Reply To: Revisiting Albion
To the Dji Cantos island! I love the scenery in this place, it really feels like a reward to explore this incredible hidden palace after all that drudgery above – something about the architecture and environment reminds me of the less annoying parts of my recent exploration through the Myst games. I can see why Rainer wants to stay here instead of spending another weeks-long stretch in a cave being chewed by small aggressive mammals.
This reminds me that I haven’t mentioned that the sprite work in this game is absolutely beautiful – after spending a long time in the 3D sections it’s easy to forget it due to the monster sprites and environments’ incredibly ugly scaling and monotony, but all of the 2D sections just look wonderful. I love how detailed they all are, with so many different object sprites for books and drinking horns and cutlery and containers lying around, and little touches like irregularities in the tiles or carpets on the floor. The environments look very realistic in the sense that they’re being lived in.
The level of information dump is… intense here, with you learning a lot about the relationship between Earth and Albion and their respective deities very quickly, tying the history of Albion in to the history of the ancient Celts, Greeks and throwing its own mythology in there as well. It is possible, but not guaranteed, that I might understand all this by the end of the game.
The other really important thing is finally getting access to the “world map”, you can now access all the places in your so-far linear journey as you like and go back and learn spells and collect things that you’ve missed. I’ve immediately used it to retrieve our two snugglewumps from Srimalinar – I wonder why the game has them leave for plot-related reasons when you can recruit them right back again.
I switched back to the game while writing this to discover that I had boosted some statistics by standing around on some flowers – on repeated tries it says that the energy of this place needs to be recharged, but I wonder if I could just raise everyone to their maximum limits given enough time here.
