As a resource, this book is definitely 10 out of 10. This is a gold mine of inspiration and ideas. However, there are two things that prevent me from giving this masterpiece 5 stars: (1) The fonts are so small. I have no idea how the physical book would look like, but I read mostly in PDF. And wow. It's so hard to read even on a 1080 monitor. I can't imagine this being easy to read on phones and tablets either. (2) So much wasted space. Many of the pages have unused space. Leading me to think; if they made the fonts bigger, the page count would not change at all. The smaller font is definitely not to save ink because most of the pages have this horrendous black side panel. I have no idea why they made this great resource so hard to read.

The only reason I can tolerate them is because the actual content is just that good. I'm just so disappointed by how inconvenient it is to use. If you can tolerate the small font, it's definitely a must-buy.

Edit: Checked out for updates after 4 months release. They removed the secured PDF and improved the bookmarks! This makes it much better. I still don't like the small font and thick gutter. But the bookmarks are a great upgrade. Previously it was a secured PDF with terrible bookmarks. That meant I couldn't edit the bookmarks myself. But now they removed it, and improved the bookmarks! From 3 stars, I would give this 4 stars!

I normally loathe super crunchy systems but I really like the Dark Eye. Using three attributes for skill checks, in combination with quality levels, really helps determine why a character failed. The combat does also feel realistic enough, even though I think it's a bit too long.

According to germans, this game is usually never played as-is. I feel this is the only flaw the game has. It's so crunchy you will never understand it fully unless you play the game enough. It's so crunchy it's almost mandatory to hack the game to remove some of the crunch.

As primarily a solo roleplayer, the crunchiness is to its advantage. It lets me help decide what happens without my arbitrary choice.