I've endured some punishing adventure games (the stairs mechanics in early King's Quest, for example), but this is in the running with Monkey Island 2 for most irritating. The first thing that really bothered me was the puzzle involving the surveyor's tool. There's a diagram showing how the lines are supposed to be aligned, which *does not match* the actual puzzle solution. After playing around with it for a while, I looked up the solution on UHS, and was glad that I didn't waste any more time on it. As with Monkey Island 2, the thing that is unacceptable is the endgame. You are treated to a maze with a lot of rooms which are just decoration, but *some* of the rooms are really important, and have puzzles and items which solve puzzles. The maze is very large, and you'll never be sure that you've gotten everything from each room, *and* it's patrolled by enemy soldiers who you have to avoid. *Except*, if you avoid them entirely, you'll miss that one of them is carrying something that you need to solve a puzzle. If you fight them, they regenerate, so you're always dodging around them while you're scavenger-hunting for everything that you might need. If you miss even one item, you have to wander around the whole maze looking for it, wondering if maybe you already *have* the solution in your inventory but haven't pieced together that a ribcage and a sausage can be combined to make a crab-trab, and that maybe a crab can be used as food for a hungry octopus, which eats crabs (there's no indication that octopuses like to eat crabs, or that crabs eat sausages, it's just dumb AG logic that you have to apply). If you get through all of this, you arrive at a statue that is powered by beads you've made in a machine at the beginning of the maze. You think you have an infinite supply, but you can run out, and if you do you have to go *all the way back* to the beginning of the maze, dodging enemies while you do. This game was what walkthroughs were *made* for.
For an adventure-game fan like myself, it was like coming home. The fact that it was created as recently as it was only emphasizes that feeling. Knowing that something like this exists out there makes me happier as a gamer. I would say it outstrips any adventure game that I know about in terms of the character-development of its protagonist. April exists on an entirely different level than near-caricatures that permeate other games. They bothered to give her her own psyche, which in my experience is a first. Plus, she's a female protagonist, which is somewhat rare in this genre, and in all games all-together, and the player will get the definite impression that she's not just there as a cheap ploy to appeal to male audiences. The story-line is intricate, though at times a bit too abstract. The villain of the game seems to be Chaos itself, which is at times a bit hard for them to pull off, but they do try so hard. I had the unfortunate feeling a few times during the game that I was just advancing game workflow, not actually striving for anything in particular. The game seems long, but you can breeze through it if you're not careful. The complexity of the puzzles is not particularly hard, unless you haven't yet picked up the item that you need. In that case, you will need to brute-force your way across the landscape figuring out puzzles that you've missed, hotspots that you didn't pick up on, conversations that you forgot to have, and items that you didn't know should combine together. In the case that you have everything you need, then it really is often just a matter of doing the first thing that makes sense. If nothing makes sense, why not just try every item in your inventory on every object in the room? Then again, this is a problem more with later games in the genre, rather than this game in particular. My two notable exceptions to this are the altar puzzle underwater, and the statue puzzle on the island. These required some real thinking, and I enjoyed those parts of the game most. The game is linear in the extreme, and this is where the game needed the most improvement I think. There is often one and only one valid thing that you can do in the world. Matching the right inventory items to the right object in the world frequently becomes like building a chain, one link at a time, from the beginning of the game to the end. A side-effect is that the things in the game that you're supposed to be doing (collect things from set A, collect things from set B, defeat bad guy #1, etc.) all happen incidentally if you know the "next right action" to take in the world. You will do your collecting of items without really ever thinking "I'm trying to find all the A's in the world". It just happens for you as a side-effect of advancing the game workflow. And toward the end of the game, you realize that the majority of the collectibles in the game are being quickly dumped in your lap anyway (I'm guessing that some elements of the story were removed, because in the span of about 10 minutes you collect roughly half to three-quarters of the collectibles). The game had a satisfactory ending, but then again considering its length it could have been a lot better. I found myself really wanting April to find her place somewhere in the course of the game, and that's one thing that never really happened, and I felt a bit disappointed. Despite my seemingly mostly negative commentary, I only complain out of love. Overall, I think the depth of the character was the one thing that this game really needed to get right, and there they succeeded marvelously.
