A pretty good comedy adventure game. The story is a really simple one, that pokes fun of fantasy and point-and-click game cliches. Nothing groundbreaking, but it got a little laugh quite few times out of me. The characters are in the same shoe, they are archetypes, but with enough personality, that you care about what's going on.
On the presentatin side, the backgrounds still look great, the stylish lighting and rendering gives them a kind of dreamy look, full of life and cheerful colors, invoking ancient legends. Especially the forest areas bathing in yellow lightrays, I really liked those. The character models show their age more, but they are still acceptable.
The music is good, fits the mood every time, doesn't become annoying on repetition, brings the magical feeling. I could not remember any of them after closing the game tho.
The gameplay is the standard point-and-click variety; look around the rooms, find items, combine them and solve puzzles, talk to NPCs. Executes it well for the most part. The puzzles are not hard for most of the part, there is no monkey wrench puzzle. There is also a handy highlighting system in place, that show all the interactible objects in a room when space is held down. The game contains the player to small areas usually, and gives them clear goles, so you won't get lost while trying to find the way forward. Also, after completing a section, the game takes away all the items you won't need anymore. And you can also save whenever and whereever you would like, which is kind of expected, but still nice.
However, there are a few annyoing decesions that take away from the enjoyment:
- You can not pick up sometimes an item, until it is revelaled in the story, that you will need it. It feels like artificial padding, when you have to walk to another room to pick up an item, that you could have and would have picked up already, if the game didn't stop you, just to send you back some time later. Items also appear sometimes in rooms without telling the player that they appeared. Kleptomania is a core part of the adventure game experience, I don't know why the devs decided to combat in these slight ways.
- Because of the previous point, the game feels extremely linear, unlike classic adventures, where atleast you can hord all the items in the world, and sometimes be ready to solve a whole chain of puzzles with the stuff you already collected. The small sections don't help either.
- Double clicking skips dialouge and transition between rooms (thankfully), but most animations can not be skipped (as far as I know), so you are forced to watch them every time you try to solve a puzzle that involves a lenghty animation.
By the end, I felt like the devs ran out of time or money, because the ending feels kind of abrupt. Not bad, but I expected a bit more.
All in all, I know the second part of this review may sound negative, but I would still recommend this game to those, that like classic Lucasarts style adventure games. Took me around 13 hours to complete it (I did not rush) and I was not bored. Just don't expect something revolutionary.
