Recent reviews by snowmantw

This game defintely should be in every "RPG" players' library: it totally motivates you while you're really doing the "Role-Playing", not just killing & smashing things to get higher scores. It's a long time that I couldn't find out a good enough story to enjoy the game, but I now get satisified, except the following chapters are still unfinished. Moreover, it even lets me feel the time is back (hah!) to the age of Baldur's Gate & The Longest Journey!

While the atmosphere is great and the stories are impressed (when they're willing to disclose themselves), the most of things you need to do is to collect enough money to pay bills of fuels and foods. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to enjoy the progress to keep your ship and crew alive in the sunless economy. Because everything you need are so expensive, and you can only pay them via some few profitable lines terminated at London, your journey would become an endless London-to-somewhere routine and only at few times you can forget them and sail up to other exciting unexplored islands, as a real captions would do. This intolerable fact was discovered when I suddenly found that I spent hours in game to hunt bat swarms repeatedly, because it provides the cheapest supplies and the way to comfort crews' terrors. Trust me, it's suck to see your great journey become a journey of a bat killer, who acts like the poorest bagger to appreciate every coins given by the game system, which performs no economy mechanism but to sell expensive goods to players.

Another problem is you can only keep relations with NPCs during the story lines are opened. After that, they disappeared. You would find that after completing your jobs to convoy them from islands to islands, and enjoy the interactions with them, they would be vaporized at the final stop. Nothing continues the stories while they're actually too short for a game whom should beat other brainless 3D engine demos with great stories, and soon you're wasting your time on the supply and fuel problems again.

And the officers: while they should be your best friends who would accompany you till the end of game, they're actually only portraits. Yes, you can 'speak to them with secrets' to gain some skill upgrading, and try to waste your most precious supply to talk with them. However, they would only give you the standard NPC answers, almost like the famous arrow-in-the-knee. The boring bill-paying routines make things worse, since that means you can almost find no chances to discovery their stories when you need to travel from London to London to sell whatever profitable and report ports to the administration to earn the money. As a result, they're aboard with silence, keep silent, and also die silently with your crew and the whole ship, when you earn no enough money to reduce terrors or pay bills for fuels and supplies. They are nothing like your truly friends in Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment, which let you enjoy the game with NPCs' most tiny requests, lies, emotions, choices, stories and their deaths and lives.

Finally, the terrors: I think it's a really terrible thing in the game. Because you would find it's the most expensive goods to buy and the supply is even fewer than others. You can basically reduce your 1 terror with 10+ Echos, but it's so easy to be stockpiled when you're sailing on the zee. It increases rapidly while you leave shore far enough, and would stop increasing while you sail along with coasts. However, it never reduces even when you anchoring in the brightest port, unless you spend *lots of* money to buy drinks at the local taverns, if they exists. Only London provide you to reduce terrors to 50 every times you stop at the port. However, it would add your Nightmare's Strength with no cure. This basically tell you your next travel may explode because the terror would burst with the event to confront the nightmare.

So, what would you get with your $18.99? A game should become the next Fallout with the rich stories and characters, screws up with the terrible economy system and the pale NPCs and events. As an early access game I think it exposed some fatal defects that should be fixed as soon as possible, or it would be a sunk ship under the sunless zee.