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19 Jan 2015 - 16 Feb 2015
The Fryearl Lone Wolf has heard that a great enemy has invaded his land. He heads to the town of Rockstarn to discover the town in ruins, having recently been overrun. Throughout his adventures, he discovers a terrible threat to his lands and to all humankind, which he must stop at all costs.
I don't entirely know what I was expecting, but it wasn't quite this.
The gameplay mainly consists of reading, and the interface is directed toward that end. Most of the time playing, the screen just shows a book, and it's very much like playing through a Choose Your Own Adventure game book. The dice rolls and stats are abstracted or hidden, and it's up to you to choose how the main character deals with the obstacles in front of him.
The part that resembles a modern-day game is the occasional fight sequence. Sometimes, battle is an inevitable result of your choices (or the developers decided players would otherwise get bored). So every once in a while, the Lone Wolf is pit against anywhere from one to six enemies of varying abilities. Whether it's the mook-level Giak (effectively goblins) or the terrifying Varyeks (warrior lich), they all have moves and strategies that can be countered.
Well, that's the theory. I had a really hard time just in the first act, and had to dial down the difficulty level so that I had any real chance.
The battles mostly consist of picking a move and accomplishing a quick-time sequence. I have mixed feelings about quick-time events; I understand that some people feel that it adds to player immersion, but most of my time is spent staring at the button, madly clicking away. This hyper-focus makes everything else surrounding the button - the set-pieces, the animations, etc - all fade away.
Still, if you accept that there are quick-time events, and if you expect lots of reading, it is quite a fun experience. Lone Wolf is aloof as only an experienced warrior can be, and his sense of heroism and responsibility carries through with every action. He can be a bit misogynistic, but he tries to do well according to his own personal code, and you have to respect him a little for that.
The story was engaging, even though it didn't have a lot of twists and turns. The progression from Rockstarn to the enemy citadel was fraught with peril, and the writing did a good job making the overarching threat a significant danger.
I have never read any of the previous (printed) Lone Wolf game books, but I don't think that hurt at all. There's definitely some history and lore that I'm missing, and I might not totally understand everyone's motivations in the proper context, but the world plays well with all of the expected fantasy tropes. If you go in having read any kind of fantasy at all, even just a few sessions of tabletop roleplaying, you'll feel at home in no time.
It's a little unclear to me as to what would be different depending on the various choices I made that others might not. If I had elected not to go through the Shianti ruins, what would have happened to the female companion? Would the last act still have focused on her prototype, or would the threat have been revealed to be something else? If I had chosen Animal Cunning as one of my powers from the start, would I have had an easier time with some of the encounters?
That's the type of thing that encourages replayability, and I can't fault them that at all. I'm a little tempted to play the game again ... but not soon. If too much of it seems too familiar, it would be hard to be as immersed as I felt the first time through.
Were there rough points? Yes. Aside from the aforementioned difficulty in the battle sections, there were times when it felt that the game just outright cheated to get a desired outcome. The loss of the Summerswerd seemed to come out of nowhere, just to allow the game to extend for another chapter. The Shianti cube puzzles are finicky and require precise placement (or else boom). Overall, though, it's fun, and when I look back at my memories of playing, I remember the fun parts.
Worth playing.