Next Fest: Choices That Matter

I'm very glad I decided not to review Dissimilar along with those other three demos in the last post. At that point, I'd played for just under an hour. My played time on Steam now stands at 96 minutes but that extra half an hour or so has made a big difference to what I would have said about it. I already liked it but having seen more, I really like it!

Often I find demos that have been specifically created as demos give a better indication of what the full game will be like than than those that just give you the the opening chapter or two but this does appear to be the largely unedited opening of the game. If so, it works extremely well. 

The demo opens with a disturbing black and white sequence in which the main character, Amelia, is being interrogated by a bunch of shadowy figures, whose faces can't be seen. She's clearly under investigation for something she's done and they're looking for her to give a frank and full account of whatever it is that just happened.

From there, the game moves into flashback, narrated by Amelia, as she attempts to explain everything to their satisfaction. Her flashbacks are where the bulk of the game takes place. Intermittently as you play, the scene shifts back to the interrogation and Amelia has to justify her actions or elaborate on them to the satisfaction of her interrogators. That makes for an atmospheric and somewhat unsettling start but things are only going to get worse. 

Amelia recalls leaving her evening classes around eight in the evening on Friday 8 December, 2079, intending to go home to her very exclusive and expensive Paris apartment, which we later learn her mother bought seven years ago, when Amelia started secondary school. I'm not wholly up to speed with the French education system, even assuming it won't be very different half a century from now, but I would guess that puts her in her very late teens or even her early twenties.

Amelia calls a self-driving car, one of her mother's. Amelia's family, we will learn, is very rich. And very old. And very important. In the car, Amelia calls her boyfriend and they have a long conversation about role-playing games.

This seemed quite unlikely and it gave me some mild forebodings about how arch and fan-servicey the writing might get, all of which turned out to be completely unfounded. The game is excellently written, nuanced and layered, subtle and surprising. The translation is excellent, too. 

The whole Dungeons and Dragons motif turns out to be entirely relevant and not at all a fantasy about how you can have a hot, rich girlfriend who invites you to come to her place and spend the night because her parents are away, even though your main interest in life is sitting in front of a screen, designing dungeon levels. I mean, that's totally a thing that happens, right?

While she's speaking to her boyfriend, Amelia gets a call from her mother, who I thought seemed oddly insistent on apologizing for decisions she made years ago. It's very subtle but I think there's some kind of foreshadowing there. They have something of a rapprochement and Amelia gets so caught up in the conversation, she doesn't even notice the car has left Paris and is heading out into the night. 

When she does realize she's been kidnapped by a self-driving car, she panics a bit but before she can get too distraught she gets yet another call, this time from her good friend Iris, who tells her she's behind the unscheduled change of destination. She won't tell Amelia much else except that she doesn't need to freak out and that Iris needs her for some "special project". 

That's totally re-assuring, right? I mean, you'd be fine with being abducted on that premise, wouldn't you? Especially by someone who, as we learn is the case with Iris and Amelia, you've never actually met in in person, only online.

The car ends up at a castle deep in the countryside, which is where the game finally lets the player into the action. It didn't feel like too long to wait at all. I found the whole introduction compelling. 

Amelia is less worried about being dropped in a deserted castle in the middle of nowhere by a driver-less car that promptly leaves than you might expect and for good reason. It's her castle. 

Well, her family's. They own it and it's where she spent many a happy family holiday in her childhood. At this point she's suspecting her mother may have something to do with what's going on (You think?) but she's understandably still not at all happy about it.

From then on the player has full control over Amelia's movements and actions, at least when she's not in the interrogation room. The game uses a nice three-quarter angle I found very easy to get on with and although there's a warning that it was designed with a controller in mind, I found it very comfortable to play with the keyboard. The mouse isn't used at all.

Once in the castle, gameplay comes in two parts: exploration and turn-based combat. Only part of the building is available to explore in the demo but even that seems like a lot. There are a number of rooms you can go in right away and more that open after certain criteria are met. There's also a large outdoor area with formal gardens and a courtyard and a small observatory. And there's a dungeon, although in the demo it only seems to exist to give the androids a place to hang out and... drink?

To save a lot of exposition and explanation, what happens is that Amelia finds she's been brought to the castle to play a game. A kind of LARP with androids. She acquires a tablet device that allows her to print copies of soldiers to fight for her. The tablet also protects her from attacks. When it fails, the fight ends but Amelia cannot be harmed. Or so people kept telling her. I'm not sure she or I believed it.

All fights have to be initiated by the Amelia. She's never attacked. They're all set-piece battles, clearly framed as some kind of test within the framework of the game. Both the game Amelia is playing and the actual video game. It's clever.

Initially, fights are mostly trial and error. There's little information about the opponents or their abilities  but as soon as you defeat one you learn its strategies, which you can apply to other, similar enemies. Or you could work it out from observation. In these early stages, at least, it's usually something simple like "Always attacks the person farthest away". I imagine things get more complicated later on.

The game isn't a roguelike per se but you can re-fight each battle as often as you want and you learn from each loss, so in a way it's similar. I found the fights very much scratched my itch for thoughtful, tactical, turn-based combat. They were fun. I didn't mind repeating them.

Then again, there weren't enough of them for it to become tedious. I only saw three but there was at least one more I saw the set-up for but didn't do. Although the thrust of the "game" Amelia is playing involves those fights, the game I was playing had far more to do with Amelia' trying to work out what the hell was going on. And it's a fascinating scenario.

The "soldiers" are AI-controlled robots. Or they might be. Amelia is familiar with AI and works with it in her studies. Also, her mother is deeply involved it commercially and professionally. But these are far more sophisticated units than she's used to seeing. They're so convincing, she wonders if they might be being remotely controlled by humans but the AIs say not and eventually she believes them. 

They are also humanoid, which apparently is absolutely illegal in 2079. Amelia suspects they may be some outlaw work of her mother's. It  certainly explains why she's being interrogated.

Dissimilar is one of those games that doesn't give you much in the way of exposition, relying instead on supposition and internal narrative. Everything you learn comes from Amelia's interior monologue and the increasingly probing questions she asks the AIs, none of which is able to answer her directly on anything but the game she's supposed to be playing but some of whom reveal more than they mean to anyway.

I loved all of that. It's exactly my kind of story-telling. Abstruse, veiled and elliptical. I found the world-building fascinating and the plot intriguing, too. Couple all of that to some gorgeous graphics and entertaining gameplay and you have a game that's going straight onto my wish-list.

The best part wasn't any of that, though. It was the way it ended.

There is a "normal" end to the demo, where you meet some hidden criterion and the game gives you a score, tells you you're done and invites you to carry on anyway to see anything you might have missed. I got that one. Then I carried on.

Much better was learning I could can win the game by not playing at all. Well, not "win" so much as "finish". But it felt like a win all the same.

When I play pre-defined characters in narrative-driven games, I often find myself wishing the character I'm playing would just say no sometimes. So many of the situations they allow themselves to be put in seem like nothing I would ever want to do and I wish they'd just not allow it, either.. 

It's very rare for a game to let the player enact such a refusal, for the obvious reason that to do so would completely negate the point of playing the game in the first place. It isn't unheard of, all the same. I have seen it done a couple of times. I always take the option if it's offered but it inevitably just leads to a snide "Game Over" card and either a re-start or me giving up on the game altogether (Which I have also done because, like Amelia, I can be stubborn.)

In the Dissimilar demo, and presumably in the full game, Amelia gets into a full-blown discussion with one of the AIs about what the hell is going on and why she has to put up with any of it. I was cheering her on all the way when she pushed the AI into admitting that, if she wanted to, she could just leave the castle and that would count as having completed her "quest". 

I didn't think it would come up as an option for me to take on her behalf but it did. I was exploring the grounds of the castle when I came to the main gates and saw they were clickable. I clicked them and got the option either to stay or leave. 

Obviously, I chose to leave. I was very curious to find out what would happen. 

It wasn't what the AI Barkeep had promised. He told Amelia that if she left, not only would her quest be complete but he'd answer all her questions, always assuming he knew the answers. I was hoping she'd be able to go back in and hold him to it.  

She couldn't. Instead, Amelia found herself back in the interrogation room, where a somewhat disgruntled interrogator questioned her on what happened after she went through the gates. She described how she'd been manhandled by the waiting police and bundled away, which neatly explains why she wasn't able to go back inside for the answers to her many questions. 

She went on to wonder whether she had indeed left too soon and if she wouldn't have been better off carrying on with the game. The interrogators harumphed a bit, clearly wishing she had done exactly that, then told her they were done with her. 

What happened to her after that was not revealed. Instead, the game ended with one of those Game Over cards I mentioned, only this time it felt completely satisfying, not least because it came with a note saying the game had thoughtfully saved itself when I made my decision to leave the castle, so if I wanted, I could go back and see how things would have turned out if I hadn't.

I thought that was the perfect way for Amelia to have her cake and for me to eat it. I felt she'd absolutely exerted her right to self-determination and behaved in a fully rational and intelligent manner as befitting a highly intelligent, independent young woman, while I'd made a clean and clear choice to express my own independence of thought, refusing to allow the game to control me rather than the other way around. 

That I hadn't saved the game before doing it so meant it was a final, irrevocable move, untainted by indecision or wavering, and yet I felt the developers had slipped a safety-net under me without my even noticing, so I wouldn't later be able to regret my stubbornness and curse them for allowing me to indulge it.

All things considered, an exemplary piece of game design. And, of course, one that can only work occasionally. If every game did it then we'd know it was coming and it would be the same as saving before any potentially awkward choice, something I do my best to avoid.Not that my best is very good...

Dissimilar is due to release on 9 December. I very much doubt I'll buy it then because I hardly ever buy anything on my wish-list the moment it becomes available. 

I'm pretty sure I'll buy it one day, though. I was really impressed by this demo, just in case you couldn't tell.