Still RPG month: Risen

One of the ever increasing joys of the new age of computing is getting games from somewhere other than Japan. I'm not complaining about glorious Nippon, which has given so much, but it's nice to get another culture. I'm from Canada, so for me American games are pretty base, but Europe man, Europe is a bold new world.

The first moment where I really realized I was playing a European game was playing through King's Bounty: The Legend, a game I played through more than a couple times, where the main character married a 'Frog Princess' and she talked about having tadpoles. Whoa! Europe! What's going on? The Witcher is pretty weird like that too, Dwarves making jokes about tying Carrots to their dicks. You don't do that over here, all games are glum excursions through ultra violence. American games is brown town splattered with blood. You are only allowed to make jokes at the specific joking moment.

I picked up Risen entirely because of Risen 2, that being, Risen 2 sounded sweet. Pirate RPG! Well damn son, I like pirates. Let's try the previous game, made in 2009 (which isn't too far back!) to see how it is while we wait for the second game to go on sale. This is an excellent plan, one that can't possibly fail. Besides I paid $5 for it, which is the 3rd best class of price.

First class is the EA Origins coupon error, which allows you to buy any games under $20 for free. So Dragon Age: Whatever and Shank 2 were free. (Actually I guess Dragon Age wasn't quite free, since it's 21 gb, so there's an opportunity cost to getting that one installed) 2nd best is the Witcher price of 2.50, which is less than the price of just about anything worth buying. I'm digressing rather than talking about Risen. Risen isn't bad, but it's kinda hard to talk about.

Risen feels a ton like the opening of the first Witcher game, though much less in terms of both grounding you into the game mechanics and flavor. On the other hand, while it looks similar, it looks a fair bit better. The engine itself isn't that impressive, but it has some nice touches like dust motes, pollen and waves crashing that pleases the mind. The UI on the other hand is downright primitive, rustic like you'd playing a SNES game that somehow got ported to 3d. I'm not kidding here, it looks like Magic Sword or something.

But I mean, SNES games are sweet, right...


If RPGS have a unifying theme, across the board, it isn't that they all have stats or numbers, or a quest or monsters or whatever else. It's that RPGs have a period wherein you must "learn immersion". This is different from the pure mechanical conveyance of other genres, as RPGs don't force themselves to teach you as quickly as possible, instead allowing you to sink into their framework.

Risen's learning period is long. The game's pacing gives the word glacial a bit of a run for its money. Which, don't get me wrong, it wins. The game isn't especially hard nor do you feel like you're being challenged, you just feel ... Bored. As introductions go, openings to a game, literal attempts to pull me in - Risen may very well be the worst game I have ever played. There are no strong plot hooks. Some babbling about ancient ruins and bandits, or something. It's dull. Do you know that feeling you get when someone tries to explain say, the political reasons for a war between Houses in medieval times? This game is like reading a wikipedia article about that.

I have reached the first town. You can not - Once you have entered the first town - Leave. You are trapped in a small sandbox and then given less a feeling of  'my grand adventure' and more point and click bullshit arbitrary bullshit. I have no idea why I'm here or what I'm supposed to do. None. I talk to NPCs and because the game allows two different paths, everything is confusing.

Except this one guy wants me to sell his fish stall...?

Every time I start this game up, I find myself alt-tabbing to try to look up some sort of direction, some kind of - SOMETHING - to tell me where to go. And the game is somehow so dull and boring that it has infected everything written about it. Every walkthrough I've looked at is a confusing mess that I find my eyes slipping off as I feel the warm embrace on my oncoming boredom coma. I feel like this is unfair, and yes - it's unanimous. Every walkthrough is terrible.

This game is making me worry about having a tumor behind my right eye. There's this soreness that starts after a couple minutes of playing.

To say this game is a failure of conveyance implies on a fundamental level I feel the team behind it had even the slightest interest in the concept. The game is as much a failure in that sense as it is a failure at being a recipe for casserole. No attempt was made in that direction, as such, I can not truly say it was a failure. I can't fault a motorcycle for being unable to fly. I don't visit the beach and scream at the turtles for being incapable of doing water color paintings. At times Witcher 2 felt like it didn't want me to play it, like it was feisty. Risen feels totally different: Risen feels like you aren't playing a game anymore. It's like a boring life simulator. It feels like I'm waiting in line at the bank.

After two hours of playing Risen I had no idea what I was doing, what my motivation was or even who my character is. (I was also still level 1?) To contrast, two hours into Mass Effect, the Witcher or even Oblivion (Which I hated) I knew what I was doing, who I was fighting and exactly who I was. I tried finishing the first quest (I think?) I was given in the town. I felt like working for the, uh, Order? Who I think might be the good guys, but the game is really vague.


I attempted to do the quest by talking to the NPC it relates to. He wouldn't say anything. I realized I hadn't clicked enough of the things to get the game to actually give me the quest. Seriously: You can enter a period of quasi possessing the quest but not actually being able to do it. So I went back and clicked through more dialogue, none of which I can skip through or care about in the least, then finally got to the point where I could interact with the quest. The NPC has a bodyguard, so I lured him out and then he beat the shit out of me in about four hits.

I quit the game immediately, and then uninstalled it. Risen is, frankly, an ugly game with a terrible UI, no real plot hooks and no real appeal to play it. I thought I was playing a pirate RPG, but the game is about as far from piracy as it is from fun, which is to say pretty far. I feel like terms in line with "learning curve" and "conveyence" or "UI design" are fundamentally divorced from the reality this game exists in. Expecting these things from it are like expecting southern fried chicken when you enter a sushi joint.

I don't know if there's a good game buried under the ugly UI and confusing quantum uncertainty quests, but all I can feel like is that there's better things to do with my life. I started blogging about games because it encourages me to play through and summarize the games I buy on sale. I didn't do it to force myself to suffer, and once I got into the ugly town Risen just feels like I'm suffering. I feel bad for being hard on the Witcher 2 now, because I haven't played anything as bad as Risen in so long that I didn't appreciate it.

If I didn't have a good solid 15+ titles worth playing through lined up, I'd probably have given this game more of a chance. On the other hand, that's the other nice thing about modern gaming: I'm not hostage to having nothing else to play.