Consortium

humanji

Has anyone else picked this up? It's only €20 on Steam and well worth it, in my opinion.

The setting is a little confusing, and I'm not sure if it's by design or if I've missed something. Essentially, you from the present but technology allows you to possess the body of Bishop Six in the future. A world war has devastated the planet and you're part of the Consortium, an organisation that does stuff in planes. That's about the gist of it that I got.

The overall background isn't too important. The game is set on a high tech plane, a flying fortress on a trip to Ireland. You glean bits of the backstory from conversations with the crew that fill in more of your mission and your history. It's a routine mission until a series of events start to unfold (and talking any more of them will ruin the mystery).

The game is all about character interactions. How you treat people will effect what options are open to you as the story progresses. There's a few action sequences thrown into the mix, but for the most part you play the role of investigator, piecing together seemingly unrelated clues and events.

The star of the game is the plane itself. It's brilliant laid out, being just big enough to make you frantic when trying to get to a location in a hurry, but claustrophobic enough make you feel helpless when you're cornered. There's plenty of pointless interactive bits to it as well, like taps and monitors etc that add to the immersion. And there's other brilliant touches like interference with the signal that allows you to project into the future making the screen a little fuzzy at times, or when the plane hits a little turbulence, everyone stumbles and tries to keep their balance. It's all really well designed.

The game does have it's problems. The dialogue is sometimes quite hammy, and the voice acting can be hit and miss (there's two Oirish characters who are a bit tough to listen to). And overall, you get a feeling that something's missing.

I think one of the best descriptions of the game is that it's like Alpha Protocol in that has plenty of faults and drops the ball at times, but it just feels so fresh and interesting that I'd say you could be missing out by not giving it a whirl.

sweetie

currently $5 on gog for those whose interest was piqued by this review!