Kelson Reviews Stuff

The Greek Theatre (concert venue review)

2026-09-07T02:31:01Z

★★★★★

I’ve seen a half-dozen concerts at the Greek Theatre over the past 20 or so years, most recently last week. Every time the sound balance has been perfect, no matter what type of act is playing. Vocals, orchestras, electric guitars, all sound perfectly clear. Even the “obstructed view” seats way off to the side are still pretty good.

The scenery is beautiful. It’s outdoors, surrounded by the hills and trees of Griffith Park above Los Angeles. Depending on the season, it might already be dark by the time an event starts, or it might still be light, slowly darkening through twilight into the evening. I’ve been there when it’s cold enough to need jackets, and when it’s warm enough to wear shorts. At least twice I’ve watched the moon rise over the hills during the concert.

Now that they’re using the Ticketmaster app for scanning tickets, you need network access just to get in. T-Mobile has absolutely zero coverage. Fortunately the venue offers free Wi-Fi.

Parking is Terrible

For last week’s concert I thought I could allow 20-30 minutes like we used to, but even with that allowance we were 15-20 minutes late for the concert.

There’s basically one road into the hills, and they do stack parking on the lawn uphill from the venue. I can only imagine what the people who own the expensive houses along the same road think of the traffic on concert nights.

This time, the line of cars was backed up all the way out of the hills and several blocks into the nearby suburbs. Once we crossed into the hills, we saw people walking along the road. Whether they’d taken rideshares, taxis or buses and stopped early, or parked somewhere (where?) in town, I don’t know. I just know that they got there faster, walking uphill, than we did in the car…and once they reached the theater, they didn’t have to pass it, park and get back.

There are shuttles. There at least used to be shuttles that picked up at nearby restaurants, and you could get a combo reservation. But as far as I can tell, the shuttles have to use the same road the rest of us do, unless they go all the way around and come in from the back…which probably would be faster, now that I think of it.

More info at The Greek Theatre.

A Month With /e/OS (phone system review)

2026-09-01T05:26:11Z

★★★★☆

/e/OS is an open-source Android fork based on LineageOS. They replace some of the default apps with their own, add microG for compatibility, and offer a set of cloud services (which I haven’t tried yet) to fill in for Google’s sync capabilities. It can run on a lot of Android devices, including Google’s own Pixel phones.

Murena is the retail company that runs the cloud features and sells phones with /e/OS pre-installed. They’re also Fairphone’s only US retailer, which is why it’s running on my Fairphone 4.

Fairphone does offer standard Android for their phones, but for now I’m trying to do as much as possible without returning to a full Google system.

Apps and Google

The App Lounge combines extremely basic access to the Play Store and “Open Source apps”, which I believe is the main F-Droid repository. You can use the Play Store anonymously or log in with a Google account. It’s flaky in that mode (it keeps crashing when I try to look at categories), and it doesn’t display (or let you write) reviews, but it will pick up when you’ve paid for an app on your account.

/e/OS also supports microG (Settings->System->App Compatibility), which fills in for basic Google account features like cloud messaging, Play Store services, license/billing checks, etc. My bank apps, as well as Apple Music, Dropbox, Pokémon Go, etc. are all willing to accept device attestation through microG, at least when I’m signed into Google.

Nothing’s complained about the phone being inauthentic so far, and the only app that hasn’t found billing info is Tasks.org (see below)

In-app purchases don’t work, at least not yet, even with the experimental billing support enabled in microG. This appears to be a known problem. (That’s for apps that use the Google Play system, which is going to be most of them. If something has a connection to its own payment system (like if you have a credit card on your Coffee Bean app), it’ll still work.)

ARCore isn’t included, either. The Fairphone 4 isn’t supported at all by the library, though it might be possible to install it manually some devices. So while Pokémon Go runs, it can’t use its AR features.

Launcher

They’ve made the system look like an iPhone as much as you can on an Android device. That includes the launcher (see below), but also the style in apps like mail, music, etc.

Bliss Launcher looks nice, but it’s not very customizable if you want to be able to launch things fast or catch info at a glance. It shows all your apps in a grid (panning to the right for more space). You can rearrange them, and you can create folders, but it always reflows to fill that grid. That means even if you cluster a few apps together visually, that clustering breaks as soon as you add or remove something earlier in the grid order. Widgets are only available as one long column, visible when you pan to the left. I haven’t found a way to rearrange them other than removing everything and adding them back in the order you want. It also doesn’t offer a way to pause notifications for an app for the rest of the day.

I’m trying Fossify Launcher again. Panning animations are still a little janky, and it can’t pause notifications either, but widgets (mostly) work now. So I can arrange my icons however I want and put weather and a calendar on the home screen.

Default Apps

The old AOSP keyboard is merely OK. I installed Heliboard, which I’d been using on my previous phone for the past 7 or 8 months, and haven’t looked back. (As of 2026, Heliboard doesn’t have built-in support for gestures yet, but it’s possible to extract or add a swipe library.)

The camera app is pretty good. Automatic settings are fine most of the time, and you can manually set focus, exposure, etc. It can shift seamlessly between lenses on devices that support it (like the Pixel 5), and you can switch manually on devices that don’t (like the Fairphone 4).

One nice thing I haven’t seen with other camera apps is that you can add some features to the floating toolbar…like turning location on and off. I don’t always want geolocation enabled, but I also take a lot of photos for iNaturalist and OpenStreetMap, or when hiking on public trails, and I do want location stored with those. Being able to see at a glance whether it’s on or off, and switch with a tap, is super-convenient.

Tasks is a fork of OpenTasks, which I used to use but switched away from because it’s basically been abandoned. I thought, hey, maybe Murena’s actually maintaining their fork! Well, it doesn’t matter because DAVx5 doesn’t sync with it, so I can’t use it with my Nextcloud server.

Mail is forked from K-9 Mail, which I’ve been using on my old phone, and I figured it was simpler to just install the upstream version and restore my settings.

The built-in Bliss Weather widget is only a widget. There’s no app view other than extremely basic settings (like switching temperature units between Celsius and Fahrenheit). And the smallest size you can set it to on a non-default launcher doesn’t show temperature. I tried a few alternate apps before settling on Accuweather, which includes a small launch-screen widget that actually has key information on it.

Location

I mentioned that the Fairphone 4’s location detection is flaky indoors, and I wasn’t sure how much of that was hardware, and how much was that /e/OS can’t (and probably wouldn’t want to) use Google’s location service and Mozilla Location Service has shut down. These are services that map cell towers and stationary WiFi/Bluetooth points to physical locations, supplementing GPS when the satellite signals are too faint or jumbled to get a fix.

Digging further into this, I found that /e/OS now uses BeaconDB for ground-based location. Apparently MLS exported its cell tower location data, but for (understandable) privacy reasons didn’t release the WiFi data. BeaconDB is crowdsourcing cell signal updates and replacement WiFi locations, with a stated goal of finding a way to obfuscate it so it’s still useful for locating, but not a privacy risk. SailfishOS apparently uses it too, and BeaconDB got an NLNet grant last year, so those are a couple of points in its favor. BeaconDB seems to be a bit lacking in data in my area, though, and I’ve been debating whether I should contribute to the map like I do with OpenStreetMap.

Cloud Services

I haven’t gotten around to setting up a Murena Cloud account. They offer email, storage, calendar, notes and tasks, and an office suite. I have email (lots of it), and I have a Nextcloud server with the rest.

Maybe I’ll give their office suite a try. IIRC it’s built on CryptPad, which seemed pretty good last time I tried it (but didn’t quite fit what I was looking for at the time).

App Compatibility

Overall, most of the apps I’ve installed on it work fine. A few exceptions:

Canon Camera Connect will not sign in without Chrome specifically. Webview? Vivaldi? Nope! This isn’t /e/OS’ fault, but I did have to temporarily install Chrome to be able to set it up. It does work once I’m signed in, and I’ve been able to both send location data to the camera’s photos and pull photos from the camera to the phone.

As mentioned above, ARCore isn’t available.

I had some trouble getting a KeePass file to sync back up to Dropbox when I opened it from the Dropbox app. I’ve since opened it from KeePass2Android instead, and marked the file to keep offline in the Dropbox app, and it’s been working seamlessly like it did on my old phone.

Speaking of KeePass, getting apps and websites to auto-fill has been haphazard. I mean, it wasn’t perfect even on mainline Android, but it seems like I’m falling back to manually copying from KeePass more often on this phone than the older one.

I’ve been using the Tasks.org app to sync with Nextcloud. I couldn’t get it to recognize my subscription (needed to unlock arbitrary CalDAV or DAVx5 support), but since the FDroid version is completely unlocked, I just switched to that source. On the plus side, DAVx5 does sync all my calendars, including the ones still on Google, which means I don’t have to install Google’s calendar app to access them.

A Month With the Fairphone 4 (phone review)

2026-09-01T04:46:34Z

★★★½☆

Back in November 2024, we bought a Fairphone 4 as a hedge against the tariffs and trade wars that seemed likely to commence the following year, figuring they’d drive up prices just in time for one of our phones to kick the bucket. The idea of a phone that’s built as sustainably as possible, is user-repairable, and guarantees support for a minimum of 5 years was appealing.

I would have preferred the Fairphone 5, but their only US retail partner, Murena, never sold that model here (though they have since picked up the Fairphone 6 and 6+). From what I could tell the FP4 was comparable to the phones we had, and there was that longer support period. And I was able to confirm that it would work on T-Mobile’s network.

The teenager used it for a while before we bought something more like what he wanted, and earlier this month I pressed it into service replacing my dying Pixel 5.

Murena ships their phones with /e/OS, an Android fork that provides replacements for some of the non-Free Google services. I’ve tried to break out the parts that would apply to other phones running the system in a separate /e/OS review.

It’s also possible to install a regular Android OS. At this writing, Fairphone provides up to Android 15 for the Fairphone 4. I’m trying to do as much as possible on /e/OS without reinstalling.

Hardware

It’s heavier and bulkier than the Pixel 5. I’d chalk that up to actually having a replaceable battery, but the Galaxy S4 also had a replaceable battery back in the day. (OK, it probably had a much smaller capacity, but still…)

The display is decent. The touchscreen is a bit sluggish. The proximity sensor works properly, which means I can actually use phone menus again. (It stopped working on my old phone a while ago.) Sound is fine, though I don’t usually listen to music directly from phone speakers (except hold music, I suppose), so I can’t really say much about the audio quality.

The camera’s actually pretty good when there’s enough light, and high resolution RAW images are almost as sharp as an iPhone. There are two rear lenses, one regular and one wide-angle, and /e/OS’s built-in app doesn’t switch seamlessly as you zoom (which is another thing I miss from the Pixel 5). Low-light images aren’t as good, and it has trouble with dynamic ranges for backlit images. I was able to sort of adjust this shot into being almost what I wanted it to look like.

The fingerprint sensor is built into the power button on the side, which is kind of odd, but seems to work reliably despite the narrow surface. At least with my hand size, it’s well-positioned for my right thumb or left index finger. (Keep in mind you may not want fingerprint unlock depending on your security threat model.)

It does feel a little slower than the Pixel 5, which is annoying, but apparently it either manages its memory better or just has less bloatware on the system, because I haven’t run into issues switching back to PoGo from the camera app after a single photo. (Either that or PoGo uses a lot of memory for the AR features that aren’t supported here!)

Network Compatibility

I mentioned that it works on T-Mobile’s US network. It does. But the T-Life app doesn’t know that, so you have to actually call customer service if you need to activate an eSim. And if you’ve been swapping phones in and out between different lines, it may need escalation to clear it for reactivation.

Location services have more trouble indoors than other phones I’ve used. I’m not sure if that’s the fault of the GPS hardware, or if it’s /e/OS having less access to WiFi mapping since Mozilla shut down their mapping service.

App Compatibility

My bank apps, as well as Apple Music, Dropbox, Pokémon Go etc. are all willing to accept device attestation through /e/OS and microG, at least when I’m signed into Google.

Pokémon Go is playable, with a few drawbacks. The AR features don’t work, which means I can’t take photos of Pokémon in a real environment, but (a) I don’t do that very often and (b) the fallback mode is more convenient anyway. The loss of a location fix indoors is a bigger problem. I don’t want to waste my outdoor time on a Rocket balloon or managing gifts. If I’m not close enough to a window, and it loses GPS access, there’s only so long it’ll wait for a fix before it decides it can’t be sure I’m still in the same area. There are also times it slows to a crawl when I’m doing something as simple as trying to send gifts to other players.

The FairPhone 4 doesn’t support ARCore, and from what I can tell, Pokémon Go uses ARCore for all its augmented reality features now.

Repair and Durability

The back just unclips, and you can just grab the battery and pull it out. (In fact, if you have a physical SIM card, you need to remove the battery to get at the slot.) Internal components are mostly held together with screws or clips. They’re actually made to be serviceable, not made to require a heat gun at exactly the right distance and a suction cup at exactly the right angle and a spudger prying with exactly the right pressure.

I mentioned that the teenager used this phone for a while. During that time he broke the screen. He ordered the replacement part online and installed it himself. Then it fell out of his pocket while he was riding his bike with his friends. One of them ran over it. And it was fine.

Fairphone states that they’re aiming for 5-7 years of support from the phone’s late 2021 release, and “guarantees software support until at least 2028.” I’m not sure yet if I’ll be happy keeping it that long, but I’m glad it’s an option.

The Confidence Game (book review)

2026-08-21T01:34:16Z

Maria Konnikova

★★★★★

An interesting read on how con artists operate, and the psychological traits they manipulate in order to trick people into doing what they want. It’s roughly structured around different phases of a con, from picking a target to running off with the ill-gotten goods. The author illustrates it with a number of real cases over the last century or so, some of them recent enough that she interviewed the victims and (alleged) scammers directly.

Some key takeaways:

Scam victims aren’t stupid. Humans are wired to trust (most of the time), and that’s the only way we get something as complex as modern society. Con artists hijack that trust.
The “dark triad” personality combo (subclinical psychopathy + narcissism + Machiavellianism) is common among con artists. They’re very skilled at picking up on what will motivate someone to do what they want, and don’t care who gets hurt by it.
When they’re not cold-calling or spamming, scammers zero in on who’s likely to be vulnerable to a particular ploy right now. Someone who would normally see a particular con from a mile away, but is off-balance today, maybe distraught over recent misfortune, maybe trying to impress someone new, maybe in a rush for one reason or another. Any number of circumstances that this particular con artist has practiced using as a hook.
Swindlers are also very good at keeping the mark off-balance (like high-pressure sales people, except even less ethical). If they can engage your emotions strongly enough, the logical part of your brain - the part that would spot the red flags - will stay out of the way.
People in general are very good at retroactively justifying things. Unfortunately that includes things like “I’m too savvy to get scammed. If this was a scam, I wouldn’t have gotten involved with it. Since I did get involved with it, it must be legit, so I can ignore those red flags that are popping up now.” We also like to think we’re the exceptions, as in “I’m sure the leopards won’t eat my face!”

One of these days I should go back and finish reading Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman shows up in several chapters with his research on dual-system thinking and decision-making processes.

I also found myself thinking of Stories are Weapons. There’s an overlap between psy-ops and scams in that they both make use of psychological tricks to get the target to fill in the gaps the way you want them to, think that it’s their own idea, and resist evidence to the contrary.

To Each This World (book review)

2026-08-13T03:45:43Z

Julie Czerneda

★★★★★

More like the Species Imperative trilogy or In The Company of Others than Czerneda’s more recent Night’s Edge series, To Each This World is a hard science-fiction story featuring multiple alien biologies, space colonies, polymorphic artificial lifeforms with a sense of humor, quantum-entangled tech-mediated telepathy and disposable avatar bodies for the astronauts who try to negotiate the future of humanity with aliens who think very differently from us.

It takes a little while to get going, but it does. And what could easily have turned into a series of plot tokens – travel to the next colony, convince them to return before the cosmic threat gets them, lather, rinse, repeat – never settles into a pattern. Each world they visit has fared very differently, and has to be handled in a different way.

Spoilers:

Some of the colony worlds are well-established. Another was so inhospitable that only a handful of descendants are eking out a miserable living. One turned out not to have any land so the colonists are still in cryosleep....

More importantly, the viewpoint characters are also deeply involved in trying to figure out what’s really going on. One’s a space pilot, and the other is the Arbiter, whose job negotiating with New Earth’s alien partners has become the job of re-consolidating humanity on one world. Are the Kmeth telling the truth about the threat of a “Divider?” What is it they really want out of their partnership with humanity, and why are they so insistent on bringing all the humans here?

Meanwhile, we catch glimpses of a human explorer on another world, one divided between human-compatible ecosystems and very incompatible systems, with a clearly artificial split that keeps the two apart.

The ending is abrupt, but only because all the pieces have been slowly drifting together such that it’s not clear how they fit until just before the end. 10 pages from the end I was wondering how she was going to resolve it in that much space. Amazingly, it works!

More info at To Each This World.

Canon Camera Connect (app review)

2026-08-11T15:06:57Z

★★★☆☆

You won’t be surprised that this app connects to Canon cameras.

I have a PowerShot SX710HS that I like to take along on hikes and nature walks because it’s still small enough for a wrist strap or pocket, but has an actual zoom lens which makes it much better than a phone for taking photos of birds and other wildlife. As long as I remember to start a location trace before I set foot on the trail, this app will use that trace when I’m done to add location data to the photos I’ve taken. (And that makes it simpler to add them to iNaturalist.)

It used to have a really narrow scope:

Record GPS and attach it to the camera’s photos.
Transfer photos direction to the phone.
Use the phone as a remote control for the camera.

It still does those things, but Canon has added some online services, and now the app requires a cloud login to function. Worse, at least on Android, the login process requires Google Chrome specifically. Not Android WebView, not your default web browser, but Chrome. I actually had to install Chrome on my deGoogled /e/OS phone last week so I could set this up!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that you can still opt out of data collection during setup, which is nice.

I also had to completely wipe my camera’s network settings in order to pair it with that new phone. I’m not sure whether that’s a problem with the app or the camera, but it’s not the first time I’ve had to reset them.

Some cameras connect over WiFi, others over Bluetooth. Mine used to be able to trigger a connection using an NFC tap, but the app doesn’t support that anymore. I also haven’t been able to get the camera and phone talking across a common WiFi network since the previous time I reset the camera’s network config. I used to be able to connect it to my home network or even to a cafe’s WiFi and send locations to the camera or photos to the phone, but since then I’ve only managed to get it to work with the camera as a hotspot.

It’s just slow and clumsy to start the camera’s hotspot, connect the phone to the hotspot, tell the phone to stay connected to the network despite the lack of internet access, launch the app, and tap Connect…especially when compared to the old method of tapping the camera against the phone and waiting a couple of seconds.

At least it still works.

More info at Canon Camera Connect. Available from Android Play Store, Apple App Store.

Eulogy for the Pixel 5 (phone review)

2026-08-11T02:54:00Z

★★★★★

I’m tired of replacing devices that still work fine for my use cases. So I stuck with my Google Pixel 5 for, well, longer than was probably advisable, since Android system updates were discontinued after only 3 years. To give you an idea of how long I’ve had this phone, when I went to the carrier to activate it, we stayed outside, because COVID-19 protocols meant they couldn’t have customers inside the store.

So yeah, I used the Pixel 5 from fall 2020 all the way through summer 2026. It’s a good size for reading, holding in one hand, or putting in my pocket. The display’s bright (but not diagonally polarized like the Galaxy S4), the touchscreen’s responsive, and it still handled (almost) everything I threw at it as late as 2026.

I can’t think of anything that really slowed it down that wasn’t either network latency or an application problem, until toward the end when it started overheating more often. It didn’t start running low on storage until near the end, either.

Camera

The camera’s better than any of the phones I had in the 2010s. It has decent post-processing for low-light and night photos, seamlessly shifts between the regular and wide-angle lenses, and its machine learning is old enough that it doesn’t use today’s “AI” to hallucinate features, or paste in an image of the moon, or transform one bird into another and mess up iNaturalist observations. It might not capture everything in front of the lens, but at least it was capturing only what was in front of the lens. (iNat now has guidelines for flagging generated or misleadingly edited) photos.)

Slowing Down

After around 5 years (still more than Google was willing to support it), it got worse in ~~two~~ a few specific ways:

The battery runs out faster and runs hotter (which occasionally triggers performance throttling).
Some apps need enough memory now that I can’t just switch away and switch back.
Eventually Nextcloud stopped reliably auto-uploading photos, which I assumed was a new bug in the app or a problem with the server…but it’s working correctly on the new phone. So now I think it was another symptom of the themal throttling.
The proximity sensor that locks the screen when you lift the phone to your ear during a call stopped working reliably. It would lock the screen, but it wouldn’t always unlock it, which meant I couldn’t get back to a keypad for menus, or switch to speaker, etc. By the time the battery went, it was affecting almost every single call.

That second one got really annoying when I wanted to combine Pokémon Go, mapping for OpenStreetMap, and collecting observations for iNaturalist. I used to be able to just switch between PoGo, StreetComplete and the camera as I walked around. Sometimes with the Canon camera app or Vespucci (or both!) recording GPS traces in the background. Eventually it got to the point where I’d close everything except PoGo, switch to the camera to take a single photo, then close the camera and switch back…and it was a 50/50 chance whether it would have already unloaded the game in those 3 seconds.

The End

Toward the end of July I noticed that the phone was running even hotter than usual. I didn’t notice that the battery was swelling until last week, when it pushed against the back of the display and a bright line appeared onscreen. I turned it off and hastily pressed another phone into service. Yesterday, after ensuring that everything on the new phone was working properly, I wiped the Pixel 5.

In theory I could buy a replacement battery from iFixit or take it to a repair shop. But 6 years is a long time for a phone, and it wouldn’t fix the RAM problem. I’m not sure at this point what I’d want to use it for anyway. LineageOS still runs on it, but PostmarketOS doesn’t boot.

Or it may just be time to take the battery (still wrapped in phone hardware) to the fire station for proper disposal.

The Prestige (movie review)

2026-08-10T03:47:20Z

★★★★★

I remembered The Prestige was good. I’d forotten just how good a movie it is. By now we’re all used to Christopher Nolan playing with time and narrative structure, and he uses it to great effect here not just for thematic connections, but narrative twists and revelations as the two rival magicians undermine each other on multiple levels. Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are both charismatic enough that you want to cheer them on, and cruel enough that you want them both to lose.

And even when you know Borden’s secret from the beginning, it’s fascinating to watch the misdirections play out.

FairEmail (app review)

2026-08-05T05:24:47Z

★★★★☆

An extremely capable, privacy-respecting, no-frills email app for Android. Works with any email service that supports IMAP/POP and SMTP (including Gmail and Outlook, but not Exchange). Works well with multiple accounts and a unified inbox.

It’s also got cool features like telling you whether it can confirm a message actually came from its purported source (using SPF, DKIM, DMARC). And it can do encrypted messages with OpenPGP or S/MIME, though I haven’t tried it.

The main downside is that it’s cluttered: the folder view, and especially the settings and options. It’s kind of like the old days of Linux applications where you could configure just about everything, but you had to go through 25 pages of settings to find it. Fortunately you don’t have to change settings very often!

I ran it in parallel with K-9 Mail for a while, and ultimately decided to stick with K-9 for my main accounts. If I’d had more use for the additional features in FairEmail, I might have switched. Though I did keep some of my less-used alts on FairEmail. And, when I had to switch phones in a hurry yesterday I seriously considered switching email apps while I was at it, before deciding not to.

More info at FairEmail. Available from Google Play, F-Droid.

Legends of Amberland (game review)

2026-08-03T04:25:05Z

★★★★☆

A fun throwback to the early Might and Magic and Bard’s Tale fantasy games of the 1980s and 1990s. Grid- and turn-based, with old-style pixelated graphics and lots of side quests. Probably most comparable to Might and Magic III in terms of both style and complexity.

It’s not quite as engrossing as I remember those games being. But that could be my own change in perspective. I could be remembering the games through rose-colored glasses, or it could simply be the difference between playing a new cool type of game as a teenager vs. playing an old familiar type of game as a middle-aged adult.

That, and the most recent party-based RPGs I’ve played were Outer Worlds and The Bard’s Tale IV, both of which are incredibly more complex and immersive. (One of the character graphics reminded me of the first player character in BT4, so of course I made her my bard and called her Melody.)

The mainline quest sends you all over the map collecting components and plot coupons. You can explore and do side quests, or you can stick with the main ones. I always like to do every side quest I can find.

One key difference from the older games is that it has a fast travel option. There’s a griffin-based taxi service, and once you rescue the griffin, you get free lifts whenever you want to places you’ve been already, as long as there aren’t any enemies nearby. It’s super convenient, but I found myself relying on it too much after a while. I can understand why there’s a Steam achievement for completing the game without using it!

Character classes and races are more flexible at the start than in the older games, but there’s no progression tree. The spell system is simple: you just get more spells as your characters gain experience. There aren’t separate spheres of magic to learn, or specific skills you can pick up.

It only took about 16 hours’ worth of game play (probably another reason it felt less engrossing than the classics), even doing all the side quests. I’m contemplating going back and replaying it to pick up some of the other achievements, but there are also a couple of sequels I may pick up instead.

More info at Legends of Amberland.