I decided to put my full review here since gog insists on cutting so short the game review section in order to let other customers know of my concerns with the game.

I gave it 3 stars:

the pros:
very nice graphical art, atmospheric, excellent painted matte backgrounds. Intriguing story, at times shocking, threat of character death adds to the fun of game. Long length of game gives good value to money, for its time was well done

the cons:
these reasons brought the game down from 5 stars. too much to-ing and fro-ing- although a staple of this genre the lack of any kind of insta port or quality map made this unnecessary traveling annoying. (my map would disappear, turned out this was due to the clipping mentioned below) The main char moves so very slow, there is no run option so what could be enjoyable adventuring becomes a chore. char dialogues take too long to start, each time you want to address a char it always starts with a long 5-7 sec intro animation... every single time. Objects and actions wont trigger unless you do very specific actions in order. So unless you 'talk' to a char, it wont let you pick up that object you already know you need to complete an action. Illogical puzzles add to the annoyances. GoG version clips the left side of the screen so some actions are cut off, as well as inventory. The lack of a skip puzzle function is inhibitive, for ex. a very difficult slider puzzle I only could pass by use of a saved game from someone else from a forum. Other puzzles there is no clue on what the objective is to even start working on it.

I eventually made liberal use of a guide in order to just cut out alot of very long grueling slow traveling back and forth and to know what to do with some puzzles, not the solution just what I was supposed to be doing. Due to the clipping of my screen I was not even aware of options for dialogue responses till much later or that some of my inv was being cut off, this added to frustration. Overall, the main objection I had was the main char. He was a real rude creep, lied, cheated, bullied servants, interfered with authorities and the voice acting made me cringe. All these contributed to ruining the game for me, could have been stellar. I believe the next installments improved on those failings. I have bought them in hope.

so beware that for some users the game will be cut off on the left side which will interfere with seeing actionable hotspots and clips inventory.

I don’t have that clipping issue, so it could depend on your system and configuration. I can understand that this must have been frustrating for you and it should be solved.

Yet I think that you are exaggerating a bit with the backtracking and animation loops (i.e. the delay when people interact with you). In my opinion, the backtracking isn’t as bad most of the time, because more often than not there are several routes you can take to reach your destination (especially in the castle). Also, you can skip most of the walking by double clicking on the exit. There are only few screens in the game that are so big that you do need to wait for the walking, but I found it only a minor annoyance. As for the animation loops, true, some characters have excessively long ones (the gardener and Dr Hermann), but you don’t have to speak to them that often. Some puzzles may be hard, but I think that’s just an evergreen among point-and-click criticisms. Some want it hard and puzzling, others want to try it a couple of times and rather skip it. In my own experience, I am more likely to click on the skip button than I would be looking for a walkthrough, i.e. I would rather try and solve it myself without being tempted in the game.

The most annoying things are the pixel hunting as well as the sequential steps for some actions, i.e. you sometimes need to talk to someone first before you can pick something up. The rest is only mildly inconvenient to me.

I did go back to see if double clicking on the exit icon would allow fast travel, and it did, though it would not work some times. I assumed the first few times I tried it when first playing the game that option was not enabled so gave up trying to make it work. Now that I see it is there and would cut down on the travel time I will assess my points up a star. I am not exaggerating the time to dialogue from the initial animation. There is some lag interference where the character will slow down and a simple turn will take seconds.

It really has a great story and takes a long while to play, which is a bonus to me.