Beautifully drawn, puzzle-heavy, cartoonish adventure game with sympathetic cast, intriguing story and quite unique mythos.
The gameplay is standard point'n'clicking: You can either inspect (a magnifying glass), pick up (a hand), or interact (gears) with hotspots. Left-clicking brings up a "radial menu" with the inspect option on left and either interact or pick up option on right. This seems a bit clunky and wasteful considering right-clicking serves no purpose. You open the inventory by moving the cursor to the lower end of the screen and use items via the radial menu or dragging'n'dropping.
Graphics of the milieus in this game are top-notch. For some reason the developer decided to put less effort into character art, and they generally look like they were drawn in MS Paint. After the initial shock this didn't bother me personally, but as someone rightfully pointed out it makes the characters seem a bit disconnected from the surroundings. Animation is satisfactory.
Sound is good, and the naivety of the protagonist is quite cutely presented by the voice actor. Rest of the cast is up to par as well. There was one character in the game whose voice I couldn't bear, but it sort of suited him anyhow. Music is mostly ambient and forgettable.
The story and atmosphere are moody. Don't let the cute exterior fool you, there are some dark elements in the story and characters. Some of it felt borderline psychotic and rather morbid, which I enjoyed. Predictably, attempts at humor are made, but I only found myself chuckling a few times, so it was mostly a miss in my case. Dialogue was for most part pretty standard stuff compared to other point'n'click adventures, at times good, and on a few occasions a bit too lengthy. The world is imaginative and the game has a lot of personality, and the characters were generally likeable and/or relatable on some level. Writing felt a bit rushed toward the end, but I felt the story came to a closure.
Puzzles are of varying quality. They mostly felt logical, and some of them were quite clever, but sometimes I felt like things were set up badly and I needed to do things in some arbitrary order or fashion to achieve the end result although I had already figured out a/the logic. There is a help system if you get stuck.
The game spans five chapters and progression happens within constraints of a handful of [scrollable] screens at a time, restricting problem-solving to a rather narrow area and assets. This means less exploration and more fiddling with objects and talking to characters.
Technically, the game had one small annoyance: Sometimes when you'd interact with an object or trigger an event there is a noticeable pause before the character responds, similar to how older games used to stall for a few seconds to load an audio file from CD-ROM. It is annoying enough to warrant a mention here, but doesn't come close to affecting my opinion of the game on the whole.
The main complaint - as often is the case with these games - is that I wish the game was lengthier. I could have gone on for full 10 chapters at a slightly slower tempo or (preferably) with a more branching storyline. In any case, if there ever is a sequel I will definitely be getting it to see what more is going on in Asposia.