It's one of the early/mid Lego games, and if you've played that you know exactly what to expect. Multiple episodes, red brick equivalents on various parts of the hub. Unfortunately, you also know to expect bugs. I had many crashes to desktop, characters get stuck, a puzzle that required me to turn down the refresh rate of my monitor.
As I was going through this, I was planning on giving four stars. Atmosphere is nice, wandering around trying to figure out what was going on was interesting. Up until I hit one puzzle, this was a borderline walking simulator. The only thing that made the puzzles difficult is that it was sometimes hard to see a required item. This all changed with one (many, many expletives not entered) music puzzle. You are required to press buttons matching a sequence of music playing. Too many mistakes, and it resets to a new, random sequence. If you have a tin ear or are deaf, this puzzle is impossible. Without the puzzle reset, I probably would've been able to get it eventually, but there's no way I'd be able to get it in the requisite three tries. Into the garbage bin it goes. Not even worth the 90% off I got it for.
This game, or better described, experience started out promising, but went off the rails (pun not intended). The good: - Very pretty - Sedate (mostly), exploration. The bad: - Autosave only. I said "enough is enough" when there was a hang and I would've had to go a fair distance and through an area that made this game run like molasses on my computer again. - "Narrative that doesn't hold your hand" shouldn't mean "we're going to put something way out of your way in a large world without even a compass" - No explanation of the word cloud. It really isn't that intuitive guys, explain it please. - The maze. I have no base objection to mazes. Add some twitch to it that doesn't exist elsewhere in the game? No Thanks.
If you know what you're getting into, this game is a lot of fun. The main way I play games is through exploration, so just bouncing around and trying things was just grand. It's far from perfect though, and several issues knocked a couple of stars from this in my book. * Not enough feedback on the cards. What does the yellow mean? What are they for? (before you reach the end) * Not enough feedback for some of the monster cards. Am I going to get something for this clicking besides a neat animation? Am I doing something wrong, if so, what? * Last level is way, way, too twitchy. After going around exploring, now there's some fast and furious clicking and mouse movement. There's no time to figure things out, screen is reset because you failed before you have any clue what is going on. I had to hit a FAQ to learn what I needed to do. This one level makes the game inappropriate for a laptop without a mouse, and is responsible for knocking about a star and a half off my score.
I'm a big fan of point and clicks, but this did too many things wrong to be fun. The real time puzzles of avoiding the guard and trying to wind your way through the forest really killed it for me. With the perspective constantly changing and no compass you could never be sure where you were with the forest, so I gave up there. Uninstalled, unlikely to ever finish.
