My initial thoughts while playing this game was that it was either:
a) A game made by a child.
or
b) A game made for a young child.
There's a massive disconnect in this game between what it purports to provide and what it actually delivers. On the one hand it makes a strong claim to authenticity and a great deal of effort has been made to get all the names and lore as neat and tidy as possible. But that's as far as the effort went. The dialogues are all one-liners. Each NPC has about 4 dialogue options, all of which provide one-line answers and barely any of which either go anywhere nor add anything of value to either the atmosphere or the gameplay. On top of this, the dialogue screens themselves are exceptionally clunky and require a lot more button presses than any human would consider acceptable. Occasionally dialogues change as a result of events but mostly they remain unchanging and constantly repeatable. Most striking example: You ask for a reward & are given a reward, end conversation, repeat and get the same options, but no you can't cheese more rewards that way at least.
Likewise, the combat is barebones and almost pointless. A couple of characters have 'special moves' but you can only use them twice in combat & combats tend to run on for tens of rounds, those that don't, don't even need the special moves. And even calling them special moves is using a very unfitting superlative. Basically, combat is just "attack"[75% chance to hit], click end turn, "attack"[75% chance to hit], click end turn, now repeat this process until the numbers reach zero, which was tiring enough in the first small fight, but by the third fight (which for me was the end boss battle) was already almost beyond bearable.
Further, moving onto itemisation, there's again a huge disconnect between the effort of the premise compared to the resulting item descriptions. One moment we are provided with a decent couple of paragraphs about ancient Greek lore, the next, as a reward for reading that text, we get a crab-helmet whose description is "clik-clak go the pincers" or some such juvenile humour-speak, and all the inventory items are like this. As are a lot of the useless one-liners in dialogues. Oh, and when I say itemisation, it's mostly adventure game itemisation in that most of the stuff you pick up will want to be gobbled up by an NPC at some point. Some items can even be gobbled up by multiple NPCs leaving you the wonderful choice of who to give your mostly pointless trinket to.
A common complaint about Divinity games is they often match silly humour with mature themes. However, I never really get that with Divinity games as their base premise is never uber-serious in the first place. What we have with this game is a stark contrast between the sincerity of the premise and the ultra-juvenile and lazy fluff content.
Even just walking around in the game is presented as lazily as possible as the sprite character can't even walk at the same speed as their animation creating that hilarious 'glide' effect as they traverse the screen. Exploration is minimal at best and generally consists of four or five screens per 'town' each of which has approximately two to three NPCs in it, if you're lucky, but, worse than this, simply going to another screen can advance the story and leave you unable to go back to a previous screen (as can many dialogues), but the signposts that indicate screen transition points are all completely blank and provide no indication as to whether they are normal transitions or chapter transitions.
Not so much choose your own adventure as stumble through your own adventure.
So the game, while giving a detailed taste of the ancient geek, generally does its absolute upmost to bugger that up at every opportunity other than text screens and some occasional background artwork. Which is a shame as a lot of the artwork is very nice. As is the rather occasional music which tends to pipe up and cut-out of its own random accord. To which the music setting is already too low with no options menu sound controls. I know volume numbers don't mean anything, but the loudest I normally watch TV, while eating crisps is at my PC's number 30, when I closed this game I discovered I'd moved the volume button to 43 just to get it to be mild background sound.
The choose your own adventure part comes into play every now and then when the game will give you the option to do either A or B in a certain situation, sometimes you might even get a C option. And most of the time it's the usual lazy crap of "do you want to A: Do the honest/good thing or B: Murder the NPC. Variations on the theme, etc. At the end of each 'chapter', which only lasts about 20-30 minutes each, you will get a run down list of what happened to all the NPCs you encountered (and even ones you didn't) to tell you how your interactions effected them, you know, like in the Tell-Tale games, only in this game you only had one interaction with the NPC & you will already know what the outcome of that situation was by the one solitary dialogue of one-liners you shared with them.
And the more you play, the more the quests get edgier and edgier, human sacrifice, kidnap, murder, etc, which instantly rules out the game being for small children, though doesn't rule out the possibility that the developer is a teenager.
I will say this however, the developer has been very attentive to constructive criticism and most of the points made by people following the game's development have been answered quickly and exactly. The irritating thing is that s/he needs to be told about quite so many quite obvious glaring issues with the game. It really is as if the developer doesn't really care for anything in the game other than "here's some solid ancient greek lore and some brief taster plot-lines, my work here is done". Does s/he really need people to tell him/her stuff that would be painfully obvious to any other human being on the planet?
However, if the developer is a teenager and this work comprises a lot of 'homework hours', to which advice is almost akin to 'teaching everything', then this is actually a very fine piece of work and one that would get good scores from any IT class. If the developer is an adult looking to prove something to the industry and to earn real money from paying customers and that they consider this kind of product to be a 'finished and saleable product' then I'd be more inclined to encourage everyone to guard their wallets and baton down the hatches for the safety and security of the wider industry, because, while this person might make for a great children's picture book writer, they have absolutely no inherent ability at understanding computer game design nor any inherent desire to provide anything other than an exposition of their knowledge of ancient greek lore.
But don't worry, I shan't be asking for a refund, charity is exactly how I viewed spending this money when I purchased the game. If you are reading this and you are a teenager, please enjoy a trip to the cinema on me. If you are an adult, please put it towards buying a game that is more professionally made so you can ask yourself 'what elements of this game do I like and how best can I imitate them', because for all intents and purposes the person who made this game appears to have zero appreciation for even the most basic player comforts & most of the comforts that have made it into the game are there because someone else asked them to be there…
Will probably play it again at some point now I have it, though the game does genuinely cause headaches if you play it for too long, so maybe I wont thinking about it, I dunno. If I'm so bored that it's either this or a free flash game then it can compete with its own kind for my attention at that point.
Which is a huge shame really, if the developer had gone all-in on making a short children's mostly factual non-edgy game in a similar way then s/he could have had an actual product on their hands, children can be extremely forgiving of the most shit-awful design features. Check out Scooby Doo: The Jinx at the Sphinx (2001), that's the market you should have gone for.