I bought this purely because of its premise: instead of being the traditional do-gooder, you play as a minion of an evil overlord who has already won. Plus I suppose that Obsidian has a good reputation when it comes to RPGs. Unfortunately I found this to be a middling game, too small and short for the scope of the story it wants to tell and bizarrely packed with features that feel rushed, out of place and ultimately pointless.

As usual, I heard about this from Broken Forum and decided to give it a shot, thinking it’s one of those small, indie puzzle games. It turned out while this is indeed an indie game that was basically made by just one person and it has the rudimentary graphics to prove it, this may actually be the most time consuming game ever made if you want to complete it. However I could seriously question the mental health of anyone who would want to.

I bought this purely because of word of mouth on Broken Forum and apparently it is commonly considered to be an underappreciated gem. It wasn’t so successful upon first release outside of Japan but it seems that sales have slowly picked up as more people grew to understand what it’s about. One thing I didn’t realize how old the original game was. This means that although the PC release wasn’t all that long ago, the graphics still look very dated by modern standards.

For a while I kept seeding advertisements about the text-based games from the company called Choice of Games and I was intrigued. I was a big fan of both the Choose Your Own Adventure types books with no game mechanics and well as proper game books with rules and mechanics growing up, and I still love the idea of using text to tell stories in video games. Then there’s the incredible diversity of titles they have so far and how they advertise the limitless possibilities of the options available. Harness the power of your imagination indeed!

I doubt that I would ever have bought this on my own but it had really good word of mouth on Broken Forum and just fantastic worldbuilding. It’s honestly more than a bit anachronistic since we’re currently worried about global warming yet this game is all about the world freezing to death. Yet it’s undeniably a great idea for a premise and all of the game’s mechanics are built around it.

Like most people I bought this prequel entirely because of how much I liked the main game. This one is actually made by a different studio and being a prequel has no Max Caulfield and her time powers in it. Instead here you are put in control of Chloe Price and the story is all about how she gets to know Rachel Amber and become best friends. There’s a new mechanic called Backtalk which is supposed to represent Chloe’s ability to convince others to do things her way by insulting them but in practice, it’s another conversation option.

Playing this in 2019 just highlights to me that game graphics are already good enough that I don’t really care about chasing the state of the art any more. Honestly while obviously not being perfect, they look fine to me even though this game was first released in 2015. This is especially true for this series given that when the sequel, Just Cause 4, was released only last year, many people complained that its production values and graphics seemed to have regressed.