What kind of gaming impotent would you have to be to saint a boring quest that brazenly impersonates Petka and Vasily Ivanovich, only crammed full of pseudo-intellectual hackneyed rants and freshman-friendly political rhetoric? We're being sold a schizophrenic cop simulator as the pinnacle of the role-playing genre, even though all this nonlinearity is a cheap smokescreen for a linear book where your only choice boils down to reading a 15-page racial theory or suddenly dying of a heart attack because you simply sat in an uncomfortable chair or heard a woman's voice on the answering machine. Idiotic dice rolls undermine even the rudiments of logic, when with a 90% chance of success, you catch a softlock and spend hours running along a gray, dreary coastline in search of any experience, simply clicking through dialogue diagonally out of boredom. And the crowning glory of this scripted crap is the ending, which simply wipes its feet on the player. You spent hours pretending to be the great Sherlock, piecing together clues and poring over kilometers of text, only to end up with a lazy piano from the bushes in the form of a crazy old man on an island who simply gives himself up with the first line. This entire vaunted detective story is a sham, where absolutely nothing depends on your actions, because the game will drag you to a single, scripted ending, patting you on the back with cheap moralizing. Instead of a deep story, they've slipped in a stuffy simulator of running from one end of the map to the other, where you work as a courier for cartoonish freaks and absorb tons of dreary nihilism accompanied by endless blaring of a pipe against the backdrop of a gray Revachol hangover.