The world
It starts in Aeven
Aeven is the town everybody wakes up in. A crossroads, a church, a row of shops, a lake at the edge of it and a woodcutter out past the gate with a crow problem. It was drawn by hand for this game, which is why the benches are where they are.
Walk to the edge of it and you are on the next map, then the one after that: farm country, forest, coast road, caves, and the towns and villages of the old world brought across one at a time. Nobody is going to tell you which way to go.
The streets are not empty either. Guards, merchants, milkmen and bartenders stand where they always stood, and crows and worse things wander the open ground between towns.
A day that turns
Roughly an hour and a half of it, and everybody in the world is on the same clock.
Dawn comes up cold, midday flattens the shadows, and by dusk the light has gone long and gold across the paving. Then the street lamps come on, one pool at a time, and the road out of town gets a good deal less friendly.
Indoors is indoors. Walk into a shop at noon and it is not lit like the square outside it. Everything in the street throws a shadow, including you, including whatever you are wearing and whatever you are holding.
Weather you can stand in
Rain over one town while the next one along stays dry.
Calm, bright sun, wind, rain, and a proper thunderstorm. It rolls in and out on its own and it is decided for the map rather than for you, so two people standing in the same street will always agree that it is raining.
In a storm the light drops and the whole town goes grey under it. The flash comes first and the thunder arrives after it, and how long you wait in between is how far away it was.
The lake is not a wall
Wade in and you swim.
Water in the original stopped you dead. Here you can walk into it, and you keep going: head above the surface, hands treading, at a slower pace than the path you left. Swim across Aeven's lake instead of going round it.
What you cannot do is fight from the water. There is no swing, no spell and no sitting down out there, because none of it has a version with your shoulders under the surface. Get back on the bank first.
Bringing characters to life
Nobody in the street stands like a statue.
Everybody breathes. Stand still and your character's chest rises and falls, slowly, every few seconds. Nobody breathes in step with the person beside them, so a crowd in the square looks like a crowd and not a row of statues.
A fight takes it out of you. Throw half a dozen blows in a row and stop, and you stand there out of breath for a few seconds, chest heaving, before you settle. Nobody picks it from a menu: it is what the fight did to you, and everybody watching sees it.
Every part moves on its own. A dance or a wave is not a flip-book of frames. The head, the arm and the body are separate pieces, each on its own rhythm, so a wave swings from the shoulder, a dance nods along with it, and the arm passes behind the head the way an arm would.
Where to go next
Quests and dungeons
Somebody in town needs something doing, and there is a floor under the chapel.
Other people
Parties, guilds, and four ways to talk to the world.
Classes and skills
What you can become once you have picked something up.