I think I've tried to play this a couple of times before and got stuck very early on. If I recall correctly, it uses Revolution's "Virtual Theatre" system to extreme effect, with puzzle-dependent NPCs wandering all over the place, and the need to send sidekicks off with complex instruction lists...
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The intro is short but with an early-cinema charm, with lots of rotoscoped silhouettes against plain-coloured backgrounds. Once you're in the game, though, the graphics are rather tawdry and bland and the sound is almost non-existent. I put it on mute and played the Hawk The Slayer soundtrack instead.
You start off with a simple escape-the-cell puzzle, then rescue Ratpouch, a jester who becomes your sidekick. You can give him a series of complex orders and he'll trot off to perform them. After telling him to open a secret passage for me, I get out to the town and I'm given a series of 'find this person and ask them about this' quests. Now, in theory, the idea that all the NPCs are living their own lives and you have to track them down, get to know people etc is intriguing. But the execution of it here renders the entire game incredibly frustrating. The NPCs' routines are given equal priority to your own actions and the pathfinding is horrendous, so you spend 90% of your time caught in little dances with them, or waiting for idle background chatter to play out so your own conversation can continue. If you're unlucky enough to be in a room with two or three other NPCs, there's a good chance you'll get stuck in an infinite loop of everyone bumping into each other and saying "Excuse me" and have to go back to an old savegame. I cannot understand how they playtested this for more than two minutes without deciding to make it so characters can just pass through each other. Plus, the village is laid out in an anonymous grid with plenty of empty interlinking passages, meaning I had to spend ages mapping the whole thing out and noting down every street name in case I was directed there by one of the quests.
The setting is bland high fantasy, and while the dialogue has some Brit comedy charm, it's hard to appreciate when it's delivered in so frustrating a package. It's easy to see why the polish and invention of the Lucasarts games stood out back then.
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Right, giving up on this game. The next sub-quest given to me in my attempt to enter the town hall was to use a lockpick to get into the alchemist's house. So you consult your hand-drawn map and make your way over there, trying not to get trapped in a looping shuffle of politeness by wandering NPCs. You try the lockpick on the door. It doesn't work. You then realise there's a two-pixel lock. You try the lockpick on that. It doesn't work. You have no way to know this, but the solution is to get Ratpouch to do it for you. He's got stuck in a loop entering and exiting a door elsewhere and stopped following you, so you go find him, try to click on him at just the right microsecond to break him out of the loop, and take him back to the house. You give him the lockpick, which is a chore because despite him being about five steps away from you with no obstacles, you keep getting stuck in pathfinding loops and then once you start interacting with him an NPC bumps into him and they get stuck saying sorry to each other. Anyway, you finally get him to unlock the door. You try to walk through it but you get stuck behind an NPC for a few seconds, during which time an orc appears and locks the door. Finally, you get Ratpouch to pick the lock again, you go open the door, walk in and close it behind you. There's nothing there but science equipment. There's no way you could possibly know this, but the next steps are: randomly ask a pub customer about the alchemist's house and she'll give you his diary. This lets you know that the equipment needs heat to make a potion that will make you look like the villain. That should get you in the town hall! So now go through the rigmarole of unlocking the house again, look at the equipment again and you'll unlock a (very difficult to find) hotspot for the oil burner. You need heat, so go to the blacksmith's forge and pixel-hunt until you find a tiny tinderbox on the ground. Go unlock the house again, use the tinderbox on the equipment. Now you need something to hold the potion in. So randomly speak to one particular NPC to get a quest to give an item to the shopkeeper, who will in return give you a blue jewel. If you happen to look at one of the pub signs you'll see that it has a blue jewel on it, so give the jewel to the innkeep and she'll give you a flask. But it's full! There is no verb for emptying it onto the ground, and you can't drink it yourself because it's too nasty. So offer it to everyone you meet until finally you find the one person who will drink it (the blacksmith). You can now struggle your way past NPCs, struggle your way back into the house and get the potion.
I guessed about half of this, but the other half is utterly random and stupid, and even when you know exactly what to do it's teeth-grindingly fiddly. Perhaps getting it to run on modern computers has caused or exacerbated the issues, but this game is too broken to play.
Rating: Red.
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