Dragonsphere

This is my second adventure game ever after Lure of the Temptress, if you are a seasoned adventurer this might be not helpful to you (and you probably played the game anyway). Based on the screenshots you can decide whether you like the graphics or not - I personally think it is good. What you can't see on the screenshots is the voice acting which is hilariously bad. The plot is average with an excellent twist. Some of the riddles were pretty hard for me, it won't hurt if you get yourself a walkthrough before you start, just in case ( and again, it is just me - if you are an experienced player you may find them easy). After I completed this game I realized that I've enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Lure of the Temptress and 4 stars for the latter was too much - but I did not know that until I've played this one. Funny, how perception changes. I've found one bug, since I did not play the original game I have no idea whether this is related to the gog release or not: on every fourth or fifth start the game my mouse clicks did not work - I could move the pointer but could not use it for aníthing. After the game is restarted the problem ceased, but it was certainly reproducable. Since it is not a long game once you figure out the puzzles, I might just replay it again sometimes.

This Point-and-Click Adventure isn't quite a masterpiece, but it is quite good! There are a few obtuse moments, but the genre is lousy with them; it's just something you have to put up with in the older games. The visuals are mostly nice, but occasionally, the sprites look almost like the cheesy digitized graphics you'd see in Mortal Kombat, but best I can tell, they're not; they don't have enough detail. The walking speed is a bit slow, too, and the climbing scenes just go on and on. All that said, the world, although small in terms of traversable real estate, has a lot of ecological diversity, as well as a rich lore with many different sentient species. Some of them are twists on old fantasy tropes, but some are completely new, and unique to this world. It also gets into the struggle of racial inequality a bit, and does it pretty well. This may not be a top-tier adventure, but it is absolutely worth your time, if you're a fan of the genre.

So, this is a good example of that particular type of point and click adventure game where you have a long list of actions to choose from, and you can collect a huge inventory of somewhat useless items, but the base of the game still comes down to figuring out the obscure solutions to some puzzles and particular dialogue path choices. If you're not into that type of game, this won't be for you. But if you like that sort of thing, this is a really charming period piece in gaming history. The voice acting is admittedly terrible, and at first I thought the story and art style were incredibly generic, but things take a good turn later in the story and things get much more interesting and inventive. If you're ok with adventure games, give it a shot. Especially if you received it for free from GOG.

Beautifully mastered POC adventure game, for its time it had amazing interface layout and options that some games today lack.

Dragonsphere was given out on GOG for free earlier. It is a well-done adventure game in its time, one that's made neither by Sierra nor Lucasarts. The graphic animations are competitive and the story has its fair share of twists to reward progress, as you take on the role of a newly crowned king to go on a quest solo to slay an evil magician that threatens the kingdom of humans, AKA the Fair. The most amusing surprise was that the direction I thought I followed correctly through the desert actually led me to a suicide fissure. The fact that you start back on the same scene, in case of death, makes the game rather forgiving enough to let you try different methods, despite the trial-and-error tendencies. The puzzle in the faerie labyrinth was rather tedious and counter-intuitive, being the only thing that got me to watch the rest of the gameplay/story on YouTube. But, blessed be those who endure through puzzles like these. I can humbly recommend this old, hidden gem.