The Age of Decadence

The Basics: Challenging Roman Themed RPG with old-school (Falloutish) sensibilities

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: medium

Why I bought this: Online reviews, (but what really sold me was someone's description of their experience playing as a grifter and totally avoiding combat)

First Impressions: I was blown away by the evocative art for the opening menu, depicting a wasteland watched over by some kind of Roman Centurion, and then very impressed by the options presented in character creation (and of course chose to play a grifter). After playing for an hour or so, realizing that I hadn't drawn a drop of blood, and had weaseled my way through things, I felt like the game was living up to it's potential and was suitably impressed. 

My 3 hours:I played through the beginning of the game as several characters, starting with the aforementioned grifter, and also attempting as an assassin and a mercenary. In doing so, I tried out a few of the main systems of the game: exploration, conversation, choose your own adventure quest bit, and combat. Exploration was pretty well handled, with a decently labeled minimap, and a clear sense of traveling around cities that felt lived in. Conversation was quite detailed, with well written characters, who react to different PCs very differently, giving a sense of interacting with human people with goals instead of static quest givers. 

The game was fairly challenging, as best shown with combat and choose your own adventure style quest lines. As I was warned before trying this game, combat was consistently pretty challenging, and even a trained combatant could pretty easily die when faced with multiple opponents or just by bad luck. This led to a lot of reloading for me. Additionally, many of the quests/situations in the game are handled by choose your own adventure style dialogues which present choices keyed to your character's skills. It looks like the game then tests against skills in the background, and moves the story forward. These could lead to deadly situations very quickly.

I found my character unable to succeed a lot of the time, and eventually feeling like I had to do certain things just in order to survive. I'm of the opinion that this is a feature and not a bug, trying to buck the trend of computer roleplaying game characters who are able to solve any problem that they come across. These characters capabilities are quite limited, and the increasingly poor choices that they have to make in order to survive drove the story along for me. 

My Highlight:  Realizing I had played over 2 hours of a video game without having my character personally draw a single drop of blood. (Which is to say that at some point I'm going to have to finish out the game playing as my grifter).

My Verdict:  If you're a patient nerd with roughly my set of sensibilities (including an abiding love for Ancient Rome as a setting, and a fondness for Fallout 1, 2 and Planecape Torment), and are willing to endure a lot of trial and error, you should definitely give this game a shot on the next steam sale. 

Next post will be on September 25th, where I'll be reviewing Eldritch, a procedurally generated game with Lovecraftian leanings