1 Response

1. Glazius Says:

   Storyline
   Design
   Gameplay
   Detail

   @GlaziusF

   Reviewing this on a mid-40s ice/axe tanker, +0 x3 with bosses on.

   —

   So I’m working for someone I don’t know much about, who the briefing makes it clear that I don’t necessarily trust.

   But walking into a building in Boomtown doesn’t sound so dangerous.

   Of course, now I’m set to level 45 and trying to find a way around a security captain, as I’m expecting giant ambush waves or something if I confront him.

   The end room seems full of enemies but empty of glowies — the glowies are back toward the beginning of the second floor. More location confusion, or does “middle” actually mean “middle” now?

   And I pick up the hypno device, along with some notes about how its victims are generally easily controllable, except for occasional moments of lucidity.

   I hope this is just my paranoia, but I have a feeling that I’m already under this device’s control.

   (Also after the mission’s over I head down to rumble with the security captain. Yep, whole buncha ambushes.)

   —

   So I guess finding the device was enough to establish this guy’s bona fides, and now I’m going to try and break other samples of this device through the city.

   The entry popup feeds my paranoia a little more, telling me there’s something I just can’t remember.

   I hear one vocal patrol, find some weapons which just gives me an “Illegal Weapons” clue that calls them a variety of illegal weapons. That’s distressingly generic.

   The boss is a recolored Transcendent, who is supposedly a traitor to Paragon but the occasional line that slips through makes it pretty clear that my paranoia is justified.

   Either that or he was hypnotized into painting himself, which seems less likely.

   —

   Hmm. The accept test for the next mission says “upload the program into the Hypnometric Inducer”, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the mission as described. Editing error, or hint at the true nature of what’s going on here?

   Ah, okay. It only applies to something my contact tells me after I accept the mission. Generally I expect the accept text to relate to something in the initial briefing.

   No mission open clue for the disc I’m supposed to have? That’s fine, but I’d expect one.

   Invis on for this one, since these guys are presented as Longbow. They’re talking about some hero who’s gone rogue. Gee. I wonder who that could be.

   …wait, what? I have to beat Manticore to leave the mission? That’s completely unexpected. At least he’s the pet version since he’s conning Hero.

   Okay, he was just trying to distract me so Sister Psyche could get inside my head and tell me I was the brainwashed drone I always thought I was.

   Fortunately they have a plan to get me out of this, though they’re not giving me the details.

   —

   Next mission, my contact is sending me after the scientists who developed the hypno machine to begin with.

   Of course, I half suspect what’s really going on, and the schlocky hero, time-cop, and eyewitness report all confirm it to various degrees.

   I fight some more pet versions of Manticore and Sister Psyche, and the fog finally lifts.

   —

   The opening clue to the next mission should probably have some kind of callout in the send-off. As it is I’ve never actually seen LOKI’s base.

   Manticore is right inside the entrance, right next to an unheralded elite boss.

   The doc apparently has some toys as well, ones he didn’t think to turn on me to defend himself. …for a reason.

   Anyway, the big boss is a claws/illusion, and fortunately I packed some break frees so perma-Deceive remained in the realm of theory. He and the machine with the blueprints are one room from the end of this tech map, though I have no idea if the terminus room here is actually the “last” room on the map.

   The customs are horde o’ machine gun minions, DB/ninja and bots/devices lieuts, and dark/dark bosses. Not that bad, if the minions don’t trap you in a -def loop of eternal hits.

   Everybody involved apologizes to me for the inconvenience, and unfortunately since tones of voice don’t come across, Manticore and Sister Psyche sound just as insincere as the CEOaf who started this thing.

   —

   Storyline - ***. There’s a philosophical concept called a “Cartesian Demon”. Descartes imagined it as part of a philosophical experiment - what could he know about the world if there were some malevolent force twisting his perceptions to show him whatever it wanted? Including a Cartesian Demon-type figure, like that hypnosis device, is particularly troubling in the Architect, where we only have the mission text to convince us that the impressive display of particle effects we just put on actually accomplished what it set out to do.

   Because what do you learn when you experience the defeat of your Cartesian Demon? Nothing. The defeat may just be the demon fooling you again — in this case, the last mission would “actually” be me facilitating my contact’s escape from Longbow custody. Once you let a Cartesian Demon out of the bottle it’s not going to go back in; I’m encouraged to see flaws in what I’m being asked to do and I can’t stop that.

   I’ve enjoyed other arcs that messed with my perceptions before, but those mostly because it was in the service of establishing a mood, or even played for laughs. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but the burden ahead of it is herculean if not unmanageable. It’s kind of funny that the hardest thing to do with a gimmick that messes with your perception is write a story about it going away.

   Design - ***. I realize that as a part of this arc there are heroes working to stop/help me and I don’t, and in fact shouldn’t, know anything about what they have planned. But I still don’t like the idea that a decent part of the backstory and objectives for the last few missions are a mystery or a surprise, and especially in the third mission I don’t have any reason (according to the briefing) to fight Manticore. Maybe he could activate some kind of jammer and disrupt the base computers, so I’d get the clue he was around. And likewise I could understand Manticore and Sister Psyche not telegraphing any of their actions in missions 4 and 5, but if my internal narration could speculate about their whereabouts that’d be a little heads-up at least.

   Gameplay - ****. The surprise chained objectives are at least reasonable and not too far out of the way, but the customs have the potential to be nasty with cascading -def on the machine guns. Maybe take a page from Crey and mix in some martial artists or people with nightsticks. And the end boss, like all lieuts-and-higher with Deceive, can permanently apply it.

   I wouldn’t be adverse to just getting some permutation of the standard EB warning for the final mission, since I was half expecting the boss but his bodyguard just came out of nowhere. Maybe like I said since I was starting to break free Manticore or Psyche could give me a quick rundown on the enemies?

   Detail - ***. So there was this one episode of the Batman animated series where the Riddler trapped Batman in a dream machine, putting him in a world where his parents were alive and he was just Bruce Wayne. But every time he tried to read something it turned into a psychedelic ransom note, and eventually he worked out that he was in a guided dream because of that consistent weakness.

   When I read the clue about there being some weaknesses in the hypno machine, I was expecting something a little more subtle than it just occasionally failing to work and letting real spoken dialogue through. I thought the clue itself was some kind of hint from my subconscious that I was being controlled, and I’d be seeing the occasional odd out-of-place object in other missions to get myself up to speed. As it is, the control just feels like it’s failing arbitrarily. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. And I’d be happier with the end of the story if the hypno machine was malfunctioning in predictable ways and I could see that it wasn’t anymore.

   Overall - ***. Despite the twist, this is ultimately an arc that tells a simple story in a straightforward way. And that’s kinda the problem I have with it. The story about mind control would be helped by having a control with a specific weakness or weirdness, rather than one that was just generally flaky. And while me-the-character understands why I’m being kept in the dark about the plan for resolution of this whole affair, me the player doesn’t like it when things just show up out of nowhere, so some special effort needs to be made to bring me into the loop once Psyche’s convinced I should be there.

   Posted on June 4th, 2010 at 5:54 pm