The graphics are truly inspiring and at times it feels like you’re walking through a hand-painted world of ice and snow, where misery and hardship are palpable in every frozen breath. Then you doze off because the game is so slow in so many places. A lovingly-created world of such visual beauty is rare in many genres of games, but point and click adventures have always been known for them. This game certainly lives up to that visually and the only flaw I found (in my beta copy I’ll add) was the fact that it couldn’t be played in a window even though full screen was set to no. This continued into the ’gold’ version that I received as well.
The sounds are no less engrossing and the music really does help you get a feel for the place a lot of the time.
There are no keyboard hotkeys whatsoever which I found annoying. Having to move the mouse to the far edge of the screen to activate the map and other information panels was annoying. There’s also no way to configure any controls. It’s all mouse or nothing. The game is an Adobe Air application which might be part of the problem. It does have a nice auto-update feature built in, but any good gaming service these days has one of those.
There’s also none of the standard puzzles that accompany point-and-click adventures. It’s almost like this is just a semi-interactive choose-your-own adventure and not really a game per se.
Overall, the games is interesting but will be so for very few people. It’s storyline is slow moving and the gameplay is less than exciting a lot of the time. The major flaw in the game is that it seems to be missing puzzles of any sort. Numerous things are achieved by simply going place to place. Experience points are doled out for having a one-line conversation with someone and on the whole, the game could use something to make it really interesting.
The game was built in Adobe Air which might account for some of its limitations. However, if that’s the case, then it was a poor choice as a platform for the game.
