I finished last night. I really enjoyed it. It’s one of the most memorable games I’ve played.
Things I liked:
Character depth, the game world, playing a detective, the RPG mechanics, writing/voice-acting, ability to be super creative in how I played my character.
Things I struggled with at times:
Text density, the political development of my character.
Highly recommended if you like adventure/RPG/detective types of things.
Which route did you end up going?
It isn’t dire.
Killing the heavy accent is actually better in some ways.
Or I just might be tone deaf /shrug
He sounds much closer to his fence sister now.
I like the original Cuno, but the new voice brings it more in line with the rest of the characters.
It said I was a communist at one point, then an ultraliberal. I ended up communist of some sort I think, but it didn’t resonate with me so I wasn’t too focused on it by the end.
There are points where the game interjects and tells you, “You’re a Sorry Cop” or “You’re an ultraliberal”, etc. While I totally got why they were bringing up the personality elements, I was somewhat confused when they were bringing up the political aspects of my personality.
Because those are based on your convo choices too. They’re very obvious too, and easy to avoid being too much of a communist or too liberal. I ended up being a moralist which was fine for me.
From what I can recall I think this occurs when you reach certain milestones in alignment stats. You can view this stuff in the menu on the right side.
Thanks. Yes, I could understand the mechanic and how it was working. The part that didn’t connect with me was the political and to a certain degree the political historical presentation. I felt like there were pockets of the game that got quite text heavy in ways that didn’t feel central to the current story, and so I didn’t fully engage in those spots. It just didn’t feel inviting and compelling.
And while many of the choices were clearly of one political slant or another, some were less clear (to me, especially with a political filter turned off in my head). So when I got labeled as a communist or an ultra-liberal, I kind of shrugged and wondered what choices I must have made to end up that way.
I should add that it didn’t bother me at all that I was labeled a communist. I wasn’t like, “What the heck! This game is calling me a communist!” It was more, “Hmm. Interesting. I wonder what choices I’ve made within the context of the game that’s led me down that path.”
Towards the end of the game things were clearer, but by that point I disengaged to a degree from caring much about my character’s politics.
Yeah, the game basically forces you to pick a side between capitalist, communist, fascist, or centrist.
Another element of this that I found a bit … disjoint, is that a lot of the choices I made were done to ingratiate my character with the person they were talking with. Take the conversations with the Union boss, for example. I know what his political views must be, so as a detective I found myself feeding him answers to align with his political views, not mine. I did that quite a bit, so it felt fragmented and kind of clunky when my psyche would come back to me and say, “Dude, you’re a (some political party).” My first reaction was, “Well, I was pretending to be one, yes.”
I mean, you could “Opt Out” as an option, so that’s what I ended up doing quite a bit, but that element of the game just didn’t give me as much pleasure as everything else.
The new voice is…fine. I don’t have a problem with it in and of itself, but the old voice really outlines the character as another kind of foil to the “hero” apart from Kim, and I mean he’s a teenager on amphetamines using bravado to cover up for his own insecurities and inadequacies, and goddammit that old voice really reflected that whereas the new one just sounds kinda sullen, which for a different teenager would be a reasonable and even realistic choice, but Cuno wants to be a force of nature, which the old voice communicated so much better.
You got all that from an accent shift?
His sister is also part of the encounter, and she sounds the exact same. Again though I am day one so I don’t know if they show up later / become more important other than nasty cursing kids.
Late to the party here, so forgive my ignorant questions:
I bought this from Steam months ago and just barely started playing. I started playing it while out of town, on the laptop I downloaded it on, and decided the touchpad and nubbin (Thinpad X1 Carbon) was a very awkward way to control it and I needed a mouse, so I put it off for later.
It is now later, and I see all the talk about an update. Do I need to purchase this on Steam or if I already have it installed, can I just update to it?
You don’t need to buy anything if you already owned it on Steam. Though I can’t tell you offhand for certain whether it is listed as a separate entry in your library (some games do that but I think that is not the case here).
It looks like the same entry in the library, but what I’m not sure about is save game compatibility. @JeffL are you thinking of starting over or loading up your existing save?
EDIT:
Finished it this morning. Absolute masterwork. It’s the best kind of detective story and role-playing game all rolled into one. I immediately want to go back and do it better - I failed (or at least I feel like I failed) a lot of the critical checks, and so I feel like there are a lot of pieces still missing, even though everything got “solved”. I don’t want to savescum it just to see what I missed, but I want to go through it again, now that I know how the systems work a little better (I didn’t understand how white checks worked until halfway through Day 3, for example) and have a clearer understanding of the critical path.
I want more stuff in this world.
Congrats! I finished 3 weeks ago and I’m still thinking about it. Really, a brilliant game.
Finished it yesterday. Final Cut.
And I agree. This is one of the greats, and the writing is excellent. This is the true Planescape: Torment spiritual successor we needed.
So random thoughs:
I like the 4 stats divided between two dozen skills which manifest as voices in your head. And they are in competition, and sometimes totally unreliable, if not outright counter-productive.
The dice system is clever. There are passive flat checks and hard skill checks (which are highlighted) that roll 2D6 + skill level, but snake eyes always fails and boxcars always succeeds so you can still succeed with a skill level of 1 against a skill check of 20 or fail with a skill level of 10 against a skill check of 6, but failure isn’t always a dead stop. A lot of times you fail forward and something interesting still happens. In addition a lot of times you get pluses (and minuses) to skill checks based on your characters knowledge, things they discover, how they interact with characters in the world, etc.
The Thought Cabinet is like a perk/special trait section all rolled into one that is totally its own unique thing entirely. It can give your character an ideology. There are so many that are super situational, based on actions, skills, or your responses over the course of the game. It’s amazing.
The world itself, just like Planescape, is made foreign and strange. Like in cyberpunk fiction there are powerful corporations with military-grade security forces but the vocabulary here is totally different, and likewise there only seems to be working class in a post-war setting where recontruction, never happened and things were left as is for 40 something years replete with an existential military bureaucracy of some sort that governs from afar. Might as well be on Mars.
Time. Time progresses through dialoge and is frozen outside of it. I love time constrants, time pressue, and the general passage of time. The implementation here is very good. The game takes place over one week but I wouldn’t worry at all about running out of time since you literally have to talk to people to progress time, and talking to people usually reveals and/or progresses quests, and there is plenty of it. Unless I suppose you go to the book store and read all the books (which jumps time forward quite a bit even on re-reads unlike old dialogue)
And lastly, I am a big proponent of RPGs set in a single location. And this one delivers. The game is super localized. You’ll visit the same locations several times and there might be something new.
I really adored the world building. I like how there’s a progression, from “Oh, is this some kind of alternate history?” to “No, this is an altogether alternate Earth,” to “Oh holy shit, this is something else completely.” So inventive.
Yeah, I loved how large the game feels despite being so small geographically. There were some lines near the beginning that made me so sure the game would eventually go to Jamrock as a second location, but I’m glad they kept it small. I loved how they periodically reveal new doors and rooms so that there’s still a sense of discovery in such a small area.