I've (re)played
Dark Sun : Shattered Lands last week. That's what you call a classic : an OLD game (1993), but a very good one which is the kind of game forging your childhood memories. Took a short bit of time for getting reused to it, but after that it's actually a surprisingly modern game, where the flaws seem to come more from technical limitations than bad design.
Dialogue is pretty good for the time (might be a bit dry, but then the game could only display very few lines at the same time, so it wasn't practical to use long-winded discussions), combat system is pretty good considering the limitations and the freedom is impressive (there is nearly always several ways to deal with a situation, even if they might be a bit short/contrived, and save for a handful of bugs the dev thought of about everything you can do, and there is no "game over" if you take the "wrong" decision, you just have to live with it). There is an impressive variety in quests and regions, with a bunch of map showing different aspects of the majestic deserts of Athas. It feels like the very early sketches of "open world" games, and, well, it works.
There is a definite "
Master of Magic" feeling in it, with the graphical limitations being transcended by making imagination works to fill in the blanks (also the music is pretty evocative of MoM, might be the MIDI sound though).
That's some A-grade actual RPG. So again, that's not just nostalgia speaking, that game was truly a masterpiece for the time. It also makes you bewildered at how gorgeous Deadfire or Kingmaker are if you launch them right after playing it for a few days
Wanted to play the second title in the serie (Wake of the Ravager, that I never got the occasion to try before), but just couldn't pass over how horribly ugly and clunky it was. The art production values just somehow managed to plummet, the zoomed-in view is annoying and the unskippable intro is unexcusable. That's some shame, because it's supposed to not be as good as the first, but still interesting.
As of the last few days playing
Outcast Second Contact (that's the graphical remake of
Outcast). Never played the original game for 20 years, and it has been sitting in my GOG library for, what, two years already.
The controls are annoying (there is an irritating inertia) and there is some blatant design/technical flaws (nothing in the interface explain you what the many items/weapons are or do, you just have to check the manual ; quests are sometimes pretty obscure, it's obvious the budget was rather small and so you have to accept that there is a sort of "cheapness" in production values) but the lack of hand-holding is appreciable, and the game has very varied and beautiful landscapes.
Mostly, the game feels like the, well, second step in "open world games" after
Darksun, the freedom of movement and exploration lets the player feels empowered and pushes curiosity about "what is here", the goofy humour makes it light-hearted without breaking the immersion, there is quite a lot of content and the writing is pretty decent (even though I could guess the major twist from within the first hour of the game, but I'll chalk it up to the amount of foreshadowing, so at least it's not an arsepull). The game just oozes charm.
So yeah, two honest-to-god "GOG" in their original definition ("Good Old Games")
