The good: - Amazing visual design, world design, and ambient story telling. I lost track of how many times I turned a corner and went "Wow!" There is a huge variety of different cultures and places put together in a way that makes sense and carries the story forward. This is by far the game's strongest point: the sheer artistry of it. - I found most puzzles in this one more fair than the classics like Myst and Riven. Most of the time there was a pretty clear goal in mind and it was more "how do I accomplish this" rather than wondering what the heck I was supposed to be doing. - Addition of in-game camera for quick snapshots means I don't have to play with a pen and paper next to my keyboard the whole time trying to copy maps and diagrams. The bad: - Many times puzzles will require you to "swap" between different worlds. Even on my reasonably powerful CPU with plenty of memory and loading from a solid state disk, this process is not instant. Some puzzles that involve multiple swaps become a test of patience because even though you can clearly see what you need to do, each step involves a loading screen. There is also a great deal of walking and backtracking because sometimes you will need to swap, then get back to that point by another route to avoid re-swapping. - The curse of the point and click adventure game lives on: two of the puzzles left me stuck because I failed to make an intutive leap based on some tiny detail. - Some parts of the game seem rushed, like there's very little background sound, and one of the main characters is a 2D video despite other characters being 3D models. - The ending made me very angry. There's actually two ways the game can end: one is very much better for you than the other. The deciding factor between them is, as far as I could tell, hinted at very early in the game when you have no idea what's going on or what anything means. Such an utterly essential detail needs to be underlined.
