The biggest issue I don't see mentioned in other reviews is how SLOW the game is. There are numerous unskippable animations for every turn, so it takes forever to do anything. I didn't see any way to turn these off. The game wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so long. As has been said, the in-game tutorial is extremely obtuse (there's a nice summary in the forums). I'm not sure if it even covers everything, though I stopped halfway through.

On my first (and probably only) run, I started with all fire by accident (didn't understand the interface). The game screen is overwhelming because there are no explanations for anything while you're playing. I managed to get a few pages in and started understanding things. Fire turned out to be a good choice because there are several fire spells that restore your Sanity. My run ended abruptly when one of the pages started out with skull burn-marks on every mana slot - which turned out to remove one sanity each if you didn't remove them before ending the turn. Again, there was no indication that this would happen. But it did spare me the hour or two (at least) trying to go through this game.

The biggest issue I don't see mentioned in other reviews is how SLOW the game is. There are numerous unskippable animations for every turn, so it takes forever to do anything. I didn't see any way to turn these off. The game wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take so long. As has been said, the in-game tutorial is extremely obtuse (there's a nice summary in the forums). I'm not sure if it even covers everything, though I stopped halfway through. On my first (and probably only) run, I started with all fire by accident (didn't understand the interface). The game screen is overwhelming because there are no explanations for anything while you're playing. I managed to get a few pages in and started understanding things. Fire turned out to be a good choice because there are several fire spells that restore your Sanity. My run ended abruptly when one of the pages started out with skull burn-marks on every mana slot - which turned out to remove one sanity each if you didn't remove them before ending the turn. Again, there was no indication that this would happen. But it did spare me the hour or two (at least) trying to go through this game.