This game has an extremely fascinating style, but feels kinda boring, clunky and not really rewarding to play. The technical side leaves a lot to be desired, esp the map and the quest system. Didn't find the humor to be completely my thing either.
I didn't get too far into the game, got really bored while navigating dark mazes and healing druid trees. I got the taste of its aesthetic, but playing this game further would feel like a real slog.
In the end, I was impressed by its style a bit more than bored/annoyed over its overall undercookedness. Maybe I will finish it some time.

Puzzle spoilers

The Kyrandia trilogy is one of the most nostalgic games for me, played all of these so much as a kid in the late 2000s (I had no internet and the main source of games for me was my uncle who I really have to thank for a lot of games I still cherish). The first one always seemed the least interesting to me, and yeah, it's pretty short and the puzzles aren't that interesting (but more on them later). As a kid, I played these games WITH NO SOUND. It didn't work in the versions I was playing on winXP. Now, having finally gotten the full experience of the first game, I can say that it's got tons of charm. The music by the man himself Frank Klepacki who also made the ost for Lands of Lore which I adore, the visuals, the voice acting, the humor, it's all just beautiful and makes me wanna stay in this game for a bit longer.
But then come the puzzles. If you know Kyrandia, you know about the hell cave, the pit of doom, the treacherous cavern. I didn't have too many problems with it, mapping it on a piece of paper was even kinda fun. And finding only 4 rocks (the final rock is hidden in a place where it's almost indistinguishable from the background texture), trying to complete the puzzle with them and watching Brandon fuck it up in the most stupid way possible was painful yet hilarious. Again, the humor in this game is very good, it's light and it's sweet.
What really annoyed me is most of the other puzzles in the game. The altar where you have to put 4 gems the order of which is random other than the first one, and when you fail these gems respawn somewhere on the map which you have to go around every time just to try again (or just use saves). The potions that you have to mix somehow guessing that you need a flower/berry and a gem with a corresponding color, not even mentioning that if you don't have a necessary gem it might be on the other end of the map, and also the usage of said potions is just a guessing game once again (you get an orange potion that does nothing, but if you're in a very specific spot it will turn you into a pegasus and send you to the final location of the game). The bells that you have to play in the order that you also have to guess. The whole you have to bring a flower with you to a location you can't return from and if you don't have one you'll have to load the game and do everything again but how would I know that I need to have a flower with me if the game has had a lot of useless items up to this point thing. Uh. I know that old point and clicks are famous for this kind of stuff but come on, not like this. This is like either you use a walkthrough or bruteforce the game by just trying out every interaction. That whole thing really irritated me.
Otherwise, it's a very pleasant experience and a sweet funny little fantasy game if you don't mind using a walkthrough and doing a bit of backtracking from time to time. Really looking forward to replaying 2 and 3 which I played much more as a kid and which I remember as being far more ambitious, fun and absurd than this one.

I feel like a fucking idiot for getting excited for this one. 3 had something to it, but it turned out to be just an exception, not a trend of how these games were going to go. I couldn't even finish this one, it just drained me of any joy or hope. And most of all I hate the fact that I'm going to at least skim the playthroughs of the next ones and waste more of my time on this series because I'm too curious about what kind of shit they're going to pull out next time and what kinds of ways of not letting people refund a 30 minutes-worth-of-gameplay game they're going to devise.
MJ_ put it perfectly (https://backloggd.com/u/MJ_/review/978956/): "I live in a world where I have been disappointed by Garten of Banban. I am lost. I am unforgivable." Couldn't have said it better. This one phrase gave me infinitely more joy than this game. Thank you.