I bought this some time back thinking that it was a relatively small, action-oriented stealth game. I was wrong as this is a fairly big game that and a fully fledged action RPG with a single character. It has a huge world, a substantial main quest and plenty of side quests, crafting, character advancement, items, NPCs, the works really. In fact, it’s so good and so well made that I consider it criminal how underrated and underplayed it is. This really is an indie gem that deserves much greater success and acclaim that it seems to have had.

The setting is a kind of techno-fantasy world that includes both techno blades and energy cannons, ruled by an all powerful tyrant known as Durgan. You are Teriel, a master thief and one of your heists turns out to be test by Durgan himself to recruit promising agents. A daemon is installed inside your head to keep you under control and give you information and you are shipped off to the penal colony of Peh. There your mission is to discover what happened to another one of Drugan’s elite agents. The ultimate objective however is to recover an Ark, an ancient repository of knowledge and power that was what enabled Durgan’s rise to power in the first place. In addition to the bandits, the wildlife and the ferals contaminated by a phenomenon known as techrot on the island, you also have to contend with the two groups that serve as Durgan’s enforcers yet are also mutually antagonistic to one another. One are the Technomagi who wear power armor and wield high tech weapons, serving as Durgan’s military and the other are the Biomancers who dabble in biological manipulation and are in the high priests of the religion that venerates Durgan as a deity.

Just as a matter of pure coincidence, the premise here is more than a little reminiscent of that in Tyranny. You play as someone who is working for an evil overlord, the Technomagi and the Biomancers are both supposed to be working for Durgan but hate each other and each have their own agenda, everyone is scrambling for a powerful artefact from the past and of course there are hidden rebels struggling against Durgan as well. But everything that Tyranny got wrong, this game gets right. Though you’re all nominally on the same side, Durgan is well aware that the two factions have their own secrets and so you’re an independent operator who must work around them. Since you’re forcibly recruited at the capital and sent to Peh, you know almost nothing about it so it makes sense for your resident daemon to feed you lore about the colony.

But best of all is that the world feels properly big enough to hold the story that the game wants to tell. The map itself probably isn’t that big compared to other open world games but it has so much verticality and so much detail that it’s more than enough to get lost in. The game engine is capable of handling lots of characters on the screen as well so you can see cities packed with people and the battles between the two factions are large and impressive rather than just a dinky few guys representing each side. Granted, the game limits how far you can zoom in so you can’t see any close-in detail but what you can see is beautiful and there’s even a proper day-night cycle. The animations are a little weak but given how small individual characters are I suppose it’s enough to be able to see what they are doing.

Gameplay-wise this has been described as similar to Thief or Assassin’s Creed and that’s true enough. Teriel can freely run, sneak, climb and jump across the map and while there is a visa system that gates your progress, the island is actually fully open to exploration right from the start and you can find alternative routes around the checkpoints if you want. Teriel can fight, and indeed once you get better gear and a fully slotted skill chip, you become almost unstoppable. However as all enemies can respawn and indeed many monsters instantly respawn when you reload from a save, after a while you realize that it’s easier to just sneak and run past them. As there are no experience points or levels in this game, the skill chips are the primary means of character advancement. They’re like implants that boosts Teriel’s stats, more damage, faster movement, health regeneration etc., and can also grant access to special powers.

In practice, I find that Seven is mostly challenging as an exploration game with a side of puzzle solving. Often you can see where you want to go and the hard part is figuring out what path you need to take to get there, which can sometimes be quite convoluted. Fights are difficult at first but trivial later. Sneaking requires patience and can be fun, as you use disguises to help you infiltrate heavily defended bases and the cover of darkness to limit the range of the enemy vision. But eventually you unlock the invisibility ability which makes this trivial. One of my complaints is that this is really the only special ability that is worth using. The rest are combat focused but fights are already so easy that you hardly need to bother with them. If all else fails simply sneak attack enemies. Depending on how tough an enemy is, it may not be an instant kill but it does so much damage that the fight is all but won.

One thing from Tyranny that I may have liked to see is a reputation system. There is none whatsoever here so even if you piss off someone by say stealing something, you can just run away and come back later and they’ll have forgotten what has happened. Similarly you can kill Technomagi and Biomancers by the dozen and they’ll still happily give you quests. In any case, at least the quests here are all excellent and interesting, involving plenty of sneaking into cool places and stealing things. Some are quite involved, such as infiltrating a posh party as a guest, or being shipped as slave labor to work in a meat packing plant. I also like how this game’s equivalent of a fast travel system is implemented by hitching a ride on the rail network that crisscrosses the island. But in order to use it, you must infiltrate and hack the control station of each segment of the network.

The sheer openness of the game itself and how you can go anywhere was itself a problem for me as I loved the exploration so much I frequently found myself in places that I had to revisit later as part of a quest. That’s kind of annoying and worse, on at least one occasion, it seemed to break a quest when I found something before I was supposed to. I also had to deal with rather common crashes, not so much as to be unplayable but it would usually crash at least once per gaming session when loading from a save. Finally the ziplines look cool but I used them very rarely. They are only one way and it can be difficult to see and later remember where each one goes.

It isn’t difficult to guess where the story is going or what’s up with the daemons but I still found it to be fairly original as we haven’t seen too many games in this kind of setting before and it sure is a whole lot more coherent than many fantasy games. The edition that I played includes the DLC which adds even more things to do to an already very packed game. There are parts that could be improved such as how all those special abilities don’t seem to matter very much and even the crafting system could be done away with without much consequence. But overall this was a fantastic game for me, being the story that Tyranny wanted to tell and yet outdoing it in every way. I’m frankly shocked that so few people seemed to have played it, judging by how few responses I’ve been able to find on the net when I searched for some solutions to quests. This game seriously deserves more sales and more attention, so please help.