The Illusion of Choice

[SeymourG]

I purchased this game on Android, intrigued by the blurb separating it from the many other COG games I've played. Now of course Steam won't let me officially review it or validate my purchase elsewhere, so this is my outlet. Now I'm going to tell you why I have such a love/hate relationship with this game, and have played through it roughly 30 times in an effort to min/max, but would ultimately not recommend it.

TL;DR

While playing this game, it was the most entertaining and thrilling COG game I've yet had the pleasure to read and interact with. The characters were entertaining, the world was engrossing, and the plot was filled with intrigue and secrets, all of which compelled you onwards. All of which, then, would be crushed by the absolutely miserable ending you shall find inescapable. It may be better to have loved and lost than not loved at all, but sometimes being Romeo and Juliet stings enough to have just not made it worthwhile. Wonderful game and execution while it lasted. Ultimately, I can not recommend this title, for reasons I shall explain more towards the end.

The Characters

At first glance these are probably the best characters I've seen on a COG game, with remarkably different and just altogether distinct personalities that make it very easy to attach yourselves to some. Now as you will immediately come to notice, they all hate each other fervently, so there's a lot of side-taking all throughout this game. Don't try and please everyone, as everyone will hate you for it. It's possible, but hard to do on your first go. After that, first play, however... you start to notice a few things. First off, a lot of the uniqueness and quirks of the characters become incredibly meaningless later on in the game, as when you take different paths, you find the EXACT same things being said by different people. Not just in simple one-liners -- there are a few opportunities when the game allows you to "choose who to follow" and basically go through a side-plot with them that may very well influence your ending, but upon following most of them, I see that while there are a few lines added by each character to sort of make it "their own," you generally get the exact same conclusion to the mini-arc and wind up in the same places. They had some differences though, enough to get you involved, especially for your first time. At any rate, you'll love the characters. And yes you can romance them. Again, not the easiest to pull off first time around, but pretty satisfying when you finally succeed.

The World

The entire setting is pretty optimal and works well to go with the hand-waving "everything is glamored when we need it to be" despite that never being well explained. On that note, Roza's Chamberlain thing only making things weirder. Do all glamors work like that? When they glamor, say, the kit you use in the mountain harvests, are there a bunch of spitting lizards and hours-long chanting too? The Ministry is about as intimidating as it needs to be without going into full-blown dystopia, and the light suffering of your entire team contrasted with everyone else doing really well serves to give the player hope that if they do well in their career, maybe they'll not be stuck in an absolute wreck like their teammates. Actually, it only gets worse, but at least the player has hope that it won't. And finally, the whole tongue-harvesting aspect is overall a very intriguing concept, with a lot of thought given to interviewing severed tongues, making sure you don't get "silent harvests," and so on. I wish it was explored more deeply than it was.

The Ending

This is definitely where I personally believe the game falls very far short, and overpowers the other positive aspects to make the experience not something I would recommend. The spoiler free version:

Throughout the game, all of the characters, mechanics, and story flow make it feel like you're in for a lot, like you're going to spend a lot of time playing and that your choices will make differences in the long run. I spent copious amounts of time on my first playthrough stuck at certain choices, trying to strategize what would get me towards my own current goals. It was beautiful, it really was. And despite giving the game a bit of a hard time in the spoilers about how the choices don't always matter as much as you'd think/hope, that is often key to smaller-budget or indie games that can't just create a thousand completely distinct plotlines. For this being one book by one man, he did well with the choice variety.
However. this is where the ending comes in. As I said, you're constantly bombarded by this feeling that the game is only just beginning, that you're only just getting started and you've got a lot in store -- which is why I'm still shocked at just how hard the ending let me down. It comes out of absolute, and I mean absolute nowhere, at a place where things are just starting to look up a little, and believe me the way it ends is quite on par with the "a rock falls and kills you" trope. You never have a chance to get your stats anywhere near as high as their bars indicate possible, you never really get to do much with more than one or two characters per playthrough, and you never get to see your career unfold to any fulfilling extent. The game just ends, very abruptly (in maybe 3 pages), and ironically right after you escape a completely unrelated, yet very lengthy and treacherous danger. Whichever character you sided with the most at key times slaps you with the ending you neither earned nor deserved. If you're curious at just how bad it is, here's the spoiler edition:

My first run through, I was trying to romance Roza and do her side-plot, for a number of reasons you may or may not see on your own. Chapter 9 involves you going to court, indicted with charges you can't seem to avoid, though the game gives you a lot of clever or less-than-clever ways to use the characters who like you or that stats you've raised to escape one way or another. So it was indeed quite an interesting ordeal -- then the game ends in Chapter 10, very, very unceremoniously. You go to bed exhausted from the court proceedings, and you wake up because [insert character you talked to a lot] beats down your door, and tells you "I can't tell you how I know this, but you're on a list. An assassination list. The ministry is out to get you. You need to leave the city." And so you do, usually with them in tow. No rhyme or reason, really, and as I found out, with no difference in arcs. No matter whether you flirt and befriend the entire ministry, go full rebel and act to bring them down, or be a nonchalant loser, you still end up on a hit list, you still run out of the country through the border which is somehow only 3 blocks north of you despite never before being mentioned (which is a terrible place to place your entire regime's propaganda machine). You flee north to some arbitrary NPC you've never met before to tell you on the last page that "hey we've been expecting you DCs, we like your work, come live with us and work for us now." And again, so you do. There is no choice, no influencing the outcome. You see, on my first go, I accidentally chose the path of the messenger girl, and thought I just hit a bad ending by mistake, given how randomly sudden and anticlimactic of an ending I got, which was disappointing considering the considerable effort I'd put into doing everything strategically. So I replayed, noticed how even on different arcs everything turned out the same, and got to the same exact ending but with Roza instead, giving the same BS "you're on a hit list, we have to run NOW" followed by meeting a contrived NPC and ending the game right then and there.
Forgive my rant, but as someone who is deeply invested in all kinds of interactive storytelling, the art of video game theory, and so on, I am genuinely insulted by this ending. My mantra has been, and always will be, "respect your players." Respect the time they put into your work, respect their intelligence to be able to make their own informed decisions, respect their right to demand what they earned through gameplay. The TV shows, books, games, movies, and so on that are most universally loved are that way because they respect their audiences, believing in their maturity enough to make bold leaps forward, while respecting their fans' devotion and time invested. So to the idea of respecting players, I have many questions: What was the point of ending it all so abruptly, and with little regard to how players played? What moral or idea was being expressed by this entirely apathetic, cynical ending? That no matter how hard you try, or who you kiss up to, or how well you perform, you'll be screwed by "the man" regardless? After all the choices in the game that allowed you to side with faction x, y, or z, or characters A-Z, I have no clue why every ending I come across seems to be "you're on someone's hit list, you must flee." Just as I was getting really invested in the whole Death Collecting job, with genuine excitement wondering "I wonder who we'll harvest next -- maybe royalty, or one of our own team members, or family, or a high-level ministry worker" but it feels more as though the author hit a deadline or word limit and was forced to shut down the story as he was writing it. None of your choices matter whatsoever in the end, only the character you ticked off the least. Depending on the sub-arc you chose to follow through with, your NPC will tell you "Congratulations, you did the thing! You're still in exile forever and must hide here and write for us in ___ cave, always on the run from 'the man,' but you did the thing!" At first it was the cloaks for me, and then the incompetent ministry, and then the corrupt ministry, and so on. It does not do the player justice to have a generic NPC tell them "Congratulations, the Cloaks are now a protected species" while you have just lost everything you worked to achieve. History will gladly forget you, your teammates will never see you again, if you romanced someone other than the individual you ran away with, you'll never see them either; your career is literally gone for good as you're apparently on a hit list from your employers for some reason; every ending is a bad ending. There is no victory here, only defeat that was forced unto you, again despite anything you decided prior. The only thing I can imagine got us put on that hit list was that you wrote a story against the ministry, but despite having a few different options to write about, they are ALL negative and paint the ministry in an critical view. Why the ministry rolls with it and publishes it, only to order you killed the very next day, is beyond me. Replaying the game in different arcs to find an answer turned up with naught.

Side Note: I took to the internet after getting my second ending, seeking answers, and wound up at the beta test page for this game[forum.choiceofgames.com], on which the author had some notes about how to apply for the beta. I left a note about "respecting your players" in the ending spoilers -- and so, having read through his offer and seeing his tone and approach towards potential players, I decided in the end it would be best to avoid approaching him.

[Smittyry17]

I like you, think the set up and the lore and the world seem really neat, and just felt like.. it did not matter. I took some times trying to decide how to do some things, for it to not matter. Orginally i could not wait for multiple plays, like some of the other choice of games.

[SeymourG]

Originally posted by Smittyry17:

I like you, think the set up and the lore and the world seem really neat, and just felt like.. it did not matter. I took some times trying to decide how to do some things, for it to not matter. Orginally i could not wait for multiple plays, like some of the other choice of games.

Funny, only last week did I point this review of mine out to someone, only for it now to get its first response. I'm sad to see that people are still agreeing with it, so I take it the story never got developed further and the project is dead. That was my last hope at the time -- that Chapter 10 was merely a placeholder until the author was ready to continue on. Well, now I've upset myself again

[Smittyry17]

Yeah, i really like all of it. Its a neat set up. But sometimes to the ending of "you are on a watch list, you should run" and it just being over seemed weird. I also recall going out of my way to befriend the libary girl and i got a favor from her in the beginning. ANd i still go to court over it. Just seemed weird.