A couple hours later, I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth. This was not candy. This was something horrible and stale, full of gravel and unsavory maggoty things wrapped in a candy coating. In general, the taste was bland and tolerable, but occasionally I would bite into some horrible chunk of gristle that would make me gag.

I will now pause to wipe the bile off of my keyboard to reiterate that this is a really attractive game. The developers obviously worked hard, and they have a very talented art department. That's for the designers - they deserve that much.

I will now perform a gruesome autopsy on my game experience, starting with the beautiful graphics and working downward into the teeming guts of this beast.

The graphics only look good when they are completely still. The few animations I encountered were well-modeled, but had horrible framerates on my out-of-the-box machine. It should not be expected for me to have a high-end graphics card to run an independent, middle-shelf point and click game. In addition, I couldn't help but notice that almost everything in the game was completely still. Even while wandering the streets on this island, I noticed that the fog was completely still - no condensation dripped from the rooftops, no merry souls passed by the windows with lanterns or anything of the sort. The whole place was devoid of even basic movement. Even more egregious, you view the game from the first person perspective, but when you transition from "room" to "room", there is no graphical transition. Apparently, you just teleport..

The graphics would be the least of my woes, except for the fact that they frustrate me two-fold in getting to the meat of the game. Woe Number One is that as beautiful as the graphics are, there are an average of 6 to a hundred little doodads and knickknacks on the screen at any given time that look terribly interesting or useful, but do absolutely nothing. You can't touch them, pick them up, taste them or anything. They are wallpaper. Move on...

Woe Number Two is that for what is essentially a glorified choose-your-own adventure, it is unreasonably difficult to navigate. I had to check a walkthrough no less than four times just to embark on the first "mission", even after the main character's employer told me the steps. I had to check the walkthrough because the navigation interface is buggered. At times, I'd click on the pretty doodad, door or whatever, and it wouldn't do anything. It was supposed to, though, but I was just a bit off to the right of the tiny speck that was supposed to represent to actual active part. This is called pixel-hunting, and to force your players to do this is sinful and lazy.

Also, the element of light plays into this game, with shadows obscuring puzzles until you can find a light source. This is actually quite clever until you realize that you're carrying a perfectly good lantern. Of course, these must be magic shadows, because sometimes your lantern works in illuminating your surroundings, and sometimes it does nothing. It was a clever idea that was inconsistently executed. Of course, my experience in wandering to the bathroom at 3 AM tells me that I wouldn't even bother with a lantern in such a situation, and would just blindly flail in the darkness until I hit the proper switch. Apparently, the designers didn't feel that was proper. Of course, given the blind pixel-hunting I had to do just to find where they put the puzzles in the first place, I wouldn't notice the difference anyway.

Also, the loading and installation are abysmal. This game even warns you in the pre-installation instructions that it is prone to hang at certain points. While this is not fatal, the installation does take five minutes short of forever, even without these hangs. Moreover, it was my bad experience to attempt to do something... anything... else on my computer while letting this game install itself. When I did that, the installer happily froze up for me, eating up RAM and refusing to die.

If you are more of a fan of arcade games or first person shooters, this game is not really for you. If you are a hardcore fan of adventure games, do not EVER play this game. I am afraid that if you do, you will turn your back on adventure games for life.

Yes, I think it is that bad.