What is with games that hold so much promise, then let you down so hard? This is another game I have to say did this to me. Last year I saw the demo out there while looking for things to make variety in the 100 Days of gaming. The restrictions the development team insisted on for anyone showing it off gave me second thoughts about playing it for everyone and in fact, I chose to do other games. This should have been a warning to me. But this year the full release came out, and the excitement of a good Lovecraft RPG got the better of me and I picked it up as my "this is for me" birthday gift. Well, let's just say I didn't pick a good one this year.
Before you start the game, you will be treated to an opening video which will explain the scenario this game will put you in. Specifically, you are one of the survivors of "The Black Day," a day in which the city of Arkham disappeared from the earth. Rather it now resides in a limbo space where ancient beings reside as gods, and your unnatural prison. So, cut away from the rest of the world, what will you do?
Once the game makes it's case, it brings you to the main menu where you will have the choice of loading a game, starting a new game, or starting with one of the 16 pre-made characters (one for each class and gender). And while using those characters is a nice shortcut available to get right into the game, it cheats you out of one of it's most fun features in making your own. Starting with choosing to be a man or a woman you will make choices about things like your age, belief system, and archetype, all of which will effect how your game will play. Most of these choices will do so by deciding the base stats your character will have. The exception to this is gender as this will strictly effect social interactions in the game itself, but all of it will give you an idea of the type of character you are going to play with. And then it comes time to fine tune as you are given a handful of points to adjust your traits and skills with. It will even go so far as to highlight the kind of rolls each is effected by so you can have a "general" idea of how you want to place your last points before you start playing.
When you do start, you are told about the Dismal Man who came to see you weeks before telling you to find him after basically the apocalypse occurs... and while you rest one night on a dirty mattress in the attic of the town bar, the Dismal Man returns in a dream, beckoning you to follow to the gates of Miskatonic University and beginning you on the main adventure to find him like he asked so long ago. Unfortunately, while this goal remains, the game is going to choose to throw things at you in rapid fire rather then let you digest your next step in any given quest you are looking at, leaving the whole thing a confusing mess and with no real solid direction on where to go. Rather you have a plethora of choices you can look into and if you are lucky they will pan out with viable solutions for your build. No do not get me wrong here. By design there should be an option for your build and the skills/attributes you can effectively follow... but this is sadly a place where the game seems to break down sometimes. If this happens, you are in for a world of hurt.
In my case, I chose to play a member of the "secret society" (or cultist) who knew psychology and medicine, but found many times where the game didn't offer me any way out of a situation besides "combat" despite what walkthroughs say should have been there. (Being as lost as I was, I researched playthroughs after giving it it's 8 hours due to settle in and get good only to discover this.) And that combat REALLY shows the weakness of this game.
Now I understand this is a Lovecraft horror, and as such combat should be brutal and tough. In fact most of it should probably be avoided, and in most cases running should be the most viable option. And this the game demonstrates this very well. Your characters will be placed with your opponents in a hexagon playfield where each character will take a turn each round to move around attack, and use spells to get the better of the other side. I did not say "defeat" because killing everyone on the other side is not needed for victory. In essence once enough damage has been done, you will be offered the choice to flee and get the experience and rewards if you can find a way to the "exit" tiles. And if you can reach exits before that point, you can flee like most RPGs. However, even these can have consequences which will make your game easier or harder. For an example, if you fight anyone in the mob, you will bring about their wrath even if you flee, making ANY mobster start combat with you on site from that moment on. If you are not a combat based character this will render the game basically unwinnable and might prove obnoxiously hard even if you go the combat route.
But even before that, the combat itself proves issues just with inconsistency an obnoxious oversites once you are in the deep of it. You will find when your characters get their turns, they will have AP points determining how much action they can do, which should be fine and in fact a great balance mechanic so you can't overpower the enemies with stupidly powerful weapons. But the problem is you can waste points by mistake. For example, you can loot bodies for an AP point mid-battle, but you can attempt to do so more then once, wasting those precious points. And while you could say "dont do that" it becomes a lot harder when you can do it by mistake because you wanted to move onto the spot with that body which the game also lets you do. It just arbitrarily decides which you are doing. And that "this could be multiple choices so I will decide what you wanted to do for you" frankly gets beyond frustrating between wasted time doing something again as well as potentially not being able to do what you could have because the game decided for you what you planned on doing.
And it's not like this game lets you go back easily either, as the game only allows saves to happen at checkpoints it makes and when you quit. You can not "save often" to mitigate when the game breaks to see if maybe you should have had something else happen, forcing it's issues in your face whether you like it or not. And if you planned on going the round-a-bout way and using the "exit save" this way, don't bother. It goes away too.
Bugs: This game shows itself to be a mess on a code level more often then not, which is a damn shame as between this and the lack of explanation for many mechanics the game relies on, it stops itself cold from being what could have been a smart little title!
- Crashes: Yes this game can crash arbitrarily. It happened only once to me in my attempt to play, but it's actually a very common complaint.
- Inconsistent control mechanics: What you are able to do is not always going to be decided by your actions. As mentioned in the main review, it is entirely possible your intent will be replaced with something else "layered" in the same spot of the screen. But we can also expand that to menus you can pop up when they shouldn't. Basically if two things you can click are in the same place, it's a buggy tossup which you will be able to actually use.
- Unresponsive Controls: Yep, among this game's issues is straight up the controls refusing to work. Most of the time, this occurred around the hotkeys to access things like the map or character information, but sometimes the mouse clicks to close said panels would also refuse to work despite being a mouse based game.
- Text boxes don't clear: The title says it all. This game will use text boxes to explain in detail what you are investigating, but sometimes, those boxes refuse to go away. This can also happen with the title of what menu you are clicking on so be ready to see "options" stay on the screen until you change locations and other stupid crap.
- Wait what?: I don't even know what to call this one, but there have been multiple times where a character wanted to talk to me about something we had moved on from 20 minutes prior. I don't mean they were reminded of something either. For example the Outsider tries to warn you about a haunted hotel room you are in... and for me he did... about 20 minutes or so after we left the hotel and were out on the Arkham streets despite talking like we were in the room right then and there.
Score:
4/10
System Requirements:
- Intel i3
- 2 GB RAM
- NVidia 450 GTS/AMD Radeon HD 5750
- Windows 7 (64 Bit)
- 4 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 7 (2700) 3.2 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 1660 (6GB VRAM)
- Windows 10 (64 Bit)
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