I'm no stranger to a good adventure game. The Longest Journey saga, the Syberia series are probably the biggest ones that spring to mind. Enjoyable games, a good balance of story and gameplay.

Unfortunately, after slogging through chapter 1, I found myself unwilling to get back into the game.

Like most point and click adventure titles around this decade and earlier, gameplay is naturally a slow affair. The protagonist is typically slow-moving, text and text boxes are slow, and quite often your progression speed suffers because of it. Even if you somehow know and remember everything you need to do and you have lightning reflexes, you will still take a long time to finish the game. And in this game, even double clicking to instigate 'running' often doesn't work.

Not to mention that alt-tabbing runs the risk of the game just closing on you without warning.

I wouldn't mind the game if that is all I had to worry about. After all, it's part and parcel of the genre.


The real problem I found that demotivated me playing any further than the start of chapter 2 was the magic tricks. The mechanics for this are just too convoluted. First off, first problem. The item menu does its own vanishing act. Almost every time I touch the top of the screen with the mouse to bring it down, it would disappear again. There is a little book you carry with all the basic tricks in it, so you right click to turn the pages, and hopefully click on something relevant.

This is where the game should have just done the trick for you.

Instead, it makes you 'build' the trick, one painstaking step at a time. Palm an item in one hand. 'Distract' someone here. Swap here, hide up your sleeve there. If you get a step wrong it won't work, but you do still have access to your booklet on this screen, thankfully. But it's just so convoluted. This is in addition to the usual confusion of finding items to trigger story advancement.

So unless you have a detailed walkthrough up on another monitor I doubt it will be a truly enjoyable experience, as some might claim.

The scenery, music, characterisations and story were passable, but given the clunky nature of my own experiences, I ended up growing impatient to the point where I wasn't paying any attention to the rest of the game. In all fairness, games like these shouldn't be rushed - and can't be. I may come back to it to try to finish it one day, but right now, the way the magic tricks have to be assembled just has me running for the hills.