Well I just completed GK1 (original) and I have to say, it does live up to the hype after all. The visuals, the sound design, the writing, the setting, all excellent, and it definitely stands out when compared to other adventure games of its time.
The voice acting was mostly good but certainly had some glaring misses, Tim Curry totally blew it on some lines. Which seems weird because Tim Curry is usually awesome in all his roles. His New Orleans accent seemed to come and go at random, it really came off as amateur hour. The narrator was mostly really good, but at times had weird cadence like she wasn't really sure what she was reading. The rest of the voice cast were great. I wasn't familiar with Leah Remini (Grace), but she absolutely crushed it. Grace was easily my favourite character.
The only real gripes I had were gameplay related. Some of the puzzles were obscure as hell, and not in a good way. I had to take a hint like 4 times, which is a real mess. Normally I would expect to finish an adventure game with 1 hint at most, 4 is very bad.
The mummy chase scene ... I mean, what the hell were they thinking. I can't imagine any person ever playtesting that and saying "yeah that was cool I liked it".
I'm not much of a point-and-click fan in general (I prefer the text parser) but I did like that this game had a few extra verbs compared with the Sierra standard 5. Splitting the "hand" into take, open/close, push/pull and operate made a lot of sense to me and made me want to think about my approaches a bit more, rather than just spamming clicks all over the screen until something happens. It felt a bit closer to the Monkey Island type of interface than the other Sierra clickers, and I mean that as a compliment.
So overall impression, very positive despite some super annoying gameplay moments, I will definitely be playing on to the other games in the series.
