I played this game constantly in junior high. Obviously, it's a Sierra game, but you don't have to deal with an annoying parser system ("Get ye flask...You can't get ye flask!"). Pointing and clicking is handled by large, easy-to-understand icons. "Look" is an eye, "touch" is a hand...very intuitive.
The graphics have the blockiness of circa '91 VGA, but everything has vibrant grades of color, kind of like stepping into a pixilated Pre-Raphaelite painting. The animation is suprisingly fluid and the soundtrack will be stuck in your head for days; the widow's theme is a longtime favorite of mine.
There's a lot of game to explore, and you can uncover multiple endings. Most of the puzzles make sense and are usually pretty forgiving about letting you tinker with them to arrive at its solution. The difficulty is just about right; I was able to 100% it as a lad in the pre-internet-walkthrough days, but it took many intermittent months to cough up all its secrets.
It tries for a few of what it calls "arcade" action sequences...really just more point-and-clicking on a stricter time limit. Still enjoyable, just not the change-up the manual seems to think they are.
This game had copy protection on it, meaning you need info contained in the manual to proceed. Kind of a pain, usually, but this game's copy protection is integrated so well into the story that I didn't even realize what it was until many years after I'd played it! It's all fun and thematically appropriate; a hand-speak alphabet to communicate with trees, gemstone lore, coats of arms (this one was bugged; it's always the 2nd one you're shown).
If you're not a fan of Sierra type point-and-click adventure games, this probably won't be the one that changes your mind. However, it's very playable and enjoyable with art that still looks good to my eyes and a compelling story. Once you've played through it, it's exactly the same each time, but for my money, it's worth returning to every couple of years.