Certainly successful at creating an intriguing, mysterious world to explore and try to comprehend - significantly less so at allowing you to navigate or interact with said world and unravel its secrets. The puzzles are, yes, in fact, MYST puzzles - maddeningly unclear yet undeniably evocative and built into the world in exciting ways - but their legendary obtuseness would actually be much less of an issue if the solutions weren't so labor-intensive. Every time you get that wonderful "a-ha!" moment, it's usually tamped down by the realization of all the places you have to go and crap you have to do to enact the results. This and the trial-and-error nature of the worlds' machinery is obviously anti-fun and certainly not intelluctually stimulating - it just exists to extend the experience. (The fact that the 100% no-glitch speedrun record is sitting at about ten minutes speaks to this, also.)

But the game was a hit and was influential for a reason, and it does still hold some power. Tinkering around, wondering at the sights, desperately trying to make something, somewhere happen. The visuals actually hold up a lot better than 99% of early CG because they were smart about their designs and didn't overextend themselves, and I love how the FMV being (mostly) confined to little windows in glitchy magic books masks the low quality. Aside from the terrible hotspot navigation, it actually stands up and is fairly playable today. But, to stoke a very pointless old rivalry, it's no THE 7TH GUEST.

I appreciate the kind of practical, real-world logic approach to the puzzles in this. If done well, that sort of thing can be engaging and rewarding, rather than dull. For the most part, that's true here, although there are some clunkers.

Genuinely tense right up until you understand how lame and easily killed the enemies are and then the whole illusion is broken - a problem that tons of games like this share but is particularly pronounced with this one.

This subgenre is a real mixed bag, and this early entry has both the good and the bad of it in roughly equal measure. But there is the spark of something kind of cool here. There are worse Lovecraft takes.

A thoroughly clumsy ZELDA clone with frankly garbo combat, movement, menuing, and level design, but elevated far beyond its station by an excellent world and main character. It's just cool! Kain is cool! His voice is cool! The mid-90s CG grimdark medieval shit is cool! I'm sorry!

So, devs take note: letting the player stomp around the dark fantasy countryside as an eloquent vampire slaughtering peasants with OP spells and turbosucking up all their blood like a latin-speaking wet/dry vac can paper over a LOT of barely-acceptable design.

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.