Wishbone: All your positive comments convinced me. Downloading right now.
[EDIT] Okay, immediate first impressions...
dreadcog: Yikes man, even I've played most of the adventure games out there. Let me just say static rendered adventure games suck, Myst included.
O...kay. What does static rendered adventure games have to do with this?
dreadcog: Now adventure games are linear, you can't get around it. Everythings always the same and leads you to the same conclusion, even adventure games that claim multiple endings. You play it because the story interests you and the puzzles are like a piece of candy. You work hard to solve the problem and it could go either way of a treat or more problems to solve. That's the beauty of playing an adventure game. It might turn out different because it's interactive but it never does.
I don't really know what you're trying to get at here. The original MI games weren't all that linear. The story was, yes, but not the game itself. You could go pretty much anywhere (in the "sector" you were in at the moment, e.g. Melée Island, Monkey Island, etc.), and you had some degree of freedom to choose the order in which to solve certain tasks. Actually, most adventure games I've played are like that.
Fortunately, as I played a bit more, the game did open up somewhat, at least regarding movement. The order of tasks seems rather more constricted than in the original games though.
dreadcog: Alone in the Dark was a good game, it scared the crap outta me when I was a kid. The puzzles in it were tough. Now that we have Resident Evil 24 or whatever number they are at right now AITD doesn't seem like a big deal.
That's all well and good, but that's not what I was talking about either. AITD had the same "let's switch the camera angle around between ones predefined by
us, many of which are completely debilitating to the gameplay" mechanic that this latest MI incarnation suffers from. I remember places in AITD where you would be shot at, by someone standing outside your field of vision, for instance behind a hedge or something, making it impossible both to move out of the field of fire and to shoot back. This because of the stupid predefined camera angles, and given those, the poor placement of the enemies.