I like this game quite a bit. However, I don't see the reason for the overwhelmingly good reviews. If i had to guess, I'd say that there are two main reasons. 1) nostalgia because this evokes old apple computer graphics and 2) story, because there is an interesting story that you piece together here. The gameplay is a little annoying I must say. You move appallingly slow, which is something I'm sure some people will say adds tension. But I think it just makes for ultra annoying gameplay when you're back tracking or trying to move through an area you already were but died later on so youre prepared for anything that comes. I think the mixture of theme and art-style is unique, but there's nothing novel in the individual pieces here. It IS a unique experience, but it really depends on how badly you want to be titillated by apple graphics and satan worship mixed together. I wanted to love the hell out of it, but I'm barely past "meh"
This game is not friendly to newcomers at all. Every review here is written by someone who'se coming back to this game from a long time ago and only has nostalgia for it. The first review here says "unsurpassed", while another mentions that it is perfect. Neither of those things are true. So what's good? Well it reminds me a lot of x-com in how detailed the management aspects are. There's immense variety in terms of building, magic, and unit types. That's where the fun ends. What's bad? Diffficulty. There are games that are challenging and there are games that are artificially hard. This falls into the latter category. Your units are about as useless as tissue paper and last about as long. This is on normal difficulty. You'll spend a few turns building up a nice little hamlet with a neat array of buildings, then you'll send an expeditionary force out to conquer another little village. While your sizeable force gets annihilated by 1-2 ghosts in a cave, a single squad of enemy swordsmen will pop out of nowhere and attack your capital. No warning, no chance to defend yourself with magic (as the name of the game and the intro cinematic would have you believe), you lost, sorry. It wouldn't make a difference even if you had had a force to defend it because whatever you throw at the enemy stands up about as well as a fart in a hurricane. People will be upset about this review perhaps and tell me that I just need to "git gud", but at the end of the day this game just isn't fun.
