May Millennials 10: Enclave (Outro)

I wasn't able to fully come to terms with Enclave's issues - primarily how much combat is a crapshoot, given its weird ideas about what attacks should hit and which should not - but I still think on the whole that it was a bold attempt at an action-RPG during a time where there very few games like it coming out. When we think "action-RPG" we (depending on how far afield you want to go) tend to think of loot RPGs like Diablo and its many clones, or slightly more recently the Souls series with its deliberate systems of parries and I-frames and attack animation priorities, or for the true OGs out there something fast and light like the Ys franchise; a game like Enclave don't really belong to any of those three schools, and possibly shouldn't count as an RPG at all despite all the familiar orcs and elves trappings. It is deliberate: you can get taken out really quickly by kiting too many enemies at once or running afoul of a sniper with nowhere to take cover, and whittling enemies down with hit and run tactics is not so much viable than essential for long-term survival (you don't get too many healing items per map, after all). It is also simultaneously a hack 'n slash free-for-all where gumption can count for much, especially if you're lucky enough to score a few headshots as you hurriedly pace away from melee enemies or can get behind enemy defenses enough times with your three-hit axe combos. It has cheap death traps, awkward (but not too awkward) platforming over bottomless pits or equally fatal lava pools, and surprise enemy spawns after grabbing key items like the ones a survival horror game might throw at you. It is a lot of things at once, and sometimes a frustrating mess, but there's something both compelling about that core (if only in a "I'm not letting it win" spiteful sense) and relatively distinct.

Another original aspect, and one I didn't get into last time, is the art direction. It has a certain "McFarlanian" '90s comic book approach to its grisly visuals: one antagonist Mordessa is just boobs surrounded by spiky gothic armor, the main antagonist demon Vatar is a real piece of work aesthetically and personality-wise, and the game creates some strong contrasts between the idyllic fantasy tableau of the titular Enclave, which was the only part of the world to retain magic, and the more desolate and ugly Outlands from which the genocidal hordes of the orcish Dreg'Atar hail. The narrator really puts the sauce on proper nouns like "Dreg'Atar" and "Vatar," rolling the Rs and making them sound more menacing, and even if the narrative is mostly boilerplate Tolkien fantasy filtered through '90s/early-'00s edginess and fractured apart due to the game's mission system (some missions are more vital to the core narrative than others, and so don't receive much pre-amble) these snippets are well-delivered.

Enclave is another game where I eventually opted for magic-users because the combat systems for melee and ranged have too much inconsistency to be all that satisfying. I spoke last time about the way arrows just clip through enemy models without touching any of their hitboxes somehow, and melee has an equally inscrutable system where swings just whiff constantly unless they hit an invisible active zone that, hopefully, isn't the one belonging to the shield an enemy is holding. Spells, meanwhile, are very rarely deflected by shields (distant enemies won't know to raise them a lot of the time) and have a homing effect, which mitigates a huge amount of the annoyance though perhaps adds a pervasive sense that you've put the training wheels on - it's sort of like auto-aim in many shooters; sometimes entirely necessary due to the way certain games have their systems set up, but it can't help but feel like turning on Babytown Frolics mode every time. A couple of late-game magic staves can really make the game trivial: a Darkness of Despair staff which hits enemies with significant poison debuffs to an extent that you can hit them once and then wait it out, and a Psionic Domination staff that can track and hit enemies through walls. With the latter, all you need to do is get behind cover and point the staff at the general direction of where you think a foe might be standing and it'll do the rest. A little cheap, perhaps, but then the game never stops being cheap to you either.

The most entertaining aspect of Enclave remains its level design, which like a Tomb Raider or Doom stage is relatively straightforward but for the occasional circuitous lever or key puzzle, but stacked with tons of secret niches and caches to find. Collecting all the gold on the stage has significant gameplay benefits - we discussed in the Intro blog that your gear loadout is dependent on how much capital you have to work with, and that includes extra potions and ammo for safety - but also makes the game occasionally feel like a Banjo-Kazooie style 3D platformer in how you're checking every corner, looking above in the rafters and below off cliffsides, and following every narrow ledge around buildings to find more elusive bags of cash and gemstones. More than once I've reached the end of a level, with the exit portal directly in front of me, and noticed that I'm missing 5 from the stage's gold total. Was it too well-hidden? (Probably.) Did the enemy that dropped it accidentally fall off the world? (They do that a lot, but rarely in a glitchy way.) Is it worth giving the level another sweep for such an insignificant amount? (Always.)

Before we're done here, I just wanted to clarify some things about the Dark campaign. I intimated in the Intro blog that the Dark campaign looked to be a mirror of the original Light campaign, but there's actually many significant differences and entirely new level design to be found in that campaign, as well as a completely different difficulty curve. To wit, the Dark campaign begins much harder because it doesn't feel the need to hold your hand and tutorialize, but the experience of playing through the Light campaign and knowing how to adjust to the game's tricks makes the rest of that curve a little more gentle. The Dark campaign also has fewer boss fights, one less stage overall, and its version of the sorceress character seems even more deadly - which tracks, because I had a real hard time dealing with enemy sorceresses in the Light campaign - so I ended up breezing through the thing in a matter of hours. There's still enough new material in that campaign to make it worth playing through, even if you're not generally a fan of helping the bad guys win.

Overall, I enjoyed Enclave not just as a curious relic of where Starbreeze got its start but in how many of its high points - the level design, the strong but not insurmountable difficulty, a loadout system that rewards explorers and secret-finders - are still as valid today as they've always been. It definitely also feels like a game that no-one really makes any more, given the advent of Soulsborne kinda changed that particular corner of the RPG genre mostly for the better (though Souls does also have some fun hiding treasures where you least expect, and often with some platforming danger involved in reaching them). I'm not sure Starbreeze is in any hurry to revisit that universe: they apparently ran into some legal issues when first developing the sequel, so maybe they're happy to focus on other properties or, presently, stick to publishing/supporting Payday instead. If they ever do decide on a remake or successor though, and maybe decide to rebuild that combat engine to be a bit more forgiving and accurate, I could see it doing well enough. More so than all these THQ remasters at least.

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