A Golden Wake

Sadly, I have to give this game a thumbs down, but it has a lot going for it.

The research behind it is meticulous, and the respect for and care given to the people and places is inspiring. It's highly recommend to play with developer commentary on, if only to get more background history. It will include a few spoilers, but I don't see that is a problem (see below), and will also earn you an extra achievement.

The pixelated graphics do a surprisingly good job at capturing the atmosphere, and the voice acting is usually good enough to keep it believable.

Unfortunately the game is very boring.

The story is utterly uninteresting and progresses incredibly slowly. The plot twists lack any real excitement—this is why I don't think commentary spoilers would affect your enjoyment). Also, the gameplay is dreary. Fans of point-and-click adventures would find the puzzles to be trivial. There are a few innovative mechanics, such as persuading people to do things via conversation, and two chase scenes, but they are poorly exectued and more annoying than fun.

If you're a history buff and are excited by the subject matter of this game, you might be better off treating it as a visual novel and using a walkthrough to just race through the insipid gameplay. Even then, I imagine you'll find it agonizingly slow.

Francisco Gonzalez has exceptional talent and dedication. I hope that in the future he teams up with a developer who knows more about how to make games fun. His passion was wasted here.

I would also like to thank the developer for supporting Linux.