Torin's Passage

The Good
I know that a lot of those who actually bought this game liked it very much. I have a friend that really enjoyed the humor and the graphics. As for myself, I have nothing good whatsoever to say about this game other than the fact that the music is quite good.

The Bad
I'm a big fan of adventure games, but this game did nothing for me. It's pretty much a strange version of the King's Quest-series. Firstly, the story really isn't interesting. Not the worst ever, but not good. Secondly, the graphics makes me want to puke. It is not the ugliest game I've played, far from it. But it is something about those mid-90's graphics that makes my skin crawl. The colours, the smooth surfaces and the fact that the characters just slide through the backgrounds like they were pasted on to the world rather than being in it... it makes me feel physically ill for some reason. Many games had graphics like this in the early age of the CD-ROM. The graphics are much like the graphics you could find in those multimedia titles with a lot of ugly rendered 3D with all too bright colours and terrible animations. I hate it. I really can't stand it. The rest of the game doesn't do anything to make it better either. The alleged "humor" isn't funny at all, just annoying. Especially that little purple jerk for a sidekick you have to put up with is very annoying and not at all funny. The voice acting is as bad as most of these old multimedia titles from that era, if not even worse. If it weren't enough as it is, the game also had a lot of bugs. It crashed constantly, especially near the end. A friend of mine even had to start over because the game crashed and corrupted his save-files. Not acceptable. As a last point: The interface. Although functional I just couldn't stand those green ugly crystal-things where you could put items to examine them more closely. Not only was this function more or less worthless and was only used a couple of time, but it was also ugly and it was there at the bottom of the screen the whole game, annoying the bloody crap out of me. This game made me doubt Sierra's judgment even more, considering they have released quite a few games that are utterly crappy. It's hard to believe that such a popular game developer can release both so brilliant games as, for example Gabriel Knight, and such utter crap like Torin's Passage.

The Bottom Line
If puke was a game this would be it.