Man, I wanted to like this game more than I did, especially since it starts out so well. I really love the way this game looks: the way the game integrates its FMV actors into pre-rendered backgrounds without either of these disparate styles clashing with each other, particularly the way both utilize colour scheme in a way to create a sense of seamlessness as to where, say, the FMV ends and the background begins. I liked a lot of the writing, especially how it handles its tone: the game really manages to capture the feel of, like, this grand historical adventure fun for the whole family (with an understated, yet effective sense of humour) but also, at points, becomes genuinely kinda grim in a way that’s rather dark for a piece of edutainment software, partially in some of the ways it shows the living conditions of the time and particularly in the story of its main character: what he goes through, and what he gets. I also appreciate how it attempts to cover subject matter in its historical period that might not be as well known as what’s in the public consciousness: rather than the direct conflict of the Crusades, it instead chooses to cover the internal conflict that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem. Instead of starring, say, the English or the Byzantines, it instead takes a uniquely French perspective on the time period, with an eye towards showing the Franc end of the conflict. This theoretically sets the stage really well to be a comprehensive learning tool, veering away from what the player is likely to already know in a way that encourages the beginning of an in-depth coverage of this particular period of history.

Unfortunately... I'm aware this is mostly a bit of a me thing, but also I think this game does have issues as a piece of edutainment software. The main way the game teaches about the historical period it covers is through the in-game encyclopedia: a fairly extensive tome for which reading and recalling it is key to solving the game's puzzles. This works really well!... if you're somebody who learns by reading and writing. If you're not — if, say, you have cognitive stuff that makes focusing on something and retaining the information from it really difficult — it's kind of painful, and on my end it eventually devolved into an exercise of brute forcing the puzzles, pixel hunting for things in the background, doing my best to try and focus on what the encyclopedia was saying... but eventually devolving into skimming because trying as such exhausted me, something not helped by how this game, I felt, veered a good bit longer than it should. And if going through an encyclopedia, looking for the fun facts you need to progress through, isn't quite how you learn, then... what this game offers in terms of edutainment is rather surface-level: perhaps if one was going through this without much historical or religious context then they'd learn something, but mostly what I got were things about the Crusades and Islam that I already knew from osmosis. Perhaps if I were more capable of being able to use the in-game encyclopedia then I would've been able to get more out of this, but if I wanted to try and fail to get something out of whatever wall of text is put in front of me, I'd rather just go back to high school.