I'm glad I finally finished this game. It's as good as everyone says it is. Well written and most of the voice acting was great. Reading the reviews, you love it or hate it. There seems to be no in between with this game, but most of us clearly love it. I've noticed that most people who don't like it seem to have passed judgement too soon. You've gotta get to the meat of the story before much of it makes sense, which is pretty typical for story telling of any kind. Too many people seem to have quit early and gave a bad review because of their own impatience. The rest seem to have completely skipped the story because they seem confused about things. That's also their own fault. You don't have to like the game, but if you don't give it a chance or don't pay attention to it while playing, then your opinion is invalid, I'm sorry to say.
The story is a slow burn for the first third of the game. Once it gets going, though, it doesn't stop and sucks you in. But you have to read/listen to everything to understand it.
Yes, there are two or three extremely obtuse puzzles in this game, a couple of them are infamous and make it into Top 10 lists all the time. Unfortunately, they all appear in the first hour or two, but they can all be figured out by doing the old Point-and-Click Adventure Game Shuffle. That is, rubbing items together until something happens. Every other puzzle in the game can be figured out pretty easily. Just remember that you can look at items and April will talk about them. These bits of dialog contain most of the information you need to solve things.
Yes, the graphics are woefully outdated and it's a turn off to a lot of people, myself included. Over the years there have been a few options ranging from reShade to add anti-aliasing, dgVoodoo to add supersampling. These worked pretty well, but now there's a full HD mod that you can download that used AI neural networks to clean up models, textures, and even the FMV cutscenes. I recommend Googling for it.
