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I bought Hack & Slah a few days ago impulsively. I'm a Double Fine fanboy and while DF-9's fate disappoints me like most people who care about it, the willful misrepresentation of DF's actions made me buy it impulsively. Basically the raging angry masses made me do it. I already played the Amnesia Fortnight prototype of it back then. Of the bunch it was the one I was the least impressed with. Thankfully though the finished product is quite good! It has puzzles that are very satisfying to solve, and the tools and gimmicks it gives the player are fun to play around with. The story is rather basic, but the delivery funny and charming. The character portraits are just beautiful! Aesthetically speaking it's pretty good looking, though I wish the sprites had some more animation frames. Also, due to the odd perspective, it looks just wrong when Alice falls to her death (or Johanson, as I called her). The game is quite frustrating in parts and feels unpolished. There are little bugs here and there, like Alice becoming invisible or the game world being rendered in a pixely look outside of dialogs. Especially the beginning is unforgivingly frustrating. Basically the game auto-saves after every map change. One of the first maps consists of a forest and is rather big. I made a silly mistake, was reset to the start of it and lost 10 minutes of progress. Later on, the "universe collapsed", which is the game's way of saying that it crashed, though in such a case it doesn't crash totally. Instead you can then reload a save, which the last one was at that point about 5-10 minutes ago. The crashes can happen more often later on, in Act 4, when you're actually modifying scripts, and I find it unfortunate that the game won't tell you more clearly how you made it crash, which I feel it should for the learning experience. I'm not sure Hack & Slash is all that good edutainment. The visual representation of the scripts seem to make them harder rather than easier to understand for me. I did some scripting in Adventure Game Studio some years ago, yet I had trouble understanding the terms and why things functioned like they did. In too short a time too much terminology is introduced, which is made worse by made up terms that supposedly should help make the whole thing easier to understand ("data crystals" is an example for that). I actually managed to modify some of the scripts successfully without quite understanding how my solutions worked, and I still have trouble understanding it. Bob, Alice's sidekick, is similar to Navi in Ocarino of Time, but not of much help. You can initiate explanatory dialog with him, but it doesn't clear up much of the confusion. And you can't talk about certain aspects with him you desperatedly want to understand. So I manage to solve puzzles without quite understanding the solution. That's no good. I also don't think that it's good that people think it's a bug that a lot of the dialog text isn't correctly rendered. You actually solve this problem as part of a puzzle, but since no character in-game comments on how certain other characters can't be understood/certain things can't be read, it's too easy to mistake it as a bug. I feel it's an aspect that should've been pointed out by Alice and her sidekick. Also, the freaking boomerang. Goddammit, is it finicky! For one puzzle you need to hit an angular surface with it, and I had a hard time making it work! I have no clue why the game is so picky in that regard, it shouldn't be. It's a polish issue that, like the difficulty spike in Act 4, could have been fixed with some more weeks of development time, which it sadly didn't get. I hope the small remaining bugs will be fixed at least. I haven't finished the game yet, but I will play it further. It's certainly compelling and I'm having fun with it, if also some frustrations. It's just disappointing to me that I can't recommend the game without reservations. :/ Has anyone else played it yet?