It's hard not to play this game and mourn the potential of what what it could have been. Playing it 25 years after release it's easy to imagine how special it was when it came out, but to me it falls short of what I really wanted it to be.

There is clearly a ton of love and creativity that went into this game. The setting, the story, and the character concepts are wonderful. I started the game excited about the themes and questions it was asking, but by the end I was totally let down by its failure to answer them in a meaningful way. Most characters are totally underwritten and there's an undercurrent of misogyny that really hurts some of the major narrative beats and is honestly just annoying. There are a few successful moments that really shine but also make me think about the game that I wish was here.

The combat, of course, is awful, but you still have to waste your time with it. And there is plenty of additional wasted time going through the same dialogue tree with countless characters (have you seen a journal?? do you know anything about ravel puzzlewell??). This time could have been much better spent fleshing out the world and characters.

I loved the game I thought would come out of this, but in the end it just consistently let me down.