First indie I ever finished but to be honest when I finished it I was glad it was over. It was a good game but had it gone on for another 5 or 10 hours I probably wouldn't have finished.
The amount of puzzles started to grate on me towards the end. Also didn't like the magic system. Having to memorize and select multiple symbols in real time was tedious and resulted in me only using magic to solve puzzles.
Really liked the exploration, hidden rooms and character progression. More of that and less puzzles would bring me back for a sequel.
While I would agree on the first part, I disagree on the rest.
I think the riddles were the only really good thing of Grimrock. The character system was bad imho, the fights were too arcade-style, where the difficulty was mostly set by the enemies turning speed, but the biggest thing which I missed was exploration. While there was secret passages to find, there was never anything to look forward to. After the first two levels you basically saw the whole game besides of other enemy models.
If I think back at Eye of the beholder, I think about the two templars in the second game, the bones you could find and resurrect, the Dinosaur Guy in the third part and so on. All these little "you found something special"-events represented by some text and a nice picture.
All that Grimrock offered in that regards were texts when sleeping and a couple of texts on scrolls. I felt exploration was extremely unrewarding.
And so every time I read "it's like eye of the beholder" it kinda hurts. Besides of the movement it's a completely different game, almost a different genre.
That said, I think it was worth the money if you get it on a sale like right now on steam.
Due to the great graphics and the hype before release it has the most amount of people who played it of course and therefore probably also won this poll.