Do I wish the combat was real time like the older infinity engine games rather than turn based like Larian's other rpgs? Yes, I really, really do. Does that make the game any less good? Not really. There are some performance issues in the mid-to-late game that keep this from being a 5 star review but honestly its more annoying than game breaking. I wish I had started this game with a group rather than solo. If you have the opportunity to do that, you should.
Most of my problems with this game are the same problems I have with the tabletop version: The illusion of lots of player choice, but with only a few viable options. Restarted several times to test out class builds. On normal difficulty, spider swarms kill me about 75% of the time, based on random chance. Low hitpoint characters get killed super easily. Stealth doesn't seem to work very well during scripted events. Random encounters aren't random. Some low level monsters have damage reduction. The video game is very faithful to the pathfinder rules, but the pathfinder rules are pretty awful, so that hurts it more than it helps. All of the balder's gate/icewind dale games, as well as NWN 1 and 2 were both pretty heavily modified to make the rules work with a video game, this one... wasn't. And it should have been. Oh my god this game is so slow, why is it so slow, it's like i'm walking in quicksand. Why does it take forever to load? I'm running it off an SSD and a modern i5.
So this isn't a game so much as it is a series of timers you periodically click on or move around. There is strategy, because you have to be aware of which timers are counting down and which timers need to be finished before others so that you can initiate further timers. There is lots of lore text as you can imagine since this is another game from Alexis Kennedy- of fallen london and sunless sea- but you are at the mercy of the timers, unless you pause a lot, so you don't really get to appreciate any of it. In this game, he's managed to condense his brand of "storytelling" which is essentially random paragraphs from lovecraft novels pasted onto cards and then randomly dealt to you in the hope that some of it will be in an order that either makes some kind of narrative or is weird enough that you think it might, into its final form. Imagine playing a version of "cookie clicker" where every time you click, the game calls a database of random strings from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and prints one to the screen for you to read. Now imagine there are 12 simultaneous cookies to click. That's basically this game. 2/5 is generous.
So this isn't a game so much as it is a series of timers you periodically click on or move around. There is strategy, because you have to be aware of which timers are counting down and which timers need to be finished before others so that you can initiate further timers. There is lots of lore text as you can imagine since this is another game from Alexis Kennedy- of fallen london and sunless sea- but you are at the mercy of the timers, unless you pause a lot, so you don't really get to appreciate any of it. In this game, he's managed to condense his brand of "storytelling" which is essentially random paragraphs from lovecraft novels pasted onto cards and then randomly dealt to you in the hope that some of it will be in an order that either makes some kind of narrative or is weird enough that you think it might, into its final form. Imagine playing a version of "cookie clicker" where every time you click, the game calls a database of random strings from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and prints one to the screen for you to read. Now imagine there are 12 simultaneous cookies to click. That's basically this game. 2/5 is generous.
I bought this back when it came out, and recently tried to run it again, but had some crazy slowdowns and other issues on my modern computer. Its so awesome that im tempted to buy it again to see if GOG made any compatibility improvements. WE SEEERVE
