Risen

Developer: Piranha Bytes

Release Date: October 2, 2009

Time Played: Around three hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Gothic: Yes

Would I play more? Honestly my time with this game might’ve actually sold me on trying to play through at least one Piranha Bytes RPG. Not right now though.

So hey remember how last week’s game was Arcania: Gothic 4? And remember how my write-up on that was essentially dropping a laundry list of Gothic things it doesn’t do? Well, I have great news: Risen is a Gothic. Don’t feel like I need to repeat it all here, but it’s a single character, classless RPG whereupon the player character is a nameless, vaguely Germanic dude who enters a closed, conflict-filled space and immediately finds himself torn between factions. Instead of an open-air prison with a magical barrier, it’s a Mediterranian-ish island where ancient temples have been rising (risen?) out of the ground. There are the bandit-ish dudes living out in the swamps! There are the inquisition dudes in town and at the monastery!

Say what you will about Piranha Bytes, it really does seem like they’ve nailed making different variations on the same game for the last 20 years; at least well enough to remain in business. Even in my short time with the game, I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of the hierarchies, politics, and weird pecking order in the bandit camp, and I was generally… surprised at how non-awful most of the voice acting was. It was almost like I was seeing what other people claimed these games were good at for ages, which was a weird experience after bouncing so hard off the original Gothic. It probably helps that Risen has a control scheme that isn’t a keyboard-only unintuitive monstrosity, or that I spent more than 30 minutes with it. Either way, it has my attention.

Now, the caveat to all of this is that I sure did spend a large portion of my time on stream solving petty delivery quests and dying to anything more dangerous than a giant bug or sickly wolf with the decidedly clunky combat. I’m to understand that’s the game working as intended, and I think knowing exactly what kind of game this is helped frame my expectations. I started feeling a little lost and aimless near the end, trying to poke around until I found something that wouldn’t kill me, but I guess overcoming that is also part of the game. If nothing else, I sure did have a more enjoyable time than I did with Gothic 4, which had all of the EuroJank flavor with none of the interesting, overly-ambitious substance. I still don’t know if I have the exact amount of patience to deal with Gothic Risen’s very deliberate, grinding brand of bullshit, but I think I’d seriously consider trying to find out. Consider this another one on the “would consider doing something more with on stream” shelf.

Betrayal in Antara

Developer: Sierra On-Line

Release Date: July 31, 1997

Time Played: A little under two hours

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Number of human beings who have thought about playing this video game in the Year of Our Lord 2020: I have to assume it’s just me.

Would I play more? You look at that “Time Played” and you ask me that question again.

If you couldn’t tell my basic level of patience for streaming janky RPGs has actually decreased as this feature has gone on, I present to you my time with Betrayal in Antara. It was the first game in a while that felt like a real “one and done” stream, even if it’s hardly the worst thing I’ve looked at. The spiritual successor to Betrayal at Krondor, the 1993 DOS RPG based on Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar novels, Antara was mostly picked over that game because: A. It’s less well-known and B. It’s worse. It’s probably one of the more obscure games I’ve covered on this feature outside of maybe Wizards and Warriors or Thunderscape, which is weird because it’s actually sold in a bundle alongside Betrayal at Krondor on GOG.

It certainly resembles what I remember of BaK, between the strange, tile-based combat system, very talk-y prose, and exploration/management mechanics. Indeed, the story of noblechad William Escobar and his pet incel wizard boy Aren Cordelaine definitely seems like it might go somewhere, complete with the requisite amount of 90s snark you’d expect… but eh. I spent almost two hours hitting pirates with sticks in un-tactical combat and wasn’t entirely sure how much longer it would take before the game got good or even “good.” I’ll give it this: the voice acting is better than most other games of this era, and there sure is a lot of it. Similarly, the character portraits are hilariously bad in a way that evokes educational material or maybe WikiHow, and it has paper doll inventories, which I can always get behind. However, after replaying through all of Pillars of Eternity and starting on the second, my RSI has been acting up like crazy. Unfortunately, Betrayal in Antara didn’t hook me enough to justify being in actual physical pain, so I guess it’s fortunate the next game on the wheel is one that seems meant for a controller.

Needless to say, if you’re wondering what kind of dubious RPGs that would be worth being in pain for, that playthrough of Dragon Age II will happen… eventually. Playing Pillars right after Dragon Age Origins really doubled down my point that DAO is a less special and interesting game removed from the context that it came out in, and playing Pillars II feels like an additional nail in that coffin. Fear not! There’s still absolutely a part of me that wants to re-experience the slow motion trainwreck of DA II for the first time since it came out, and I still intend on getting back to it before the end of the year.