That's a shame. The concept always struck me as really cool. Of course, Spiderweb is pretty consistent about having cool ideas, but I've played a couple of their demos and always wound up deciding not to buy. They ought to be fun, and I can tell that the writers put a lot of thought into making interesting plots, but they're hard for me to get into -- the interfaces drive me nuts, and the graphics and layout are just ugly. They're like Harry Turtledove or Larry Niven, who both have awesome ideas, but whose writing I just find unreadable.

I feel bad saying that; looking over the Geneforge series, they've made progress in terms of graphics and layout, and I'm led to believe that they're looking for graphics artists, but they've made a few artistic decisions that just don't work, chief among them the use of small sprites, and tiled maps. Compare them to the original Fallout. Its artwork was not especially better (except for the character portraits), but it had larger sprites that showed more detail, the maps were hand-drawn, and they adopted a very striking visual style.
 

Yeah, I downloaded the demo, played for a while, and got about what I expected -- a very interesting idea with some thoughtful plot and exposition, coupled with a nearly unplayable interface. OK, there are a lot of people who are comfortable with roguelike interfaces (press a letter key to select an action, then another letter key to select the object or option...) but I can't stand them.