See this is why I still haven’t made it to Aug City. There are so many of those side quests. There are a few interesting characters in the sewers…
Always take the human-only metro cars.
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One funny aspect of the game’s heavy handed politics is that every gun in the small arsenal I’m carrying actually feels like a liability, like the last thing I need is to actually fire one of these
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I’m almost certain it wasn’t scoped this way but the lack of plot momentum and the massively padded side quests and the art budget combine to create something like “abortive cyber-scion tries to reconcile himself to life after dreams of the future have evaporated and resolves to help out the overly verbose citizens of an otherwise charming eastern european town in the throes of apartheid.”
which is actually a great premise for a big-budget game!
if it weren’t supposed to be deus ex it would feel like someone accidentally mixed the scripts of three different BBC miniseries together and after doing a 30-minute continuity edit they were like, fuck it, olivia colman can carry all of these characters anyway
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Adam Jensen is…
Lillehäcker
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the game is 90 percent side errands and every one was carefully engineered to make you take the long loading screen train across town at least once if not more. then the train goes down and it’s a long loading screen of jensen walking down a subway tunnel. I didn’t think that game or that tunnel was ever going to end
you make it sound better than it actually is again, but Prague really is a wonderful place to explore after detroit et al in DX:HR. I remember spending some time watching at cars and shops (that sonic-game-nod in that electronics store still rocks, even if jensen never asked for it).
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Adam Jensen in
Playscape: Torment
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The best part of this game is the stand-alone story where you infiltrate a prison and can actually affect how things work out as it unfolds.
honestly this is diverting enough after two evenings that I’m relatively certain I’ll finish it. It’s certainly worse than Dragonfall at writing and worse than Witcher at world design and worse than Dishonoured at action but for all its visibly incompetent machinations it has pretty good hangoutitude in spite of itself and it doesn’t ever feel like it’s wasting my time the way that Firaxis’ 2016 releases did; it may not amount to anything, but that’s more its problem than mine.
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It also asks less of you than Prey, is less cynical than Bioware’s post-2013 work, and is less relentlessly performative than Uncharted 4. It is, truthfully, much more appealing than a lot of single player games I’ve passed on from the past couple years, even though it is not really successful.
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sometimes a man
well, sometimes a man
well he feels like he needs a big bowl of porridge
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my wife, who is eastern european by birth and who grew up in Montreal where the game was developed, was pretty not-amused-amused that the game elected to have you get fucked up by an incompetent local doctor as an early plot point, and also swears that the developers got the voice of the crime boss patriarch from a random Greek guy on the street
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Going into it with low expectations certainly helps. I can get behind an immersive sim with chill vibes; the rainy, autumnal set dressing works hand-in-hand with the low-key depressive mood of the game.
I think the aug ghetto is the standout level; extremely dense in a way allowed by technology, its questlines come closest to mirroring the layered nature of the environment as you uncover successive truths about this society, peeling it as an onion. The miniature police station even feels like a callback to the potential of the Deus Ex: Invisible War cube levels with their micro-faction bases living elbow-to-elbow.
Speaking of chill immersive sims, I think at that point we’re getting close to modern first-person adventure games. Observer and Firewatch come to mind, as does Fullbright, but they don’t fully engage me; I prefer having some system of conflict to push against and break the pace. For example, the systems of horror in Observer didn’t have enough game behind them to have any real teeth.
Wow, I’ve almost expunged the ‘mystery’ of Jensen’s ‘mystery parts’. I think that was the sort of expanded media universe tie-in thread like the Mass Effect 3 Kai Leng plot that can’t even bother to appear to be graceful.
yeah, I feel that. I still think the single best part of Observer was how much interactivity they managed to fit into the hotel setting, even though the set of available verbs was, as you say, so obviously limited as to be totally nonthreatening
there’s a range of “too straightforward” and “not straightforward enough” that almost all first-person adventure games in between until dawn at one end and firewatch/observer at the other end fit into, and I’m so sensitive to it that I’m very willing to overlook any other flaws of games that avoid it
also, I like that it’s very easy to spec yourself to totally trivialize the stealth and just make yourself invisible with some eneloop-tier batteries. I am so sick of stealth unless it’s like hitman-style.
Aside from lazy stereotypes, the game evinces no evidence that the devs ever visited Prague, nor even looked at landmarks on Google image search really. There’s more Prague influence in Bloodborne than in this game. Like the Prague in this game is still probably the best Deus Ex setting they’ve had, but when I imagine a potential jumble of cyberpunk, socialist architecture and Yharnam it still feels like a missed opportunity.
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Wait, what is the claim here? That “chill + hangoutable immersive sim” and “firstperson adventure game” converge in the middle of some sort of spectrum?
That’s where I was led when thinking about this last night.
I define an immersive sim as adhering to most of the following elements:
- First-person, very often with body simulation
- Heavily detailed environment, information presented through a mix of environmental storytelling, diegetic sources (notes, emails, audiologs).
- Multi-layered systems to approach hostiles: stealth and multiple combat types, and often dialogue systems
- Progression systems - skill points, inventory gadgets
I think this encompasses the games we’d put in the subgenre: Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis, Bioshock, Dishonored.
First-person adventure games (and here I’m thinking of Gone Home and Tacoma (heavily shaped by prior experience in immersive sims), Firewatch, Observer, and the horror side like Amnesia, Soma, and Alien: Isolation) often use the same approach to player physicality and narrative through environment, but don’t use the progression systems. The horror games tend to preserve some of the combat options but emphasize stealth as it supports their aesthetic, and build systems for futile combat.
Immersive sims are built with a maximalist philosophy, so the range of potential player experiences are much greater than the focused adventure games. But I think the bulk of the player experience – poking around dense environments, absorbing information across varied channels – is broadly similar.
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Yeah, this makes sense to me.
Firewatch even has a very light progression system. Further corroborating the existence of such a spectrum.