The Tempest of Baraqiel
Nathan Leigh
First, a public service announcement: you can turn on undo in this game. Go to ‘options’ and then turn on ‘show back button’. Don’t turn it on if the presence of undo spoils your enjoyment of games, I guess? But I used it to great effect in my own playthrough.
So. I find myself having a hard time putting together my thoughts about this game. On the face of it, I enjoyed it! The world building was interesting, the character of the PC was nuanced, the other characters were distinct, and the central mystery of the story felt both relevant and somewhat realistic. The style was a genre I’ve often enjoyed: classic hard sci-fi with an interesting core premise. I enjoyed having discussions with my team where we were trying to solve a hard problem, and a discussion point I chose to bring up helped us edge closer to a solution.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. There’s a point where a reference to an unknown-to-you but clearly significant-to-the-PC is intriguing, and helps establish the world as bigger than just the things happening directly in the line of this particular story (“Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars.”) But here, I kept being dogged by the suspicion that there were things in this story that I was missing. It felt like, perhaps, the best way to play the game was to literally see all the text in it first, and only then choose your ‘optimal path’ story through it.
And while that sort of game is often interesting to me, the problem here was that I kept feeling like the story I personally was getting was incomplete and therefore unsatisfying. That was mitigated a bit by the undo (‘go back’) command! It meant I could see at least a bit more of the breadth of the story: it made more sense that my PC would back off of asking too many prying questions of her superior officer when I discovered that I could literally be sent to the brig if I kept it up. That seemed like a bit of worldbuilding that the PC would know that I didn’t, that using ‘undo’ helped me discover.
But as long as my choices kept propelling me forward, I was loathe to lean on ‘undo’ too much for my first playthrough, even though on reflection it might have been the best way to experience this game for me.
I was also just left confused when being thrown into the aforementioned brig didn’t end the game, but instead seemed to push me down a completely different path; one where none of my previous choices nor efforts meant anything, and where I seemed to be essentially starting over from scratch. I eventually decided the story I was now experiencing was too discordant from the character I had previously established, and backed up so as to not get thrown in the brig after all, and from there played a much more coherent storyline. And I found (through a little bit of trail and error) a reasonably satisfying ending. But I was left vaguely dissatisfied, and I think a lot of that was just that the game seems to have been meant to be played ‘wide’ and not ‘through’: that the full impact of the story only makes sense when you know all the ins and outs of all the different stories you could have played.
That is, of course, only a guess! But I can at least say that despite there being a lot in the story that I really liked, my own playthrough felt less than the sum of its parts.
Did the author have anything to say? I think so! And they certainly had a lot of worldbuilding that I did find and appreciated.
Did I have anything to do? Yes, and this seemed fairly reasonable: I was well satisfied with the immediate results of my choices probably 85% of the time.