Overall, a great episode.
The best part about opening Pandora's box and the fight scene was that they were both at the end, so that you could skip them without missing any of the adventure play. I stopped playing when I got to the Pandora's box part and watched the rest on Let's Play Videos. As episode 5 approaches, I may decide to play them, but, for the moment, I am finished playing this episode.
I know that many others have commented on the Pandora's Box sequence, but I want to weigh in on why I didn't like it. The problem for me was not the game mechanism, but the fact that no understanding whatsoever of the symbols was required to complete the puzzle. In fact, you're not manipulating the symbols at all, but merely assembling the four corners of each symbols to form a complete symbol. The actual symbols used were totally irrelevant to anything. You could have used letters of the alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or Chinese ideograms, and the puzzle would have been the same. I think you were trying not to make the puzzle too hard but ended up making it extremely tedious and frustrating instead.
I realize that your intention was to invoke the frustration that Valanice must have been feeling trying to open the box. That brings to mind an old flight simulator that Sierra put out in its early days. In order to invoke in the user the feeling of danger and responsibility that the pilot must face, the program was designed such that, if the user crashed the plane, the program would crash the user's computer and mess up his hard drive. Needless to say, it didn't go over too well.
By contrast, let me give you an example of what I consider to be an excellent puzzle involving symbols. It occurs in the game King's Quest III Plus: An Heir Raising Tale by
Crystal Shard Games. I'm not giving this example to plug the game, even though I was listed in the credits as a beta tester. I'm doing so because I really like this puzzle. In this game, in order to make the spells, you actually have to decode the symbols in the spell book, and in order to decode the symbols, you have to find two separate documents which function as a sort of Rosetta Stone. I discuss this in this thread:
http://www.agdinteractive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=15412If you had used symbols that the user had to actually decode and understand, then you could have kept the same mechanism of the spinning circles, but had complete symbols on the spinning wheels instead of fragments, and the puzzle would have been interesting rather than merely tedious and frustrating. The symbols could have represented, for example, numbers and directions such as left and right, and it could have been like opening a combination lock.
However, the fight scene that came later looked more interesting, so, as I've said, as episode 5 approaches, I may try to complete Pandora's box in order to get to the fight scene.