In a word, glitchy.
While the game itself is decent, your save system is glitchy enough to be considered broken. There are two major bugs that I ran across by using save/load.
1) Exploration of the final 2 columns on the map always reverts to a state where they show as never having been explored.
2) Reloading the game results in the game proceeding from the plot point at which you stopped rather than the one where the game was actually saved at. Some explanation is needed to clarify this.
As best I can tell, saving of monster data occurs whenever quest-related enemies are killed. This means that whenever you kill a quest enemy, if you revert to a save before this enemy was encountered, it *WILL NOT RESPAWN* and the game treats it as having already been killed. For instance:
I completed the quest to destroy the three death gates north of the central city, returned for the reward and thus started the quest to eliminate the army at the north gate. In order to give myself another chance at a riddle, I reloaded the game, forgetting that my last save had occurred before the three death gates were destroyed.
My stats, gold, and equipment all reverted to that point. The scout NPC told me that my quest was to destroy the three death gates. However, I was unable to claim the quest reward, even though the gates were "destroyed" from never having spawned. The reason for this? There was an army at the north gate that the game expected me to destroy--the plot point AFTER the gates. Once this was completed, the game proceeded as normal from the "army" plot point.
Story progress saved, ALL character progress lost. Harmless, unless you count the fact that you can and will lose quest rewards this way. (Shadowslayer equipment, I'm looking at you.)
Nice effort, but it's badly in need of fixing.