I just finished the game. I bought it (donated $10) back when it came out but quit near the end due to never being able to find Alva's Lamp. Couldn't find it this time either :D. Luckily I figured out that Magic Mushrooms are super OP for getting through dungeons (they don't last very long though). It turns out I didn't really need a light source for the final Beast dungeon anyways.
I had some questions now that I'm done:
- WHERE IS THAT GD LAMP?!
- what are the stone circles for?
- what does Draupnir's Ring do ("this ring hums with unknown power")? I tried infusing it into one of my Artisan pieces and it told me I'm not allowed. Tried wearing it and just walking around, including through all the stone circles.
I had a lot of fun.
GOOD
- Character progression. Fully embraces the Oblivion model of "be everything all at once", but sensibly makes it take all game to do it. I always enjoyed getting another level. Classes are only fully differentiated by their passive, which can in turn be changed/enhanced through specific Mythic items.
- Mythic items are really cool. Each has a unique passive that does anything from giving bonus power to a skill to creating entirely new effects to completely changing the way certain classes are played. I was always excited to find a new Mythic.
- Artisan infusion. You can take the power from a Mythic item and graft it into the unique class-specific armor obtained at/near endgame. The Mythic gets destroyed in the process, and each Artisan piece can only hold one power at a time (the power can be overwritten by a new graft) so there's some tension in your choices. Makes endgame itemization feel like a branch of character progression.
- Dungeon exploration was fun. Nothing crazy, but some fun teleport/item-based puzzles, and you need half a brain to navigate some of the larger dungeons.
- Boss fights have their own unique mechanics, mostly (but not always) requiring use of a special item. Baal and the final Druid dude were my personal favorites, see some of the previous posts for other examples.
- I liked the music. Gave me a comfy 80s console/8086 vibe.
BAD
- The world map. See others' posts.
- Itemization outside of Mythics is fucking terrible. Items follow the well-known tier system (white/green/blue/yellow). Each item has fixed stats, no prefix/affix or similar procedural system here, a slight plus. Set against that, the names of uncommon (green) and rare (blue) items might as well have been spit out by a computer algorithm. Their stats are all over the place, there's no rhyme or reason to them. I never felt good about getting any item outside Mythics, totally forgettable and sometimes (due to the schizophrenic stats) actively aggravating.
- Random encounters become really tiring by the middle, and only get more so towards the finish. The game would have benefited enormously from a way to ignore much lower level encounters entirely. At level 30, decked out with Mythics and all four Artisan pieces, able to do over 1K dmg/hit, the lowest level random enemies (orcs etc) would still make beelines for me and die in their thousands, sapping away my precious bodily time-units. Ugh.
All in all, 15 hours well spent (it shouldn't have taken that long but I must have spent at least 5 hours looking for that FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU- lamp
).