The Tempest of Baraqiel
This game charmed me with the little joke it plays while loading music assets. There’s a button you can click that says ‘wait patiently’, and clicking it a lot generates funny messages; which takes me back all the way to playing Warcraft 2 where clicking on units repeatedly made them say funny things! Two-headed ogre: ‘[Burp.] He did it! No, he did it!’ Two-headed ogre: ‘[Fart.] Huh huh huh huh huh.’ Okay, anyway…
The Tempest of Baraqiel is a fairly large game, but the story feels small. You are the child of a war hero mother in a sci-fi future. Your mother has died in the war with the nasty alien race, and you more or less left the army to pursue a career in alien linguistics. But now you are suddenly brought onto a large military ship for a top secret mission: you’ve got to decode the language on the buttons of an advanced weapon that has been captured from the aliens. That’s it. You talk to some people on the ship, you try to solve the puzzle, and that’s more or less where things end.
This just goes to show that the plot idea isn’t important; what you do with it is important. The Tempest of Baraqiel does a lot with this small segment of story, and it was throughout engaging. There’s a real sense of tension about both the internal politics on the ship, and the morale of the little group of experts that you’re in charge of. You’ve got to make some seemingly innocuous but in fact crucial decisions about how to spend your time and who to talk to about what. One thing I did was use the ship’s communication system to talk about a sensitive topic, and to my horror several communications officers who were not supposed to hear what I said were executed for security reasons! From other reviews, I’ve learned that there are even weirder paths you can take in the game.
The story moves towards a climactic investigation of the weapon, where some of the linguistic facts start to make sense. I enjoyed this – rarely did linguistics feel so tense. There’s even a do-or-die choice about which message you send to the captain of the ship, where you had to pick up on some fairly subtle clues in order to succeed and survive…
… which brings me to some areas where The Tempest of Baraqiel is less than stellar. One weird design decision, easily remedied, is that the game by default (a) does not show a back button, and (b) saves in the single save slot every turn automatically. Unless you’ve seen these options on the options menu, which I had not, you’ll be under the impression that the game works like a roguelike: no saving, no undoing. In fact, Save/Load simply seemed broken and non-functional to me. It was only by sheer coincidence that, after dying, I went to the options menu and saw that I could actually go back to before I made the wrong choice! It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense to change at least one of these two settings – I’d probably stop the auto-save, because it makes the prominent ‘Save’ and ‘Load’ buttons do nothing. And I think ‘Back’ is best implemented, not as a dialogue choice, but as a button in the interface?
More important is the fact that The Tempest of Baraqiel, for all its size, sometimes moves too fast and too sudden. The weirdest moment was where, near the end, I suddenly had no choice but to mutiny against my commanding officer. Why? I have no idea; this was a totally unmotivated plot twist that felt bizarre and utterly out of character for the protagonist. I also failed to understand the end sequence. If you don’t send a message to the captain, the entire ship gets blown up by the aliens and you die. If you do send a message, the captain turns back… but why would the aliens then not blow up the ship? Seems like they have even better reasons to do so in that scenario.
These are the clearest examples, but also at other points in the game I felt that I as a player just didn’t grasp the situation well enough to make an informed choice. Surely my character, who knows this organisation well, should understand the dangers of the intercom system, or the subtleties of the hierarchy, and so on – but the prose doesn’t convey them, and therefore you make choices with no idea of what the consequences will be. There’s room for improvement here.
That said, I enjoyed playing the game. The music was nice too; I was too focussed on the game and the writing to really think about its procedurally generated nature, but certainly it never went wrong for me.