Consortium - 4/20 hours

I was worried about potentially spoiling the end of Consortium, but I'm not sure that's actually possible. There were events that happened, but putting them in the context of a narrative might be a bit difficult. The fact that you're playing a game in the world of the game is mentioned often enough that it feels important, but it's so confusing that I couldn't tell you why it's important.

The problem may be that Consortium is not a complete story. It is merely the first part of a trilogy. Plots are set up, but they're not resolved. Granted, I didn't solve the game's central mystery, so it's likely that some of this comes down to my incompetence, but the game ends on a cliffhanger. It tells you which of your decisions are significant, but nothing about their consequences. Presumably, they're waiting for game 3 to do that, but seeing as how game 2 is still in early access, I'm not expecting that to happen any time soon.

I should probably just learn to enjoy the texture of the experience. Appreciate the subtle differences in dialogue and context that come from making different decisions and befriending different characters. It would fit the game's intimate scale. It's set in a confined space, with only a dozen or so characters, and it's over in four hours. I should be expecting depth rather than breadth.

And who knows, maybe it's there, but the game flat-out tells you that it always ends the same way, with you falling out of an airplane in a sabotaged freefall suit, having failed to detect the second traitor in the organization. Can there really be enough variation in-between for the game to be satisfying on five different playthroughs? I'm skeptical.

It's not that I don't think there will be some significant differences in the story, it's just that you're given a detailed list of all the significant choices that might have branching consequences and while combinatorial explosion might mean that there are thousands of technically different playthroughs, the realities of making a game (or, for that matter, telling a story) mean that they should all be fairly close to each other in feel.

It remains to be seen how big an issue this is going to be. Even if I weren't doing this for the blog, I'd probably play Consortium at least 2 more times - once to see what happens in a totally nonlethal game and again to see what happens if I choose the "say nothing" option every time it becomes available. I also want to discover the identity of the traitor, purely for my own edification. Playthrough 4 is going to be the real test of this game. That's when I'll be moving outside my normal crpg patterns and start playing the game purely because it promises to be different.