2 people found this review helpful
1 person found this review funny
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 74.6 hrs on record (39.0 hrs at review time)
Posted: 25 Jan, 2020 @ 4:56pm
Updated: 25 Jan, 2020 @ 4:57pm

TL;DR This is the best indie game I have played in years and I honestly have no idea why it gets such mixed reviews. It is unique, gripping, atmospheric and well worth your time.

The Good:

The story: very solid, and the ending was immensely satisfying. It is tragic and epic. There are many points during the main story with radically different choices that impact the game world, and your character will act slightly differently depending on whether you choose to embrace innocent citizens or not. There is a lot of replayability, especially with the amount of builds you can make.

Atmosphere: you truly feel as if you are in Victorian England. The developers obviously did their research on everything: the architecture, the manners, the fashion, even the known medical knowledge at the time. Theres a section where you can suggest doing CPR and the nurse questions your competence, which I thought was strange until I realized CPR had not been invented until a few years after the game takes place!

The combat: a lot of people hate on it, but I found the combat entertaining. It certainly is not groundbreaking or new, but there is nothing inherently wrong with it, and you can avoid it fairly easily if you desire most of the time. You can spec your character a certain way and find out which abilities chain and synergize best together.

The music: amazing. It is a blend of classical, eastern European folk, and industrial. This sounds like a weird mix but it works amazingly well and builds up the tension and atmosphere in the game. It always compliments what is happening in the game and nothing sounds out of place.

The embrace mechanic: it is unique and interesting. Embracing certain citizens have vastly different affects on the world. Embracing a pillar citizen for example, will cause the district to fall into disarray. Embracing someone with a large social circle or someone who is well liked may result in certain characters coming after you. Embracing people in the same social circle in different orders will have different affects on how the survivors react. There is a ton of complexity to this mechanic and you can not just go around embracing everyone or else the district will fall into chaos and citizens will die. You have to be strategic about it. The downside is that someone going for a no embrace run misses out on this very cool mechanic and there is nothing equivalent.


The Bad:

Uneven difficulty: mobs can jump up 10 levels inexplicably, bosses are either a joke or an absolute nightmare to handle (the hardest boss is about 35% through the game), side bosses and even regular mobs walking around can without warning absolutely eviscerate you, and citizen hints/side quests can be lost with the tiniest of mistakes. Pay extra close attention to dialogue choices that have the red Y in the middle when speaking with NPCs, this means your choice may affect whether you get the hints or side quests for that particular character. The problem is there are almost never any relevant contextual clues to which dialogue choice you want to pick to get hints, and if you pick the wrong one the hint is locked away forever and of course the game instantly autosaves after.

Temptation to feed on innocents to level up: it was not there for me, but I only played on normal difficulty. With five minutes of research, doing all the side quests in the game and talking to every citizen you will get enough XP and create a build that will make short work of 95% of the game, except for one nightmarish mid game boss. If you want to do a no embrace run, I highly recommend NOT looking up builds and/or playing the game on the highest difficulty. I also suggest looking up what exactly counts as embracing and what does not, as the distinction is not super clear in the game.

The writing: it is a little uneven. Luckily, the bad writing is confined solely to (very few) of the side NPCs. Some of the characters are so transparently evil that the developers may as well have hung a sign on them that says "you can feed on this person without feeling guilty". One character in particular could not slip in enough references to how much he hates immigrants, how much he loves exploiting renters for money, and oh yeah he also forces women to have sex with him to pay their rent.

Thinly veiled political leanings: a lot of the dialogue, situations, and characters are very obviously supposed to mirror hot button political topics of the modern day that do not even try to disguise the leftist bent of the writers/developers. There is even a rich industrialist character that literally wants to build a wall to contain the epidemic. All the characters talk about him as if he is the supreme evil big bad #1 with nothing "but teh wall" given to the player as a reason to dislike him until later in the game, which is hilariously undermined by the main character who is an actual doctor acknowledging that a wall would be helpful in quarantining the epidemic. I wonder who he is supposed to represent? The "hes evil!" narrative was not convincing at all until more is revealed about him later. The left bent in the writing comes off a little heavy handed and comes dangerously close to being obnoxious at times but I found it was at least well done and made sense for the time period, nothing was shoe horned in to make a statement. There are also good and bad examples of characters of every political leaning in the game, such as the alcoholic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ union rep that takes her problems out on her kind hearted sister and everyone around her, as well as the seemingly out of touch rich foodie living in the nice neighborhood who actually plans to donate his fortune to the poor upon his death.

The Ugly:

The romance: it really does come out of nowhere. There are a few hints here and there, but it goes from this to "WE ARE SOUL MATES" real quick.

Continuity: many of the conversations you have can seem bizarre or repetitive, meaning you may pick a non-essential dialogue option, have an important tidbit or great revelation, and then the same information is delivered with even more gravitas when you pick the essential conversation option and I guess we are supposed to act surprised. Or you may just finish accusing someone of being a terrible mother who will end up killing her daughter, the character rages at you, and then everything returns to a normal, jovial tone right after this. Also, unlike games like KOTOR where finishing quests or convincing someone of something causes the character to change for better or worse, the side characters never seem to benefit from your actions or change in any way. This seems to be so the NPC is always available for you to feed on, if you so choose. It seems clear that the game was built more in mind for vampiric characters to have their fun feeding on everybody than it is for a benevolent play through.

Poorly optimized: technically speaking, the game leaves a lot to be desired. There are weird graphical glitches, especially with light reflection. The loading times can be absolutely atrocious too for a game this recent. It took me almost 10 seconds to load into a relatively small dungeon instance frequently.

Inability to skip single lines of dialogue: if you attempt to skip a line of dialogue, it will actually skip everything that the character is saying and move on to the next character in the conversation. There is no way to skip a line at a time, which is annoying and a time sink. However, the incredible voice acting makes up for it.

Unclear choices: some of the most well meaning and innocent seeming choices you make can cause apocalyptic catastrophes to happen, and with very little hint to the player. Depending on your personal preference, this may be a good thing but I would recommend using a guide for major decisions to avoid these kick in the pants moments especially since the game autosaves after every little thing you do in a single slot.
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