[ozzie]

Oh, yes! I'm definitely a fan! I love it, love it, love it!!
Where to start?

The atmosphere. No single other game I know possesses such a strong atmosphere. Everything coheres so well to create this thick mood and feeling of place, of these desolate and ancient catacombs. The music, the graphics, the voice acting, the environment descriptions, the sound design, everything!

The characters. The deranged knight templars are quite the people to be around! Everyone has his own quirks and some of the insanity isn't quite apparent at the start. Did you know that only three voice actors were responsible for the male voices? I never would've noticed if I didn't read about it! The acting is amazing. You'll dread some characters and their unpredictable behaviour, grow near to some others and be crushed emotionally by one in particular. The twist at the end had me shocked for a while!

The puzzles. Well, except for one puzzle that made little sense in my mind I think the puzzle design is excellent. It ranged from Myst-style tinkering with machineries without the obscurity to some typical inventory combination and to interaction with the environment. Sometimes you also have to piece clues from notes together. There are quite a few optional puzzles that reveal more about the back story, and some alternative solutions.

The story. The story summary may superficially sound like an extended version of the end scenes of the third Indiana Jones movie, but it's certainly a lot more!
You're some kind of futurist grave robber and got a message from a competitor. He's searching for the holy grail and needs your help. He offers to share half of the profits from the sale of the holy grail. So, off you go into some catacombs in North Scotland. At this point the game starts. Yeah, you'll only find out about this back story within the game's manual! A rather poor start, admittedly. Anyway, soon you'll learn that you have to pass three trials before you're able to reach the holy grail.
But the game is about much more, like how the knight templars became so mentally deranged, why they are still living in the catacombs and what relationships they cultivate between each other, all the intrigues and animosity. You'll also meet other grave robbers that attend to the same business like you do. Let's just say, there's a lot of interesting stuff happening that is sometimes even shocking and surprising.



But yes, there are some drawbacks, like:

The interface. It's huge! I know it's because of technical reasons. Azrael's Tear was a demanding game back then and to shrink its otherwise even huger demands the developers limited the world view by expanding the interface to a considerable degree. The game may even stutter occasionally if you run it on a modern machine in DosBox.

Railroading. My biggest problem with Azrael's Tear was that it didn't take into account that I might kill off one of the main characters. The game won't care and barely react if you do. It might very well happen that if you kill somebody off he might reappear later on, happily alive, while his old corpse still lies around where you killed him. Weird!

Sore feet. In the second half, there's a bit too much walking around you have to do to get from place to place. It can drag a bit, to be honest.

I have some smaller quibbles about the occasional glitch and the ugly graphics (to which your eyes will adjust with time), but there's not much more to complain about.

All in all, Azrael's Tear may be hard to get into for some people.
I guess that's okay. I never managed to enjoy interactive fiction and I'll never care much about the Final Fantasy series either, but for me, Azrael's Tear is something quite special and in my view the definitive proof that video games are quite capable to tell good stories in their own way!