This game is pretty amazing. The arena mode alone is incredible and the dungeon crawling is unique. The realistic physics and relatively unscripted animations makes for memorable and emergent gameplay. It's a little rough around the edges and it is not overly long but its something I have come back to several times since completing it and if you are interested in seeing new ideas well implemented then its well worth a whirl.
The first hour or so felt really great. There is clearly a good game buried beneath the mountain of bugs. Given it was fun and unique I was happy to overlook a fair number of these annoying crashes and UI failures but at a certain point in the game it just crashed continuously and I wasnt able to progress any further. Frustrating as hell given its been out for several months now but maybe my future grandchildren will be able to play some kind of stable community patch version.
... and 2012 was a pretty good year but while it came out in 2012 I actually played it in early 2013 when the main technical problems had been patched out. Most of the complaints against this game were presumably valid at launch but have since become outdated. My third favorite moment of the game was finally being able to triangulate a landmark which opened up the whole north coast for my exploration pleasure. My second favorite moment was finding a rare plant just as the sun set, leaving me quickly in almost complete darkness, far from safety and having to use my memory and wits to safely navigate to the nearest bed in dangerous terrain, knowing that if I fell, the plant would be dropped and lost to the darkness. My favourite moment, and what made the game so memorable to me was when the game's mechanics, interface, environment and found journals all clicked for me and the island's mysteries became clear. The story itself is simple, verging on cliched, but the way it is told is what impressed me. Most games try to tell a story in a very narrative heavy way as though it were a film or a novel but this game is art in the way that a piece of music or a single image are art. It is a simple idea expressed beautifully through through its medium.
