Apothecarium: The Renaissance of Evil [Premium Edition]

There are some cool, wacky, surreal graphics and good animations in this game. And it's quite long. But pretty much everything else is bad.

• Nonsensical point-and-click adventuring. At some point you have two different hammers, but can't break glass: you need a rock for that. You have scissors, but no, you need a knife. What.
• Awful story, script, and voice acting.
• Buggy clicking: you click, but it doesn't register. This makes hidden-object scenes really frustrating. For one of them, I could not even complete the scene because it would not let me click the last item.
• Instead of hidden-object scenes, you can play an incredibly stupid bubble game that is totally the opposite of the game's supposedly spooky mood. I think it's supposed to be ironic.
• Bad hidden-object scenes: you need to pick a book, but there are three on the screen. One is the "correct" one.
• Puzzles and other locations are bizarrely hidden in scenes: you click on them, and they open. But there's no graphic for them in the scenes. It's just an arbitrary set of pixels.

The game features an innovative hidden-object scene tactic: objects morph. Not only is this annoying, but it's also inexplicable. Still, kudos for this attempt to innovate on this venerable game genre.

What a mess!

It was more fun to write this review than to play this game.