In any rpg, you're going to get a division between the action-filled combat parts and the more passive story sections, and usually, even the wordiest of games tends to rely much more on the former than the latter. Consortium, so far, appears to reverse the balance. It's hard to say at just 2 hours in, because these are often the most plot-heavy, but it appears that most of my time is going to be spent in conversation menus, attempting to choose the responses that unlock the potentially branching paths through the story.
For my first time through, I'm just going to play as intuitively and naturally as possible. Which may not be as easy as it seems. There is some weird stuff lurking in the corners of this game. Like at the beginning, where one of your fellow officers is telling you about your current mission and in the process dips into information about your character's backstory. I did what I was trained to do by any number of rpgs past - respond with ignorance in order to encourage the npc to deliver more exposition. But then the strangest thing happened, the character started to get really angry with me. At first, she accused me of messing with her, and then she became concerned that I was having a mental breakdown. She sent me to see the doctor and things got really weird.
As the doctor interrogated me about my symptoms, the conversation tree gave me the option to tell him that I was a character in a video game being controlled by a player in another dimension and that everything around me was simulated. A nearby witness begged me to stop with this foolishness, but the doctor believed me and eventually put me in a sci-fi scanning device, whereupon it was revealed that I had extremely atypical thought patterns, consistent with being mind controlled by a second, artificially implanted, personality.
I may not have paid enough attention to the Steam store description. I read the words "have developed a satellite (iDGi-1) capable of opening a digital rift through time and space" and kind of just assumed that they were describing the futuristic plane the game is set on. If I'd bothered to take in the sentences both immediately prior to and immediately following that one, I'd have realized that they were, in fact, referring to the game's framing device. The conceit is that this magical satellite is in our real world and that by playing the game, I am actually accessing this satellite and communicating with an alternate reality - the world of the game. Consortium actually takes place on a high-tech, but otherwise normal airplane, and not, as I originally thought, in some sort of time-traveling, dimension-hopping space plane.
Why the game needs this framing device, I can't say. Presumably it's going to have some kind of payoff, later on, but for now, despite having incontrovertible physical evidence that my character, Bishop 6 (a code name), has been compromised by an unknown third party, the Consortium has decided to let me keep doing my highly-sensitive, if vaguely defined, military/police troubleshooter job. Maybe it's just an in-joke, meant to make fun of idiots like myself that insist on staying to the perverse and nonsensical path of total ignorance, but if that's the case, why tout it as a selling point on the game's Steam page?
The practical upshot of this detour is that I am not completely lost about who I am and what I'm supposed to be doing. Someone's been murdered, and despite being in a confined space, with a limited number of people, nobody's a suspect and aside from assigning me to investigate, my superior officers in this secret(?) military(?) organization appear to be mostly content with waiting until the plane lands and having the professionals on the ground handle the investigation.
I think what I'm supposed to do is observe as much as I can, read the in-game lore documents, and then, because multiple playthroughs are explicitly canon, thanks to the game's framing device, use my knowldge from the first run to make better choices on subsequent runs. But if that's the case, I haven't quite gotten into the spirit of the thing yet. So far I'm playing as if I were a nameless detective with severe amnesia, bumbling my way through this investigation with zero law-enforcement instincts.
I'm hoping it will all make sense in the long run.
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