My eyebrows went up when the opening cutscene introduced a post-apocalyptic world where literal gender wars broke out in the late '90s(!!) and women won by banding together in a global sisterhood and stealing nuclear weapons(!!!). But, as I really should have guessed, this was just a setup for the most sexist garbage imaginable, with you playing as the last heroic man on earth unfrozen from cryosleep into enslavement by the lesbo-cybervixen communist regime and who must escape and re-establish manhood worldwide by outsmarting all the dumb robo-bitches (and force-gender-reassigned men), freeing the Y chromosome for the good of the universe.

The gameplay is shitty first-person point-and-click that basically amounts to one long pixel hunt as you can't collect or even see items without finding the exact right hot-spot for a new camera angle to make them appear, even if the place that they are has been in sight the whole time. So you're just shifting nonsensically around early pre-rendered 3D environments while this Ringo Starr-sounding asshole quips and occasionally a cyborg babe shows up and you have to quick kiss them (it's a whole mechanic!) to stun them and knock them over into a spread-eagled position, allowing you to continue your manly quest.

I guess this is based on some dogshit Polish movie that might have slightly more nuance or something, but who fucking cares. Do your best to forget this exists.

Another refinement of the now well-established conventions of the series, this time adding much more accomplished art, better equipment sorting, and, blessedly, MUCH better quest design/tracking. For the first time with these games, I felt like I was on an epic, cohesive adventure rather than randomly wandering across a (cool!) map getting into (exciting!) trouble trying to remember/figure out what to do. Still not at the ceiling of what I feel like this series is capable of with some more menuing tweaks and a stronger narrative, but so far, every single one of these has been a notable improvement over the last and always more and more enjoyable. These games are pretty good! Old CRPGs fun!

Another significant step forward but still a ways to go from greatness. The visual fidelity got cranked up dramatically but the actual art is pretty garish, so it takes some getting used to. Same with the interface, which is, on paper, quite a bit more useful than the archaic stuff from the first two installments, but is confusing and awkward in its own new ways. You still wish things were a lot easier to navigate.

One unqualified success is the new approach to the world map - much more open and concerned with reflecting a believable place rather than having every grid be a puzzle labyrinth full of traps, even if you were just walking through a field or whatever. Rewarding and organic exploration in this one - lots to discover and map out, if that's your thing. And it's a cool world!

The questing, the loot, and the character options remain pretty overwhelming, and despite some light quest tracking this time, it is very easy to get lost in the sauce and lose interest. You still gotta be a real head to have much success let alone get through this thing, but I like the direction the series is headed in, for sure. If gear and spells specifically were easier to see/manage, and if the quests were just a liiiiiiittle bit more directed/designed, I feel like I could get super deep into these games.

Since reading The CRPG book and educating myself more about the origins of the genre, I've taken some time to sample the first entries of all the biggest long-running franchises - ULTIMA, WIZARDRY, THE BARD'S TALE, POOL OF RADIANCE, etc., and I think that this is the most immediately accesible iteration of that common experience they were all going for back then.

Really fun world to explore with just a hair more QOL than its contemporaries. Still brutally difficult and yet totally breakable, still byzantine yet overly simplistic in certain aspects, still ... just insanely old. But a good time if you're game for it!

I've always held a prejudiced view of old UK games as being mid-at-best knockoffs of Japanese or American classics, made for silly, underpowered computers by insanely British goofs elevated to the status of rockstars by a quality-starved press and public. So, let's just say that this exhaustive exploration of the early work of Jeff Minter ... doesn't do a whole lot to change my mind.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of two good games in here, out of about forty. But then again, I'm not a Pink Floyd obsessed stoner living in the early 1980s with access to a Speccy and nothing else, so maybe they're just not for me.

But love what Digital Eclipse is doing, as always. God help me if they ever make one of these profiling someone I actually care about!