My favorite android micromanagement RPG, is here. With a lot of added mechanics to deal with tenser situations, that you can't back out of once the decisions are made. Permanently sealing one of the various trajectories this game takes for its characters.
I thought the first game was this intrinsic exploration into the consciousness of an A.I., and the deeply thoughtful, entrenching story with multiple branches and interesting characters brought forth a very memorable experience. With gameplay heavily leaning on RNG dice based gameplay. This sequel carries that momentum in a different narrative, somewhere further away.
There are a couple of things I have gripes with, and mainly most of them having to do with gaping holes you find that sort of cheapens the experience. But it's good to see that the stress system has been revamped, and doing challenging contracts with crews is quite fun.
Much like the previous game, you select the difficulty and class of the sleeper, you have Operator, Extractor, and Machinist. Out of five skill trees: Engineer, Interface, Endure, Intuit, and Engage; each class doesn't have access to use one of them.
The classes are familiar, but their skills bonuses are different. Because now, you're going to have take chances with the tasks as this effects the dice rolls, certain tasks requiring specific trees will rather decrease outcome chances. And no, I do not think during upgrade you'll even unlock them for use. Oh, if your stress goes up, the dies take damage till they're gone.
So a small summary, you're another runaway Sleeper. But this time from a powerful crime syndicate. You, and your friend Serafin become stranded on Hexport, and must quickly leave before Laine catches up to you. There's another problem; going through reset, you've lost some of your memories.
The story and narrative will also require me to pick up bits and pieces, and often take guesses through the dialogues as well. Kind of like Disco Elysium, though a bit more anemic in its presentation. I have a personal issue with how it doesn't display the choice of dialogue I made when scrolling up. There's like information to take from the writing alone.
As if that wasn't enough, your skill trees also factors into the dialogue choices. And yeah, negative outcomes lead to different branches of the story. It's hard to find some cozy parts of the experience because you're immediately told to earn many credits as possible to get the part needed to escape further away from Hexport. Progress isn't easy, since I have a few small cycles left till Laine finds us. There are other ways, eventually introducing me to an entirely new game mechanics.
This isn't a chill game, it's made to be more anxiety inducing, as there's always something that can go wrong. This wasn't made much clear before I started doing something called Contracts. Where after fulfilling certain tasks, you meet new characters. Some of them gives me contracts, where I can even bring along new crew members too.
Now, bear with me, because this is the tricky part. These 'Contracts' are like salvage operations. It's the same kind of dice gambling, except anything can go wrong, crew members have their dies to use as well. Stress accrue, you have new situations to deal with. Be sure to also bring enough supplies, otherwise you'll starve too, which also increases stress.
Complicated is barely putting it, it's overbearing responsibility, and the first contract doesn't clearly explain the stakes till I've realized left and right what was going on. But, being in duress isn't entirely a bad thing. My machinist sleeper can actually make use of a mechanic called 'Push'.
This also increases stress, but my added benefit was that one of the dies would increase rolls. Like going from roll four to five. If I upgraded my sleeper in the long run, this can be much more useful. Coming to think of it, it seems like all these interesting mechanics will pay off in the long run. For now, my salvaging deteriorating the ship, leaving me limited time to complete my objectives.
Though, it was in my second contract, with someone named Juni that our work was exhausting. I took the rest of spending credits from my last job to get enough supplies. Yet, we stayed way longer as excavating the ship took a lot of work. It wasn't until I reached the endpoint, where Juni deviated from the objective because she stated the data core was very important.
So I had a choice to make, whether to stop her, and get the core to the employer, or help her along and see how she pays me back. In the end, she helped me get through by, of course, hacking into the employer's storage, and getting me that item before we run off Hexport.
You ready for this next one? After leaving Hexport, Laine sends a chilling transmission, and then an explosion of what seems to be from Hexport's direction blasted us of course. Landing us to the Belt. Now I'm thinking the prior crewmates, like Nia, might be dead.
My dies have also glitched, putting negative outcomes at 80%, with positive at 20%. Those ain't good odds, but some rest and later cycles would fix that up. As for the die's health, once each is dead, they can be patched up by Bliss's help, they are also helping us by fixing our ship in the Belt. But yeah, this point is after the 1/3 of the game I'm assuming does get easier.
Man, these parts of the game do bum me out, but it's not stopping me much since the amount of stories, characters, world-building is just rich and engrossing. It's one of the big reasons why the original was my favorite over 2 years ago. And this one picks up on that really well.
I know it's not perfect, there's even a loophole where you can quit to main menu after a failed roll, and do it again since autosave works in certain ways. Maybe it got patched out now. The fact that I have the options of also traveling to multiple stations amplifies the possibilities more. My next place after my ship is fixed might be Far Spindle. Wish me luck.
I really didn't expect that, for an Android game it's quite complete with a feedback dynamic that keeps the player active. Sometimes I feel that phone games are guilty of feeling incomplete or like something is missing. This game however seems quite attractive and complete. Thanks for showing.
Ahh, no, this is not an Android game. What I meant was that the main characters sre androids