Month: August 2018

At this point I think we can all basically agree that every game that Wadjet Eye releases is going to be worth buying right away. This is Dave Gilbert’s first game as lead designer since Blackwell Epiphany. There is overlap with the Blackwell universe, but it is definitely a departure from those games.

Possibly taking a lead from Telltale, there seems to be a more deliberate attempt to make your choices affect the story. This manifests itself first in that you choose one of three origin stories for your player character. Then, throughout the game, each chapter ends with you deciding the fate of an adversary. The consequences of your decisions don’t really ripple throughout the game. They mostly affect the end-game sequence. Still, it’s a worthy attempt at adding a little variety to the experience.

The farther an adventure game gets from being a pure puzzle-solving endeavor, the more these types of ludic story-telling tropes become important. For the record, the puzzles of Unavowed are not very puzzley at all. In most cases, the path is pretty clear and, if there is any doubt, just talk to everyone, including your squad-mates. The game is mostly a matter of understanding the abilities of your friends and using them appropriately.

But all this is moot if you are just willing to sit back, click away, and let the story develop. There’s enough good story-telling and pretty visuals there to make it worth your while. However, I don’t think all the effort that went into creating branching narratives will really justify multiple plays. At least not for me. I think I’m fine with just turning on the commentary and racing through a second go-around. You know how much I love hearing about color theory and how voice actors are the salt of the Earth.

I think with this I have finally played through all of the original Infinity Engine RPG games. Icewind Dale I & II are still my favorites of the bunch. Those were about building up characters and skillfully fighting though areas. Torment is all about story, story, story. Normally that’s a good thing, but when that story is told via an endless scroll of text and dialogue trees is gets really tedious. I may have been able to deal with all the text with a more adventure game style interface where you get animations of who’s speaking and some visual cues as to their emotions. Why can’t dialogue be fun or gamified somehow? Instead I sat in a daze as thousands of lines of text flew by waiting to hit the 1 key until I was out of options.

I guess the story is unique. It’s not your standard “defeat the evil creature” narrative. You must find out about your forgotten past lives and solve the mystery of your identity… eventually, by defeating the, um, evil creature.

Your character is immortal and can’t be killed. Instead you are respawned every time you die without consequence. I’m not complaining too much. I don’t long for the good old days when games were hard to beat, but there has to be some motivation for improving your character and doing well in combat. Eventually, you run out of immortality. In fact, at that point in the game I was in an unwinnable state and wasn’t about to go back to an old save to relive the joys of scrolling through the same text again. I had to revert to a god-mode cheat for that penultimate battle. I don’t know. That just makes a game feel broken to me. I was able to kill the final boss without cheating. So that’s something.