Cursed

This looks pretty large and involved. Happily, it seems well-implemented and thorough in its coding. The choice of three different paths is a nice touch, and the puzzles that I did find (I did not manage to complete the game) were mostly sensible and flowed well with the narrative, though in one or two cases I thought that some alternate solutions should have been available.

I found the fantasy names rather off-putting, though. Remembering one unique name out of a sea of "normal" names is easy; remembering the same out of a sea of similarly "unique" names is much more difficult, even when we are given a strong character description for each. Even now, the only one of the named characters I remember is Lady Harridan -- and that only because of the humour of giving a female character a name which means "bad-tempered, disreputable woman". Cue the Mad Magazine parody of "Annie": "we still love you, Miss Harridan...!"

I suspect that the story would have been somewhat stronger had the author dispensed with some of the fantasy world trappings and gone with "mediaeval Europe with magic". There is a large amount of world-building involved in fantasy writing, and most of the fantasy classics that I can think of tend to go into rather extensive detail on these matters. This is not a tale of political intrigue and courtly machinations: it is a mystery thriller, underneath the magic, and as such we don't really have the time and patience to investigate these incidental background details. A quasi-real-world setting, a setting with which the player is already familiar even with the addition of alien elements, helps bridge the gap in the player's understanding of the world. One does not need to go into great detail about a long-standing feud with a neighouring kingdom if one simply names the respective kingdoms "England" and "France", or even "Albion" and "Gaul". This sort of backstory shorthand may seem lazy to the serious fantasy reader/writer, but it means that the player can get a sense, without being explicitly told, what to expect from the background. This background information can therefore be relegated to the background where it belongs, and kept from intruding into the main focus of the story.

All this to say that the background built into this thing was substantial, which is good, but almost enough that it takes some of the focus away from the main thrust of the story, which is not so good.

This is the breakfast buffet: all the waffles and scones and scrambled eggs you can eat. The chicory is a little muddy.