I'll start by saying that this game is great vanilla, but I play it modded, and I think it's worth having a review that reflects that. This is a game about making the best of a bad situation - and the vanilla game is meant to be kind of stressful and hard. You're constantly making decisions that will make or break your heroes. But, this is also one of the most moddable/modded games out there, and there's lots of amazing mods for it - including some that decrease difficulty in such a way that it's functionally a very different game. When modded in this way, it becomes a game about people in terrible situations supporting and inspiring each other, and helping one another cope with stress. So if you want a challenge, this game will give you that. What isn't widely advertised is that you can mod it to be a lovely settlement-building adventuring game where your heroes like and care for each other and you look after their mental health. There's something here for everyone.
This is a great game. I love that it has robust difficulty settings that can make it both completely accessible to new gamers and also brutally challenging for those who want that. This game also includes one of the best visual/environmental effects I've ever seen in a game (you'll know the scene I mean when you get to it). I have very few critiques of this game except for one big one: game-breaking glitches. In my most recent playthrough, one of the plot triggers completely failed to load in, no matter how many times I reloaded or restarted the game, and left me completely unable to proceed with playing. This long after release, there shouldn't be glitches like that.
If you like plants, obscure puzzles, and a sort of fantasy vibe, this is a great game. The puzzles sometimes get really obscure, though, so I several times had to look up walkthroughs. In addition, and more importantly, the controls/interface is not very well designed in my opinion, and are sometimes hard to use and there is zero tutorializing.
The worldbuilding on this immediately drew me in! A Western game with the sexism and racism deleted, and fascinating magic added in? Yes please! But in terms of actual gamplay, this game is frustrating to play in many ways. Inventory management is a much bigger part of it than it should be, and gets irritating and intrusive quite often. There are a lot of things about the design that seem meant to make the game more difficult, but instead just make it irritating to play rather than just balancing the game better and having a more streamlined experience. To give some examples, there's no way to favorite weapons or armor in your inventory, so it's easy to sell your best gear by mistake, and there's not even a buyback system. Twice I sold my best gear accidentally, couldn't buy it back without spending ALL my hard-earned money, and had to just load an earlier save. And the game is full of relatively basic design flaws like that, which make it more difficult to enjoy.
While there are definitely parts of this game that weren't good to start with and have aged even worse (the Roma are real people and not a fantasy species like orcs available for free use in stories like this) this is still a classic adventuring game for a reason. Most of the game has aged remarkably well given how old it is, and it is still a fun game to play if you can stomach the portrayal of the "g*psies".
