So I finished the game, here's a couple of things I think about it:
- Steam says I have 27 hours of playtime on it, and I did pretty much every side quest there is. Only thing I didn't find out was how to open Ruby's lorry. Other than that I solved everything. Where are the 60-90 hours you promised
Kasparov ???
I enjoyed it way too much for it to be over already
- The whole political stuff is tongue in cheek and mostly outrageously exaggerated. Being a fascist or a commie or a centrist or a libertarian are all exaggerated parodies as you can find them in those political compass memes. The political options are no less silly than the superstar disco cop or apocalypse cop options. There's definitely no political agenda in the game, as it makes fun of
all the ideologies. My Hitlerist friends whom I convinced to play the game loved it because they can laugh at themselves, never felt like the game was overly pro-commie or overly anti-fascist. It just hits the right notes of parody that both outsiders and insiders of the ideologies can laugh at, as long as they have a sense of humor.
- The main focus of the game's writing isn't the politics, or the humorous WEIRD COPOTYPE stuff, but the personal stories of people. This is where the writing shines the most, and it blends in perfectly well with the more outrageous stuff you can say and do. Yeah, "sing karaoke" is a funny quest on the surface, but the song actually means something to your character, and it's a sad and moody one. Gives you the feels. One of the greatest twists in the game was when I annoyed a woman at the bookstore with requiring police help until she admitted she might really need it. "Is your husband missing? No? What about your daughters? Okay, they're not missing, but what about your pet bird? Is that missing?" I kept going on about that - with Kim shaking his head next to me - until she said that her husband has been away for a little longer than usual. She's not really worried yet, but if we have the time to look for him...
It started out as a funny quest, but then when I found the guy, he had broken through a wooden board at the boardwalk, hit his head on a metal railing and died. I had to go to the woman's apartment and tell her that her husband died. It went from funny to gut-punching tragedy in a single moment.
- The characters are all memorable. Rene, the bitter old loyalist who's a good guy at heart. When I met his socialist friend alone one day and he told me Rene died, I felt genuinely sad. I had come to consider Rene as somewhat of a friend, due to our similar ideologies and how he was always open to sharing old stories. Cuno was a fucking asshole, but he was a funny asshole. Plaisance with her superstitions and her lack of interest for the actual fucking books she's selling. Evrart, that slimy fucking weasel. The ravers in the tent who are HARD FUCKING CORE YEAAAAGHHH! Great cast of characters. There wasn't a single NPC I found boring to talk to.
- Kim has to be one of the best companions in an RPG ever. Sure, he's not as weird and off-beat as Morte, Fall-From-Grace, Dak'kon, etc, but he's got a personality that isn't just surface-level. The guy is a meticulous note-taker, a good detective, and he's got a past and hobbies. He doesn't like dealing with kids because he had to deal with youth delinquents during the start of his career for way too long. He doesn't like childish things like playing pinball or dancing to ANODIC DANCE MUSIC because he wants to put the years where he
had to do that stuff behind him. But if you make him dance, he actually seems to enjoy it. He really likes cars, and when you tell him you're also into cars and your skills manage to analyze correctly what type of car he drives, he's gonna be quite delighted and you'll have a nice friendly chat about it. He of course didn't approve of my rampant racism or my unconventional
disco approach to policing, but he gained respect for me due to the good results of my police work, and went along even with my more out-there ideas. There was even something like a friendship developing between the two of us.
Also, Kim gives you the greatest bro moment ever seen in an RPG. When you sit down on the swings to wait for the tide to lower so you can access the crashed car's trunk, and you finally realize this was
your car and
you drove it into the ice while you were drunk out of your mind, Kim tells you it's not that bad. You're more valuable than a car. Biggest bro moment I ever had in an RPG. Bioware's companions never even came close to how bro Kim was in that one moment.
- Lots of side quests, stuff to explore, things not related to the case at all, etc. It was fun to explore Martinaise and do a whole lot of different things, from investigating the curse of the commercial area to turning a church into a disco clubhouse. Pulling rank on Kim to make him dance was one of the funniest moments of the game.
- I'm not sure I liked the ending, but I also don't hate it. It was decent, I guess. Would have preferred for the Deserter to have some kind of connection to the main factions, but he was just a wild card. But at least I had gathered so much evidence, I could nail everything on him. The hole in the wall between the secret area and Klaasje's room. The white flower on her balcony. The bullet fitting perfectly to his gun. Everything checked out. I also asked him if Evrart hired him to perform the assassination, but he didn't - was kinda disappointed, as it would have been cool to have a connection to one of the characters I've gotten to know (and distrust) during the course of the game. Finding the phasmid was also very cool, but I dunno if I like the whole "he's got health problems because he's addicted to the phasmid's pheromones" thing. It all came a bit out of left field.
- Initially I kinda missed ending slides for all the little things I did, like forging the signatures on Evrart's letter (what would be the result of that compared to if I had gathered the real ones?), finding out what the soundless spot in the church really is (are researchers going there to examine it?), how the anodic dance music club is going to turn out (I improved their song to the MAXIMUM HARDCORE, so they should get a thriving customer base, right?), etc. But then again, not having ending slides fits the noir theme of the game better. Classic movies like Chinatown also ended with plenty of stuff hanging in the air rather than fully resolved. And some of the major points do get closure if you have shivers or inland empire - I think it was shivers that told me about Klaasje being on her way out of the city, throwing one last look at it as she moves on to the next location to hide at. Also, the whole sequence of Kim giving his evaluation of you as a partner (he claims to be a superstar and uses the word disco 30 times a day, also he's a massive fascist, but he can get people to spill everything and is the best detective I ever worked with) and being able to mention all the successes you had was even better than ending slides, I'd say. Just felt great to brag about my achievements to colleagues who doubted I could ever get my shit together again.
"So -- as you can see, I'm a *pretty okay* detective -- and an absolutely GIANT FASCIST."
Great sequence.
- Shaving should come with a permanent malus to intelligence, because only an absolute retard would chop those glorious chops off!
Does anyone even react to it? I made a save, shaved, went out of the cabin to see if Kim had any reaction towards me no longer looking disco as fuck, but he didn't even remark on it, so I reloaded the save. Does anyone ever comment on it or is it purely cosmetic?
- Not sure the ex-wife dream is in the right position. You get it as a completely missable thing shortly before the game's final confrontation. It's filled with sadness and regret, and really hits your feels when you've experienced something similar yourself before, but I dunno... I think it might have been more impactful if it had come earlier. Maybe when you sleep from day 2 to day 3, or from day 3 to day 4. Day 3 is the first day you get a chance to enter the church and look at the stained glass window depicting the goddess that reminds you of your old love. It's also the first day on which you get a chance to have a walk along the beach with the fisherwoman, and to have a talk with her daughter in the house, who likes you because you're just as fluffy as her favorite stuffed toy (her letting me hug her toy was one of the cutest moments in the game). It's like... you met someone you could live with, and could even be a great stepdad for her daughter. Sure, she's not ready to get with your drunk ass yet, but maybe in a few months you can come back, go on another walk... it gives you at least a small hope of moving on from the whole ex-wife thing.
And the ex-wife thing was mentioned as one of the first things at the start of the game, in the first dream. But then it takes until the very end before you're ever confronted with it. I dunno. Would've been more impactful maybe if it had come earlier than that.
- I agree with the people who find the ending sequence - from finding Ruby onwards - to be too linear. Until that point, the game has been all about player agency. You can interrogate suspects, examine clues, deal with side cases at your own pace and with your own methods. You can even decide to arrest or let go certain people (Klaasje once you find out everything about her, the raver kids when you find out they actually wanna build a drug lab). It's all up to you how you go about your police work. But then... you
have to find Ruby before you can go to the island. Okay. Why? My visual calculus told me the island was one possible vantage point for a sniper. Titus told me that the shot probably didn't come from the roof because nobody heard a shot that night. Neither he, nor Gartre the cafeteria manager, nor anyone else present in the place. And none of the other possible locations my visual calculus came up with were likely to be the place from which the shot came. When I went down to confront Ruby, both my skills and Kim told me that this would probably set things in motion we can't stop, so I went back outside and tried to wrap up all loose ends before confronting Ruby.
One of those loose ends was investigating the island to make sure the shot didn't come from there.
I even asked a friend who had already finished the game how to get to the island, and he said you get there in the second chapter.
Yeah, but I already had a reasonable enough reason to go there earlier. Because someome told me nobody heard a shot, and it was one possible location for a sniper. Also this is the only place in all Martinaise where those white flowers bloom at this time of year. Funny that nobody in the entire game knew about that. Kim might have told me "We should probably focus on finding the current most likely suspect first", but I could either have pulled rank on him or convinced him my idea was good, because at that point Kim trusted me implicitly and went along with every insane idea I had, and during the dance scene in the church it was established that I have the authority to pull rank on him, so any argument about "Kim wouldn't have let you do that" is invalid. Yeah, the fisherwoman's boat isn't ready yet, but what about the Wild Pines representative? What if I convincingly told her that I have to go to that island to find the real murderer? "Yeah but she'd tell you there's not enough time for that due to the dangerous mercs in the city right now" is also a bullshit argument because sailing there doesn't take that long.
Would it have broken the carefully built narrative structure? Yes, it would. But if you want to give the player true freedom, you also have to accept players breaking your narrative.
- There wasn't enough to do with the gun. Sure, the game was always advertised as not being big on the combat, but when the devs said combat is delivered in set pieces where you get to pick your actions in a dialogue menu, I expected there to be more than just
one single combat confrontation. I go through all this trouble to get back my gun, and I can only shoot it once? AFAIK there's also only one bullet, so the scarcity of ammo would have added another nice element to the game. Let's say you allow the player to find his gun much earlier, so he can use his gun instead of Kim's to shoot down the corpse from the tree. Boom, one bullet wasted. Why not allow the player to shoot that infernal machine Ruby is using to fuck you up, rather than walking there and smashing it with his hands? Boom, one bullet wasted. Instead, we never get the option to waste a bullet when it would have been much more useful during the tribunal scene. If we find the gun and the bullet, we're good. There's no risk of blowing your load too early because the game never gives you the option to.
- Why can't I buy back the fancy golden wheel nut covers that Kim pawns off to pay my debt on day one? If I somehow manage to scrounge together 200 bucks, I should be able to buy them back from the pawnshop and give them to Kim, just to show that I appreciate his bro-ness. But I can't. I doubt the pawnbroker managed to sell them that quickly.
So, overall great game, but it has some flaws that keep it from being as great as the hype promised it would be.
It certainly is something special, though. When it was funny, it actually made me laugh. When it went for the feels, it actually made me feel things. I haven't played a game that made me feel things in many, many years.
