I had so high expectations of this game, but in the end I found it very unsatisfying. I mean, the implementation is super. However, the ending is unsatisfactory. It takes a lot of work to finish the game, as it's big. You spend a lot of time learning the various rituals and managing the ingredients, and the reward for all this work is extremely terse. The difference between the better ending and the worse ending is 3 words. It feels... stingy! The author could have given us a slightly more expansive description of the ending as a reward.
The text hints at a wide game world; yet the game is only a sequence of card games against nondescript opponents. If you win 5 in a row, you win the game. I had expected the games to become more challenging with time, and in a way they were; but it seemed to me that the game difficulty was due to the luck of the particular hand of cards that I was dealt, more than anything else. The computer opponent didn't seem to become smarter. The card game itself is entertaining, but not enough to make me want to play again. It may be that it's too easy -- I won 5 times in a row, I never lost.
I would have liked to see a bit of story to develop with each game. Maybe seeing variations in the game.
The game's atmosphere lies in the large, sprawling map of the two valleys, and the underground. There are many NPCs that move and act independently. In fact, the first time I played I didn't find an important object because some NPC got it first. Some puzzles are quite arbitrary, and I remember poring over computer mags in search for hints.
I remember playing this game in the eighties on my C64... At the time I thought it was really cool. In retrospect, it was a good game, and it was fun to map it all out, but it would look naive for today's standards.