Great story and even better ideas about consequences, but even then it was a rough gameplay experience.
It makes more sense when you realise it was originally going to be a PC port of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, but it leads to this awkward mix of gameplay styles that are hard to grasp at first. There’s really not much to the combat other than clicking when the icon glows and moving.
The hardest fight in the game is a dog very early on, which you can cheese by stunning it with Aard (RNG based iirc) and landing a one hit finisher, but the fact that there’s an unskippable lengthy cutscene right before it is absolutely obnoxious. And fighting something two levels above you is a death sentence, leading to a bit of exploring to get enough XP to be able to do everything.
Steam Link performance was terrible for me. Like half the frame rate and crunchy as hell. No idea why. I assume it was using CPU rather than GPU, or maybe using too much GPU…
GFE worked for a bit (until Nvidia killed it) but would often use the wrong monitor with no way to configure it.
Even without the hardware limitations, there was so much jank to PS1 games. Like we had an idea of what a 3D game could be, but we were no where near where we are today. Controls are all over the place. It was the wild west. Alien Resurrection was the first time we had left stick to move and right stick to look, and it felt bizarre at the time. It’s probably the only FPS from the era that’s still playable.
I had to look up a video to realise this wasn’t the “I guess that’s something I do now” game.
Looks like a confusing mess of a game tbh. When a game’s failure is blamed on it being released close to fucking Starfield, you know it never had much going for it.