitch. I play using the Heroic Launcher on Linux, and while it works fine through Steam using a launcher command, I was unable to watch any of the 2D cutscenes. If you don't care for achievements, just launch it through Steam as an unregistered game. I docked a star for two very personal reasons not mentioned in the second paragraph. The first is the protagonist's need to vocalize everything unimportant. It's not on the level of the Gothic remake demo, but it can get grating when it's something that you can clearly see. It's also not "Did I just move that with my freaking mind" or "Well, that just happened". The other is the warning at the start. It's not the warning itself, it's that the message divulges the theme, and dispels it instantly. You go in, knowing the main narrative drive before it has time to unveil itself along the journey through the story. I would've preferred if it was during the credits. I can't recall if the message was said more through a cutscene, I had to watch them separately, and there wasn't a video with just the 2D cutscenes. If not, would've been best there. It's a nitpick, but I do think the game has a very good message, told in a different way from a perspective not usually taken, with solid gameplay to match the theme.
With the release of the, in the heaviest quotations I can only express in text, "remastered versions", Activision Blizzard has in all of their limited wisdom and foresight, decided to delist the GOG versions. Why? To funnel people to buy their anniversary ones of course. Are the new versions even worth it? Nope. They used AI to upscale everything, and that's about it. Anything they added was done by the loving warcraft community eons ago when they abandoned their earlier works to the annals of history. Why? To quote their now infamous, and still well held belief, "You think you do (want it), but you don't.". The people in charge couldn't care less about their legacy, legacy titles, or what they mean for the history of gaming, especially for a franchise as well known as Warcraft. Even the 2.0 reforged version of Warcraft 3 and its expansion is still incomplete, and they popped the champagne like they scored a victory, crossing a milestone to celebrate a momentous anniversary. The irony is palpable, as they marionette the corpse of Warcraft along like a triumph. If you can secure a copy, they're still wonderful games, and if the old school version is a bit too old school, there's the wc3 version of wc2's horde campaign available. It hurts watching what felt like the best possible move Activision Blizzard could've done to preserve their older titles be completely undermined by their own pure greed. They're not alone in being poor stewards of their catalog, but it's still a travesty.
The best way to imagine playing this game is like you've discovered a lost version of MediEvil on the PS2, given an HD treatment. It has the melee combat, the environmental puzzles and navigation and the cartoonish spooky atmosphere you'd imagine it to have. It has a solid art style and direction that feels like something you've seen before, but it does enough to distinguish it as its own, like Overlord (2009) or Subcon Forest from A Hat in Time, the music is "spookified" versions of classical music that sounds like would've fit in, again, like Subcon Forest. Everything feels familiar, but it doesn't feel like it's rip off another game. Everything fits well, has variety and intentional direction. There's clear passion and effort woven into it, and it's difficult to deny or ignore it. I wasn't blown away, because I've experienced way too many games of a similar type, but that's fine. It can feel unrefined at times, but that's to be expected. I do wish it would figure out its target audience, as that's the one part that feels directionless. And the barriers in some levels need to be more obvious, or at least use unique models; some fencing was used interchangeably as an invisible barrier, and some was just level dressing. I was able to get it on a sale, and for myself, I felt like the price I got it for was more than fair. GOG didn't properly track total playtime, and while I missed 3 collectible items, after getting 100% of the game done, it totaled to roughly 4 hours. Everything is straight forward with little in the way of branching out. It was enjoyable though, and I couldn't ask for much more.
