We (I played the game together with raeff) finished playing yesterday. I thought I'd write a short review.
We really enjoyed the game and recommend to play it!
What I liked about the game:
Story A lovely story based on a unique game concept. I loved that you could visit several different stories (of some of them I haven't even heard before - great to learn something new!) and all characters were interesting and believable. It had also a very good and satisfying ending.
Around the world in 80 days was the only book in the game I read myself, but I couldn't for my life remember where they boarded a balloon. A Wikipedia search revealed that my mind was not playing tricks on me and there was indeed no balloon. So, of course Fogg could not help us with the balloon - great take on the story!
Beautiful! The backgrounds were done with so much detail, it was a pleasure to look at them. Also the portraits enhanced the dialogs by emphasizing emotions. We played the game with the laptop connected to the TV having all graphics shown at large scale, which was great and helped a lot with immersion.
Music The lovely music was, together with the graphics of course, a huge factor of setting the scene for the different stories. You just opened a book and were immediately pulled into the world just by hearing the first bars of each tune.
Voice acting Great performance throughout, my favourites being Alfred and Enkidu. I also enjoyed the accents that were fitting to the book (especially in the Gilgamesh story)
Puzzles The were ranging from easy to difficult with lots of variation. Of course, this is mostly personal preference, for example
the tile slide puzzle in the temple: when we encountered it, I was "Great, I love this kind of puzzle" but raeff was just the other way round, he hates them. So, in our case, I solved it :-)
What I didn't like:
UI Since we were playing together, most of the time raeff was controlling the mouse. Using the magic bag was somewhat tedious: every time we were interacting with the full bag, there was an unnecessary messagebox if I really want to remove the item (of course I do, that's why I clicked there!) and another box when it was empty. Also, only beeing able to carry just one item was annoying, especially with
the recipe puzzle were you have to carry so much stuff to the kitchen
Another thing about how the GUI reacted to clicks:
The magic coat: you would either put it on or just take it as an item, depending on the room you were in. This was a bit weird. I'd have prefered to have Alfred clickable and use the coat on him.
Also the last puzzle: In all previous situations, left clicking the empty bag would just show a message. But suddenly it is the solution? Merlins hint wasn't helpful either (and he gave great hints for all other puzzles), we even tried to cut the books with the knife from the library (i.e. from outside) and just discovered the solution by accident. We felt a bit cheated then, especially with it being the last puzzle which should leave us satisfied.
Of course, noone knows for sure how ancient names were pronounced, but it should at least have been consistant. Some said for example 'Enkidu while others said En'ki:du. Additionally, some of the voices had very irritating accents, like the left woman at the market. Some of the voices where slightly different in volume.
Another thing: Lowering the music volume during voiceacting was sometimes a bit distracting, especially when there were several lines with just short breaks in between. It might have been better for a game with so much text to keep the music volume a bit lower throughout the game.
We found a tiny bug:
When you look up "Around the world" in the cataloge after you have been there, the red frame and error wont go away anymore. It was even visible in the final cutscene.
