kyrandia...underated?

[Ryukage]

Hmm... I didn't care much for Kyrandia.  While it certainly has a number of things in its favor, there was one big thing that turned me off: most of the time, the challenge was not figuring out how to solve the puzzle, but figuring out what the hell the puzzle was.  All too often you're just left hanging without the faintest clue what you're supposed to do.

Like the part where...

Spoiler

The part where you're left at the witches house with the boiling cauldron.  By reading a hint book I discovered that I was supposed to make various potions by putting three objects of matching color in the cauldron; however there was nothing at all in the game to prompt me to do this.  Just the opposite in fact: I got the impression I was supposed to wait for the witch to come back and make the potion for me, or tell me what she needed, or *something*.  That's just one of a hundred places where I got stuck simply because the game utterly failed to properly indicate the nature or presence of a puzzle.  The puzzles were easy to solve once I knew what the hell they *were*.

[close]

[Gilbert]

Heh, this and the maze part are those that I like most. They lengthen the game too.

[Ryukage]

Heh, this and the maze part are those that I like most. They lengthen the game too.

My only complaint about the maze was that it was too easy.  Having conquered far more insidious mazes in Infocom games, it hardly even registered that the fireberry cavern was a maze at all.  For that matter, none of the mazes I've encountered in graphical games have seemed very challenging after Infocom mazes (except for the railcar maze in Myst, which like most Myst puzzles was more annoying than challenging).