After owning this for 8 years on GoG, I finally sat down for a 50 hour marathon that took me two weeks, but I finally beat Arcanum tonight. Despite the steep learning curve for new players, I must say that the journey is well worth it. This game requires your full attention. Have a real pen and notebook ready, because the in-game journal doesn't hold your hand at all. I constantly had to look up where an NPC was to get back to them. The main quest is intelligent, the lore behind the world is thought-out, and the constant struggle between Magick vs Technology creates palpable tension in the world visible during your journey. Every dialog with an NPC feels natural, and your choices reflect the type of character you want to be. Tired of talking to this person? Pick an agressive line, such as: "Uh, that would be the sound of ME descreating your pathetic remains!" kill them, and loot their pockets for the knowledge you seek. Or, with enough charisma, you might convince them to tell you what you need to know, willingly, without any confrontation. OR you might discover they have a rival who will help you instead. The game gives you the tools. The choice is yours. Your INT affects your dialog, so if you're drunk, your responses will be slurred until you sober up. I haven't seen dialog this dynamic since playing as a Malkavian in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. It feels like you're having actual conversations. With the latest Unofficial Patch, you no longer have to hunt down for all the graphic and sound mods, however there are some areas' framerates that still run like hot garbage due to the way the engine is rendering the sprites on the screen, which is the only reason it gets a 4/5 stars. It can be frustrating debugging the game if you run into a problem. I wish we could go back to days like this where we can be so much more immersed, where your options affect the world, and the game actually treats you like an adult who can solve problems. Good stuff.
I was in middle school in 1994 when I first saw the trailer for Pegasus Prime. By the time I grew up and had some money, the game was discontinued and crazy expensive on eBay. It took 20 years to finally get it here through GOG, but it has definitely lived up to my childhood expectations. This is a reboot of the original Journeyman Project Turbo, which was an amazing time travel adventure that was packaged with our Packard Bell computer (66 mhz CPU woot! woot!). I finished Pegasus Prime in just under 6 hours, due to having to replay certain segments multiple times. It's mildly frustrating the changes they made with these "mini-games" that in the Turbo version were just cinematic movies you watched. Now you have to hit Left or Right in order to prevent yourself from crashing in scenes like a space ship chase or submarine navigating underwater. The scenes themselves are epic, BUT if you forgot an item from another timezone, and have to come back to this timezone, you start back at the beginning each time, and have to replay the entire level again to get back to where you were. If you know what you're doing, this game would only take about 3-4 hours to beat if you took your time with it. Beyond that, the story is solid, the environments are amazing, and the main "villain" should be honored as one of the most memorable in gaming history just because of how compelling he was as an actor. I want to thank Presto Studios and GOG for allowing us to play this game on modern systems. You've given me a bit of my childhood back, and that is priceless.
