Frankly, I don't see it. Either it's aged beyond its prime or I missed something.

On its own, the game is first and foremost, gorgeous. Every environment is rich and lush, full of details. It is obvious that the artists responsible are some of the best in the business. I was truly awed when the game opened up and displayed the first cut scene, which so very smoothly transferred into the first playable bit. However, this is where the trouble starts.

To even get to this point, I had to sit through a long-drawn out in-game cut scene where some old boring people in silly clothes were talking... and talking... and talking.

Please, just let me play the game...

Five minutes later...

Ooh, look at that mysterious vista. Oooh, listen to those sounds. This is the greatest game ever!

So, I gazed out at the mysterious, enchanted world set out before me, with all these little details lovingly rendered. Ooh, what's that then? I'll just click on it, and... nothing.

That interesting wotsit sticking out from this thingamajigger doesn't exist. I mean, you can *see* it. Maybe it's even blocking your path. That other interesting wotsit over there... it exists... but this one... no, I'm sorry. As far as the game is concerned, it just doesn't exist.

Get used to it, because 99% of those stunningly rendered widgets, doodads and knick-knacks in the game don't even have a brief description for them. Not even a default, "That's not important to the game. Ignore it," message.

Okay, I can understand this in part, because the whole game has great voice acting. Well, great! Except that the voice acting is merely adequate. They sound like human beings. They even sound like the voices were performed by real actors and not just some people they grabbed from the programming pool. But the characters are just annoying. They aren't particularly obnoxious, but I just didn't like any of them as people. Especially the main character. Your avatar for the whole game is an 18-year old woman who has continuously seen magical hallucinations her entire life and yet can't believe anything that is happening to her, even as it is happening to her. She is an obnoxious ninny that continuously grated on my nerves. And there is SO MUCH DIALOGUE!!! And you have to go through it all to activate different steps of the game. In fact, if you're absolutely sure you've gotten all useful information out of somebody and you're stuck advancing to the next quest or whatever, simply go around and TALK TO EVERYONE AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN until something happens.

So, this isn't so bad, though, because the developers graciously put in both color-coded subtitles and a skip button for cut scenes and speech samples, so it's possible to fly through conversations if you're a fast reader. However, I would have preferred all text in the first place, just so they could have given your character more responses to objects and people in the world... Or maybe instead of having incredibly long and tedious conversations, they could have divided up their audio assets a little better. Either way, the game lost massive points due to their voice-overs.

Puzzles.

That's the defining bit about an adventure game. This game has them. They are not particularly clever. Some of them are difficult, but that is largely due to a combination of pixel-hunting and the game not letting you do something unless you do it *exactly* the way it expects.

For example, I figured out that three different items needed to be combined in a particular way to solve a puzzle. In your inventory screen, you can select an item, "use" that item on another item, and if they fit, then they make a new item. Fine, the first two items went together. Then I needed to add the third item. Well, I was on a close-up of the "new" item, because some items allow close-ups when they can do multiple things or must be manipulated in some way. So, I assumed that because it was a close-up, I should add the third item while in the "close-up screen." No dice. I had to add it in the normal inventory screen. Why not both?

Also, if you try to use an item on something, and the two things are not supposed to go together, nothing happens most of the time. Sometimes, your character will just wander off as if you had clicked on the ground to move her instead of trying to use the widget on the whatsit.

The engine is pretty good. It never crashed. It looks beautiful. The point-n-click interface is the best I've ever used. If you left-click on something, you open a little sub-menu from which you choose one of three actions. If you right-click, you open your inventory. Very basic, but I liked it a lot.

Even pressing Alt-Tab to switch to my browser to look up a walkthrough when I got stuck didn't crash the game or cause any annoying hangs. I expected that switching from this full-screen game to the desktop would take a couple minutes, but it only takes about 15 seconds. Nice. However, when you revert back to the game, all of the character models are partially transparent. They all recover after you change locations a few times, except for your main character who ends up with the same textures mapping to her pants, shirt and face, making it look like she has an elaborate tattoo that changes colors as she moves. I guess that's a bonus feature or something. Depends on your opinions about tattoos.

Ultimately, I would say that this is an okay game. If you can find it in a bargain bin or something and you are a fan of the genre, then you'll probably have a good go at it. My criticisms are largely because my expectations were *very* high for this game. It could be that I expected the game to have learned the lessons of today's games or at least shown me something different. However, it's a big, beautiful world without much going on in it. Often, large screens are full of beautiful objects wherein only one or two of them are even clickable (seriously!). Considering the amount of effort they spent on the dialogue and the frequent rendered cut scenes, I would say the beautiful environment they created was largely squandered, as was the suggestion of hidden depth.