Samizdat Broadcasts

I just don't get the steam community some days. Nothing but rave reviews for this game and the best I can say about it is that I've finally found a reliable cure for my chronic insomnia. Ten hours in almost no combat and a story that is most definitely not engaging. The main story thus far is a tedious murder investigation with pretty much no leads except the victim's wife, who unsurprisingly denies any culpability. You are suddenly whisked to the "end of time" and told you have to collect a bunch of stones or something. This is surprisingly unrefreshing and is actually quite jarring and the broader story you're jolted into feels completely contrived and nonsensical. Otherwise, plenty of searching crates and barrels, pointless conversations with common townsfolk and cranky city guards, side quests such as finding work for unemployed drunken sailors and finding lost sheep for merchants. I think I leveled up once, but you still have to find and purchase books that let you unlock new skills. The stuff of legends this most certainly is not. It's almost like this is a satire of the Baldur's Gate/Dragon Age mode of RPG. It has all of the drawbacks of those games: tedious crafting and item maintenance, tedious hours long "role playing" sessions in sprawling urban environments, silly rescuing cats from trees types of side quests, ridiculous puzzles that will most certainly having you google searching walkthroughs, managing personality conflicts within your party and so on, but with none of the strengths. No interesting opponents, opportunities for advancement, levelling up etc. At least none that I've found so far. Perhaps I haven't gone far enough in, but ten hours of game play should be enough to get past long, drawn out introductions to one uninteresting NPC after another. If it takes that long to get on with things, that's too long. Period.