It looks deep on the surface but, as is often the case, it's smoke and mirrors. You can piss people off beyond recall if you decide to be a total idiot – hey, that might be your play style – but otherwise you can explore every branch of a dialogue tree with little repercussion, meaning that what you say rarely matters. If you speak to the right people or stash points in the right skill, you can reopen a white check, but the payoff isn't always worthwhile so I had a bunch left over by the time the game ended. There are white checks that can be retried and red checks that cannot. Sure, somehow I managed to pull off some checks with a sub-20 per cent chance of success, but I still didn't feel like I achieved anything. There's only so much excitement I can squeeze from a skill check-based system, where the amount of points you have in a certain attribute will make the simulated dice roll more favourable. Twenty years ago I might have thought this was a neat focus, but Planescape: Torment, clearly a huge influence here, has already done it and these days I tend to enjoy having to do more in games than mouse 1 all the things.
At times I found myself clock watching for how much longer a conversation might take. That's another problem – there is just so much dialogue. Union boss Evrart Claire, the big cheese in Martinaise That's pretty weird straight off the bat, but your various mental faculties interjecting during conversations and observations is a central theme of the game and they form a colourful cast of secondary characters as things progress. You do, however, because there's a game to be played. Once you have selected or created a "play style" of sorts from a character sheet with biases in intellect, psyche or physique, you begin your adventure bathed in the soggy, stinking darkness of the mother of all hangovers, splayed out on the floor of a trashed hotel room with your ancient reptilian brain – a terrifying disembodied cockney growl – and limbic system – a simpering, snake-tongued spectre – whispering riddles in your ear, urging you not to get up. Motorics: Hand/eye Coordination, Perception, Reaction Speed, Savoir Faire, Interfacing, Composure Physique: Endurance, Pain Threshold, Physical Instrument, Electro-chemistry, Shivers, Half Light Psyche: Volition, Inland Empire, Empathy, Authority, Esprit de Corps, Suggestion Intellect: Logic, Encyclopedia, Rhetoric, Drama, Conceptualization, Visual Calculus
You can temporarily raise them through drug and alcohol usage, but with a penalty to your health and morale. What's left of your mind will be bombarded by checks testing these areas during conversations and interactions.
0 kommentar(er)
