As someone who never played the original, I'm finding this really interesting--it's a great retelling of Mechner's creative process. While I'm still working my way through this interactive documentary, I've found the playable versions of Mechner's earlier games particularly interesting, and I *love* that I can just sit back and watch an emulated "recording" of someone else playing, while being able to jump in at any time. There's a few quibbles I have, though: * There doesn't seem to be any way to show only what you *haven't* yet seen in a particular chapter. I thought I saw everything in the "Deathbounce" chapter, but it says I've only seen 89%, and I have no idea what I missed. * The UI really seems made for controllers, and everything feels awkward with a keyboard and mouse--kind of like one of those weirdly-ported console game that maps buttons to keys on opposite sides of the keyboard, making it difficult to use with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. Sometimes there appears to be no way to do things with just a mouse, including exiting the application. * The game sometimes immediately exits when run from GOG Galaxy (see the GOG forum for this game for more details). From what I can tell, disabling the GOG Overlay appears to have fixed this so far (fingers crossed), but it's still a frustrating bug.
I've played this for almost 40 hours now and I've found myself vacillating between confusion, frustration, boredom, and moments of excitement and amazement. I don't find the story and characters particularly compelling. While choices do affect the story in consequential ways that are pretty cool to see--I restarted the game multiple times to see how well this worked--it can also be very confusing if you don't have certain characters in your party at the right time, as important scripted sequences simply fail to occur. The story is also quite overwhelming at first. Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you encounter aliens, dragons, demons, inter-dimensional portals, elves, castles... it feels like Lord of the Rings crashed into Guardians of the Galaxy. And unlike games like Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity, which take all kinds of pains to carefully introduce you to their world, here I feel like I was dropped into the 15th movie of a cinematic franchise with no clue about what was happening, or why I was supposed to care. The way this game approaches romance is also strangely transactional; it feels like virtual sex is just another reward for progressing the story, which is terribly uninteresting. Mechanically, the game is overwhelming and confusing for newcomers to D&D like me, and the tutorials don't help much. Luck also plays *far* too big a role in this game. Requiring players to constantly save-scum in order to enjoy the game is simply bad design. I also frequently found myself trying to do things that simply didn't work out, and felt like I was playing a game of "what did the designers want me to do here" instead of inventing my own solutions based on a consistent, predictable set of mechanics.
I played this for almost 30 hours and I'm giving up on it. I was expecting a game that would at least let me somehow avoid the most difficult encounters, so I poured points into my persuasion skill, only to find it mostly useless, as the game frequently railroaded me into situations where I was forced to deal with its abysmal combat system. And to call this game's combat "clunky" would be a compliment. If it were merely "clunky", I'd still like the game overall. But unfortunately, it's pretty confusing and scales terribly as the game progresses, eventually becoming impossibly hard. Enemies get stuck in geometry, sometimes becoming invincible, sometimes bugging out so they don't even attack. At its best, the combat is merely uninspired--as far as I can tell, there's not really any strategy or tactics one can use to get "better" other than pouring points into various stats to actually hurt enemies. Even some puzzles are inscrutable; at one point I just started pressing my "use" key on every object in the area and somehow made it through, but I have no idea what my actions were supposed to mean in the game's world. The stealth in this game is also weird. The game's tutorial makes stealth impossibly hard, but once you've put some points into it, it's ridiculously easy to the point that you can be standing in front of an enemy in a well-lit room and they still won't see you. All that said, the story and voice acting is pretty good, so I guess one can play it for that--but at that point you might as well just watch a video of the whole thing.
I was so excited about this game. I came to this title expecting a Carmen Sandiego-like twist on the adventure game genre: a point-and-click adventure game that required me to do "real-world research" to solve the puzzles. Right now this game is sitting in my collection with only a few hours of playtime. Here's what keeps me from picking it up again: * Unlike most adventure games, CDA doesn't allow you to save whenever you want. I had to leave my laptop on with the game running whenever I wanted to take a break during a case. * This game has twitch-based action sequences. Early on, I had to shoot a gun from someone's hand by clicking on it within a period of time. I don't mind playing twitch games, and I was able to complete this challenge successfully, but I really don't want twitch mechanics in my adventure games; I wish there was just a way to turn off these sorts of challenges. * This game has real-time limited puzzles. At one point, I had to find real-world information within a span of 5 minutes, during which the game wouldn't let me pause. The stakes were increased because this occurred deep into a case, so if I failed, I'd have to restore an old saved game and play a bunch of it over again. I guess this was intentional, but it wasn't really what I signed up for; while I did complete the puzzle in time, the time pressure wasn't fun. * There's a bunch of other superfluous mechanics that just ... aren't fun? You have to manage your time using a painful UI, doing a bunch of time/date math in your head, and pay monthly rent. Yet the thing is, the puzzles themselves are really fun! The characters and art are wonderful! It kills me that this game would be made so much better by *removing* mechanics. I hope someday they make a director's cut that gets rid of these things--or at least makes them optional--and adds the ability to save anywhere, because that would be an easy 5-star recommendation that I couldn't put down.
I've been playing this for around 20 hours and I've been enjoying it a lot. Many non-Souslike action RPGs can get a bit boring for me, while the Soulslikes are a bit too frustrating. On the normal difficulty ("Adventure"), this game has the perfect level of challenge--I have to fight bosses multiple times and feel a rush of achievement when I beat them, without getting too frustrated. Enemies have clear telegraphs that never leave me wondering how I died, and I feel like I have to exploit all the game mechanics (consumables, equipment, special abilities, etc) in order to overcome challenges, unlike a lot of action RPGs where I feel like I can find a dominant strategy fairly quickly and ignore the rest of the mechanics. The story is also engaging so far; while I found it a bit "cringey" at first (I'm not entirely sure why), once I played for a few hours, I found the story compelling and the characters endearing. Good guys have flaws, while bad guys aren't always what the seem; even the main character isn't perfect, as her idealism can sometimes make situations worse. These aspects give the story a complex texture, and there's also a nice sense of mystery that makes me eager to find out what happens next. The level design makes environments really memorable and fun to explore; destructibles and hidden areas don't advertise themselves, so finding them feels rewarding. I also love that there's no map: it's challenging and fun to learn a level's layout by heart, exercising a part of my brain that has atrophied since the era of GPS. A few other notes: * The game's difficulty can be changed at any time. * This game supports ultra-widescreen resolutions (Elden Ring doesn't!). * This game has never crashed on me. The game isn't without its flaws, of course: for example, the camera can be finicky, which can get very frustrating in tough fights. But overall I find these to be minor quibbles in light of the game's strengths.
When this game was originally released, my teenage self had some very preconceived notions about what an RPG was supposed to be: turn-based, with a profound story and interesting characters, a variety of colorful environments to explore, and so on. Diablo, with its real-time, action-focused gameplay, what appeared to be a threadbare plot, an ever-present sense of gloom and dread encased in a palette of muted grays and browns was not something that interested me. I wrote it off as a mindless click-fest, and the handful of times I tried playing it, I blamed my character's death as the consequence of poorly-balanced gameplay. In 2012, my tastes had changed. Diablo III came out, and I decided to try it out. I actually really liked it. It appeared the genre had evolved a lot since the "mindless click-fest" that I'd made Diablo out to be. "Thank goodness those designers at Blizzard finally learned how to make a game with interesting, well-balanced mechanics!", I thought. When Diablo showed up on GOG, something occurred to me: what if the original Diablo *wasn't* a mindless click-fest, but I'd just failed to appreciate it for what it was? I'd since seen David Brevik's 2016 GDC post-mortem on the game and it seemed like the game may have had more going for it than I'd given it credit for. So 25 years later, I decided to give it another shot. I'm now about 6 hours in and just defeated the first boss, who I found pretty challenging. Even the townsfolk reveal interesting histories as I progress; there's enough of an air of mystery about the story that I'm intrigued by it, rather than bored. Exploring the labyrinth is engaging; I'm always curious about what's around the next corner, while also readying myself in case a horde emerges from the darkness. In short, I'm having fun so far, and I'm glad I gave the game a second chance.
It's a good game overall, but it crashes after epic 40-minute long battles, forcing you to restore your game to do it all over again and hope it doesn't crash, so I can't really recommend it.
I've played this game for about 40 hours and the combat starts out challenging but eventually becomes a crowded mess of randomly unforgiving insta-kills that also crashes after extremely long boss fights.
