Geneforge 2: Infestation read the standard CRPG manual, then set it on fire

Here we go again. Another remake of a decades-old CRPG that’s obviously either unable or unwilling to escape the past. There’s the party character portraits running down one side of the screen. There’s the minimap in the opposite corner. There’s the hotbar along the bottom. There’s the squareish area between, filled with tiny pre-rendered sprites just begging to be clicked. 

I assumed I knew exactly how Geneforge 2 was going to play. I’d work my way through a slightly awkward character creator and then stumble on a party’s worth of adventurous souls within about an hour, and we’d go and RPG our way across a legally distinct fantasy land until I either found the cackling madman behind whatever god/world/region-ending threat the game had cooked up or I got so lost working my way through sidequests spun off from other sidequests I forgot where I’d left the next main plot thread and gave up.