This game is fantastic.
I don't know the whole story of development. I was very excited from the debut trailer, and then it seemed to stay in development hell, made horrible design decisions, and kept reinventing itself until it finally stumbled back onto the scene too late for anyone to care. Since it was out I still really wanted it, though, because of the mixture of its Bioshock-like retro-dystopia, which here was played especially clever (that 1960s British psychedelic sort of thing) and the gameplay concept of trying to blend in and survive in a hostile society.
Well, I've gotten into Maidenholm so far - the first part of the town proper - and I'm absolutely hooked, the gameplay isn't real well balanced but just interacting with the world is fascinating. The thing plays like a linear Fallout, in terms of just basic control scheme, quests on the map, stuff like that, but you don't have dialogue options, you have a voiced protagonist and he is acted superbly well. Excellent British bureaucrat everyman like Hitchhiker's Guide or, appropriately enough, 1984. From the first scene you're working on redacting, Soviet-style, newspaper articles in a 1960s office, really setting the tone. So far what I've found is something to the effect of that the Germans conquered Britain, got run out, and in the aftermath of it all the British turned to their forced positivity dystopia to bury their awful world,
The gameplay seems like shit at first, because the survival mechanics are super light. I think that when the game was still in its roguelike phase (a horrible design choice) people complained about it being too hard. Now you don't actually have to eat sleep and drink all that much to stay alive, but it still feels kind of fun to do for its own sake. Melee combat is bland and shitty, as to be expected. Where it starts getting good is the city. First time I enter the city, I'm on Joy since that's how the plot goes, wandering this peppy wonderland of rainbow colors and 1960s kitsch. As I wander around I suddenly feel myself coming down from it, and the withdrawal symptoms kick in. People are noticing. They get angry, start chasing me. I wander around the city's mazelike streets (or, rather, they feel mazelike), desperately dodging around corners, seemingly always drawing in more people from every direction, until finally I find a trash can to duck into when no one is looking. And with the Joy falling off, the world turns dark and grim, a run down slum that makes you want to go back on it.
Night comes and i head out to post up some dissident posters. The streets are empty now except for the bobbies, but damned if it doesn't seem like there's always a bobby right where I need to get past. I wander around and around trying to find ways around. The screens that in daytime creepily rotate to always keep your eyes on the TV do the same here, illuminating where you're standing so as to draw the attention of the guard, and make me feel dangerously exposed even when noone there, like a lamppost that follows you on a dark street.
The game feels like a nightmare, but a specific kind of nightmare, the kind where you're in the midst of a hostile crowd of raving people and you can never find the way out, even as you weave in and out of people's houses and alleyways, seeming to always wind up back where you started and them always a step behind you. And I was especially psyched about the promise of social stealth (like early Assassin's Creed and Hitman), and it's here. You misbehave, you draw attention, you greet people you disarm their suspicions. Take the drug to blend in, but come crashing down and you draw attention, and too much drug and it goes badly too. You have to dress the part wherever you are, and you can deal with people in different ways, like if you need a policeman out of action you give the bobby a bottle of liquor and he chugs it like a degenerate and goes into a stupor. And while not having AAA graphical fidelity, it has top notch aesthetics, they couldn't do realistic people probably so they did wonderfully stylized clay-looking noodle people, caricatures, and like a lot of old open worldgames like Destroy All Humans, you have a bit of pedestrian variety but mostly they fall into a few archetypes. It's the sort of thing that in a serious game would be immersion-breaking, but in something like this I love it that there's so many summer hat wearing little grannies shuffling around and that ever bobby is a lower class lout.
Fantastic, so far I'm having a ball.
So yeah, so far it lives up to this. I was psyched for Atomic Heart too and despite all the naysaying it sounds like it turned out great.
