Overall this game was an awesome experience and exceeded my expectations! I grew up with the Quest for Glory series and this game was just the right mix of retrospective but with hilarious winks for a more adult audience
The tone, atmosphere, and story were absolutely excellent. My favorite part of the game was starting out, exploring, talking to and meeting all the characters. It was brilliantly done!
That said, I do have some constructive criticism as well:
Combat. The combination of chain armor + block + bladearang is waaaay too powerful. You are literally untouchable in combat. I think its the fact that chain blocks all damage even if a block is missed that makes the combo too unbalanced. And if you DO block it you even heal! Put all this together and combat becomes trivial once you get chain armor. This is disappointing because it takes a lot of the impact out of what should be the climactic Act 3 battles especially.
Puzzles. The puzzling overall was great but I play the game more for the atmosphere and story. Maybe it says something about me and how I approach these types of games but I got stumped a LOT! Thank goodness for all the help I received here on the forums from people willing to take time away to help or I probably wouldn't have had the patience to try work through the game on my own. In some cases the hints were there in-game & I just couldnt put the pieces together but in other cases some serious logical or exploratory leaps were required with few indications of what to do in-game. In any case, remember that puzzling isn't always intuitive for some people & it can be helpful to put in more tiers of hints in-game for those of us who don't have the aptitude for these types of puzzles as other people but still want to experience a good pace of progression.
Economy. I was REALLY poor early in the game but being a Quest for Glory vet I realized the succor to my trouble was to rob the bank. The issue? WAY TOO MUCH MONEY, as ironic as that seems. I went from thinking 100 blythos was a lot to having 50,000. It was sort of funny as a joke, but kind of broke the economy side of the game for me and made making decisions about what to buy much less interesting. I just bought everything.
Pacing. There is a LOT of content to explore early in the game, which I love! But then things kind of stagnate in mid and late-game. I would get stuck on a puzzle stage and not really have anything else to do in-game other then work on that puzzle step. This would lead to frustration. Obviously this is linked to my own inability to get through the puzzles with ease but mixing in more conversation content that only shows up mid- and late-game would help. For example, Udo is supposed to have news and gossip but he never gets new conversation options! That is one example of low-hanging fruit in this area
All in all though this game was brilliantly done! I'll do my best to pass on recommendations to friends of mine that might be interested
