Westfront PC: The Trials of Guilder

I have no idea what I am doing in this game, even after playing for several hours. It certainly has a lot of stuff in it, but that doesn't necessarily make it fun to play. I find it tedious to navigate through the 1000+ rooms only to die and have to find my way back to where I was. I want to give a piece of armor to my companion. I can't just say "give armor to <companion name>" - it recognizes that I have typed the command but it tells me that I must first unequip it. Obviously you know what I wanted to do so why not just unequip it for me and give it to my companion? There's are just a few small examples pointing at a larger pattern of letting the clunkiness get in the way of being able to explore the game.

I definitely would consider this to be a sandbox. So, if you are interested in just exploring and discovering, you may get some enjoyment out of this. But just know that the mechanics and general clunkiness of the interface are going to make it less-than-pleasant to work with.

I give this 2 stars just on the merit of having a lot of content in it. You can't go wrong with putting a ton of stuff in a game. But the aforementioned issues overall hurt the experience. That said, it's one of the first few IF games I've played, so perhaps I don't have the breadth of experience to know if it's really 2 stars when compared to other games...

This game is so different from Panks's other games. Panks's IFComp games were short and trivial, or mocking.

This game is really, really big, and reasonably well polished.

You can play a lot of mini games, visit tons of locations, order NPCs, etc.

The problem is that it was developed for a long time by one person with only a little input from others, meaning that several of the mechanics are just spotty.