Pros: - Graphics are Sierra-quality. - Great voice acting. - A moderately decent story, although not very long. - Has the different "hero classes" which adds some replay value. Cons: - Bugs galore. - For a game aimed at more mature audiences (relative to the QFG series, that is), it's got a lot of adolescent humor. - Combat is pretty basic and trivially easy after a short while. - More adult-themed than the Sierra series (FILLED with sexual innuendo, cleavage, several expletives), which excludes it from being kid-friendly. - The hero almost always has to run to the object he's looking at, which is annoying. About 2 hours in, I frowned as my character unexpectedly peed on the corpse of a monster he killed, to "mark his territory." Had it been the very first occurrence of pee-related humor, it might have been so unexpected it would've been funny. But instead, every examined barrel, pool of water, forest stream, river, bench, etc... includes descriptions of "probably peed on" by different people or the hero felt like peeing on it. After a while, the references are so frequenty that it's almost like the writers have a weird fetish, and it's just kind of unsettling at that point. As far as bugs go, here's just a few: - If you die during an animation (which is most of them), the game never "unfreezes" from the animation, which locks up the restore/restart/quit buttons at the end, so you literally have to kill the program's process to exit. - Because the hero has to run to whatever he's looking at, it can bypass normal game logic that is triggered by movement. For example, there's a scene where you have to get around a monster that will kill you if you touch it, but if you simply look at an object on the other side of the screen, the hero simply runs through the monster as if it wasn't there. - The time-of-day system is glitchy and not always well-done. I performed an action in the morning that trigger a "Meanwhile" night cutscene and suddenly the whole day was gone.
This is not a game. This is a short story presented in a first person view. When it finished, all I could think was how much time I would never get back, and how many calories I could have burned if I had gone for a real walk instead. Your choices don't matter. It's like having the freedom to change lanes on an empty highway - there's an illusion of freedom and interactivity but once the thrill of the empty highway wears off after 5 minutes, it doesn't make a bit of difference for the next few hours. You just head in the same direction the highway/game takes you until the end. Yes, a few hours is about how long it takes to beat it... No, scratch that - "beating" implies a challenge or a conflict, and there are none of those in this thing. It takes a few boring hours to reach the end. I held out hope that something exciting was around the corner but nope. Just more of the same. I thought being able to pick up items would make a difference but no, they are just there for you to pick up and drop. I bought this around the time that everyone was raving about it and discovered that the people who loved it were the same kind of hipsters who loved anything that was different. For this price (even on sale), you could buy 2 real books that would provide a better story, and probably last longer. Or you could buy an entire anthology of Sierra games and get weeks of well-written, challenging interactive stories. The only redeeming aspect of this game was a pleasant soundtrack, which you can own and listen to without enduring the disappointment of the "game."
