The "negative opinion" playthrough was my longest one yet. I had to save and reload several times. It turns out it's much too easy to get someone to like you by accident. At one point, I threatened to kill someone and it raised his attitude by +3 points. Granted, it was a villainous warlord, but other, less cartoonish characters had similarly unpredictable reactions. At another point, I had to reload and then completely avoid meeting a certain character because I could not figure out any way to offend him. Luckily, this involved running out in the middle of a meeting with the leader of the Consortium, so it wasn't too out of character for my irresponsible rogue agent. In the end, I wound up getting drummed out of the organization entirely.
I will give Consortium this, though - playing as an asshole did change how the game felt. It was definitely more of a thriller, with a lot more hostility and suspicion. Of course, much of that extra negativity was directed at me, but you can't have everything. My main disappointment with the asshole playthrough is that the pivotal moment of the whole story, and the most noir-ish moment in a game that is, ostensibly, a murder mystery, is one you can only witness if you fail to rescue another character earlier in the game. It wouldn't be so bad, except that the rescue mission is so easy that you'd never stumble upon it accidentally. You literally just have to walk into a room, suffer a slight bit of damage, and press the action button. In order to fail it, I had to turn around and leave as soon as I entered the chamber.
Which is a shame, because it would have been a thrilling mind-screw if I'd encountered the scene organically. One of the ship's engineers tells you some secret information and then suddenly the oxygen starts to leave the room. With his dying breath, he accuses the ship's pilot, a man who is consistently portrayed as a technical genius, but who is having a suspicious amount of trouble overriding the door lock, of being in league with the enemy. It's a great mislead, because the pilot was very aggressively friendly, and thus a good suspect for the end game, but the only reason he fails is because he's injured by the accident you failed to save him from earlier in the game. If you first see the scene as I did, after a successful rescue, the pilot manages to save the day in the nick of time and any suspicion you have of him is immediately dispelled.
I guess what I learned from this playthrough is that the content for a good mystery is there, in the game, but it's too well hidden. Consortium doesn't go out of its way to toy with you. It doesn't give you superfluous information and let you draw wrong conclusions from your bad assumptions. Instead, it requires you to deliberately search out confusion. For example, this was the first runthrough where I actually found the evidence that implicates the true traitor, but it was in a cupboard and by the time you're able to find it, the game has already trained you to ignore cupboards by having literally every other container in the game contain nothing of interest.
I'm guessing it's an artifact of Consortium being an indie game. With a game like Skyrim, there's probably a person whose only job is to go through every map and ensure that all the cupboards have a setting-appropriate amount of clutter and also the occasional useful potion or unique outfit. Or maybe there's an algorithm that does it. Either way, they had the resources to put in plot-irrelevant discoveries. A smaller production would probably need to be more parsimonious with its dead-ends.
If I were playing this game purely for pleasure, I think this is where I'd walk away. I still have 13 achievements to acquire, and several of them are plot-related, but I think I've seen 90 percent or more of the dialogue, and I'm right at the cusp where the satisfaction of learning new things is perfectly balance by the annoyance of having to watch almost everything for the fifth time. So, of course, I'm bound by honor to do violence to my memories of Consortium by repeating it until I can't stand to look at it any more. I blame Interdimensional Games. They should have made it 5 hours instead of 4.
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