Hey guys,
other than being the guy that maintains the monthly Indie threads and currently the Steam sale hidden gems thread, I am also someone to sometimes annoy this forum with individual threads about games that completely amaze me.
And todays spotlight is for Inquisitor!
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Info Box
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Genre: Isometric RPG (think: Baldurs Gate 1)
Price: $3 in the Reboot Bundle with Tropico Collection, Zeno Clash 2 and Hard Reset, $3,39 in the Steam sale, usually $9,99
Platform: Windows
Links: Steam, Website
Challenge level: 5/5 - Super oldschool challenging
Length: 100-200 hours
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So what is this?
-------------------------------------------------------------
This might become a bit long, but consider it preparation for the game, as the game requires reading comprehension and has a SHIT TON of text. The game has quite a few flaws and I am trying to stay rather objective here to give a fair assessment of the game for you as a recommendation, because your enjoyment of this game will hinge on how much you can put up with the game's oddities. I'll say it up front now: I enjoy the game immensely and with some fixes and balancing patches, this could be among the best games in the genre, standing up there with the Spiderweb and Black Isle games. However, and this shall serve as the mantra for this text: The End of the World is not convenient.
Setting:
The game is set during the inquisition era with hell spawn crawling all over the earth, fire slinging bats, poison spitting spiders, stone trolls, orc families, ogres, skeletons, astral projections, haunting ghosts.. you name it. And thats just the stuff you encounter in chapter 1 out of 6. You have been called to a city which seems to be the centre of some very strange accidents and crimes and your task is to aid the inquisition in finding out more about these incidents. Were there really demons flying around the city during the last thunderstorm? Who killed the merchant, sliced off his genitals and put them in his mouth? And why? Where are the missing townsfolk? And most importantly, did Linda cheat on her husband? Those and more questions you'll likely encounter within the first 30 minutes of playing. The way Inquisitor exposes you to the story is text. Lots and lots of it. You start the game by killing off some bats and then you likely spend about 5-6 hours of exploring the first city and talking to people. You might as well consider this game half interactive novel, half running away from trolls trying to beat your head to a pulp. There is more condensed reading here than in Planescape Torment if that rings a bell.
Huge amount of text:
That might sound intimidating if you just want to play a game and kill some orcs, however all that text serves a purpose. I can honestly say that its been a long time since I felt this immersed into a game world. The english translation might not be perfect overall, but considering the amount of text here, the quality of the writing is still rather astounding and walking around the first city, talking to townsfolk about gossip and their opinion on the recent events really makes them come to life. The game also ties this huge amount of text cleverly into some other game mechanics, which means you cant just skip over the text to get to other parts of the game. Naturally, this will impact your enjoyment, since you likely wont be as immersed in the world as I was, but it will also actually impact your ability to grasp what is going on, where you need to go, who you need to talk to, how you should prepare for certain areas and which areas you better ignore. There is a handy notebook keeping track of the most vital information (which you absolutely should read every time something new has been added), but reading the full conversations will give you insight on more subtle hints. One example would be that I was helping a certain character for which another character was voicing clear antipathies for. Instead of being able to talk and trade with both of these, my choice of helping character A, led to better prices from A in trading, but the reluctance of B to talk to me at all. Another example, and I love how this ties back into the inquisition theme, is that you can accuse someone of a crime and if you go by your notebook and the collected evidence you might get him to be executed, but if you consider more conversations about that accused person, then the picture might not be as clear. Will you accuse people based on the first evidence you find or will you dig deeper?
Okay, text. What else?
The combat itself is strictly speaking turn based, but has no pause/plan function. Imagine Baldurs Gate 1 without the ability to order commands in a pause screen. I dont know why the game doesnt have that, and its definitely missing something like that to make the combat a bit more approachable, but you can at least go into your inventory (which pauses the game) and equip yourself with other skills or use potions on yourself and your allies (a feature you will use a lot). In the beginning, you are stuck with some basic attack options and fairly simply equipment. Eventually, you'll start using your skills, learn more skills, level up your ability to use more sophisticated weapon and armor (with yummy extra effects) and are presented with a variety of spells, usable items and skills to use in the situations the game throws at you. So far so good, but lets get to the second issue that will be a deal breaker for many.
Difficulty
I'd divide the reasons for the high difficulty into these 3 categories:
1. High difficulty balance
If you want to find companions/subordinates to help you, you'll need to find them. Exploring and talking to everyone is a necessity. Almost every monster can easily kill you, and with the exception of the normal bat variant (the first monster of the game), all the others still can if I am being careless after 14 hours of playtime. Equipment breaks, poison sucks HARD and the game will frequently throw some challenges at you that feel unbeatable. Figuring out how to deal with any of those issues is an interesting challenge, but expect to save/reload a lot. Here is one example: Pretty early on you can encounter a poison puddle inside of a cavern. If you walk across it, you and your companions die 99% of the time and just past that spot are a few tough enemies that will pick you off once you passed the puddle. What are you going to do? There are multiple ways to deal with this actually, but I'll let you figure out a solution yourself.
2. Unorthodox game design and difficulty spikes
The game is challenging all the time, but there are some things we take for granted in these games that doesnt apply here. There is a spell that lowers the chances of being poisoned, but once you are poisoned, you'll quickly learn to hate it since there is no antidote (at least I didnt find one so far) and your only option is to deal with poison draining your HP for 200 seconds. Another example would be how games usually deal with dungeon progression. Lets say easy dungeon, slightly harder dungeon, medium dungeon, etc. Ignoring the fact that all dungeons here are hard and bosses might just 1 hit K.O. you once you meet them the first time, going from hard 1-2 level dungeons in chapter 1 to a whopping 10-fucking-level-monster dungeon at the end of chapter one with AoE Fireballs slinging bats and orc shamans is just downright devious. Its not impossible, but it sure doesnt feel fair if your equipment breaks at level 8 and you run out of potions. Oh, speaking of which:
3. The End of the world is not convenient
Now we get to the parts that will put off another huge chunk of interested players, mainly because there isnt any justification for these and it really downgrades the overall quality of the product from what could be a stellar game. The game doesnt explain its game mechanics. For example, it took me quite a while to notice that your character attacks less (and seems to have less accuracy) if you run out of Stamina, so keep those yellow potions at hand. You'll also do a lot of inventory sorting to use your items and regularly sorting 4 pages without an automatic inventory sorting option is quite nasty. Or how about the action hotbar, which allows you to modify the spells and skills you want to quickly use. Considering you'll turn into a jack of all trades before long, you'll need stealing, lockingpicking, fire resistance, ice resistance, water resistance, healing, reviving, stamina regeneration, accuracy buffs, damage buffs, slots for potions and some more intricate spells, but you only have 10 slots. Considering the game pauses in the inventory, you can switch around active skills, but its certainly not convenient in the middle of a fight. Oh and yeah, remember those Diablo town portals? Combine not having those town portals (at least in the first chapter) with the aforementioned 10 level dungeon and broken weapons at level 8. Even though I decimated most enemies, the game made sure that just getting back out stayed exciting due to me only having bare fists to fight with and the help of my subordinates.
So why did you play 14 hours in one sitting?
Admittedly, part of that was that I havent played a decent isometric RPG in quite a while, but even despite its flaws, the game is really darn engaging. I havent been as immersed in a story for a long time, and the huge odds the game throws at you never feel completely impossible and are just hard enough to make me want to learn another skill and try again in 1-2 game hours or to come up with creative solutions. I think I spent the last 4 hours of my playsession in that aforementioned dungeon, despite it already being very late with the "just one more level" syndrome. In the end I noticed I might not make it all the way to the end, so I wanted to get as far as possible and then pull back out for another try with fresh equipment and resources the next day.
If you like well big amounts of well written story text, challenging games, exploring game mechanics to figure out the best way to handle situations instead of being told what to do and can look past the issues the game undoubtedly has, Inquisitor might just turn out to be one of the most interesting RPGs you ever played. Objectively judging the whole package its probably in the 7/10 range, but I noticed that for certain players, this game might just turn out to be quite a bit more than that.
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Media
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-------------------------------------------------------------
Beginners Guide
-------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoyed figuring out that stuff alone and you cant totally screw yourself over, but just in case you want to be eased into the experience, there are quite a few hints that will make the start of the journey easier. Taken from here: http://levelupguides.com/inquisitor/inquisitor-beginners-guide/
General stuff:
- Press F4 to always show items on the floor
- Dont sell Devil's Roots
Spoilers:
There are 2 subordinates you can recruit in the starting area. You'll find them by thorough exploration or by doing this:
-
-
2 stats useful to boost in the beginning are:
-
-
Every skill has its fair usage in the long run, but 2 skills useful to grab in the beginning are:
-
-
other than being the guy that maintains the monthly Indie threads and currently the Steam sale hidden gems thread, I am also someone to sometimes annoy this forum with individual threads about games that completely amaze me.
And todays spotlight is for Inquisitor!
-------------------------------------------------------------
Info Box
-------------------------------------------------------------
Genre: Isometric RPG (think: Baldurs Gate 1)
Price: $3 in the Reboot Bundle with Tropico Collection, Zeno Clash 2 and Hard Reset, $3,39 in the Steam sale, usually $9,99
Platform: Windows
Links: Steam, Website
Challenge level: 5/5 - Super oldschool challenging
Length: 100-200 hours
-------------------------------------------------------------
So what is this?
-------------------------------------------------------------
This might become a bit long, but consider it preparation for the game, as the game requires reading comprehension and has a SHIT TON of text. The game has quite a few flaws and I am trying to stay rather objective here to give a fair assessment of the game for you as a recommendation, because your enjoyment of this game will hinge on how much you can put up with the game's oddities. I'll say it up front now: I enjoy the game immensely and with some fixes and balancing patches, this could be among the best games in the genre, standing up there with the Spiderweb and Black Isle games. However, and this shall serve as the mantra for this text: The End of the World is not convenient.
Setting:
The game is set during the inquisition era with hell spawn crawling all over the earth, fire slinging bats, poison spitting spiders, stone trolls, orc families, ogres, skeletons, astral projections, haunting ghosts.. you name it. And thats just the stuff you encounter in chapter 1 out of 6. You have been called to a city which seems to be the centre of some very strange accidents and crimes and your task is to aid the inquisition in finding out more about these incidents. Were there really demons flying around the city during the last thunderstorm? Who killed the merchant, sliced off his genitals and put them in his mouth? And why? Where are the missing townsfolk? And most importantly, did Linda cheat on her husband? Those and more questions you'll likely encounter within the first 30 minutes of playing. The way Inquisitor exposes you to the story is text. Lots and lots of it. You start the game by killing off some bats and then you likely spend about 5-6 hours of exploring the first city and talking to people. You might as well consider this game half interactive novel, half running away from trolls trying to beat your head to a pulp. There is more condensed reading here than in Planescape Torment if that rings a bell.
Huge amount of text:
That might sound intimidating if you just want to play a game and kill some orcs, however all that text serves a purpose. I can honestly say that its been a long time since I felt this immersed into a game world. The english translation might not be perfect overall, but considering the amount of text here, the quality of the writing is still rather astounding and walking around the first city, talking to townsfolk about gossip and their opinion on the recent events really makes them come to life. The game also ties this huge amount of text cleverly into some other game mechanics, which means you cant just skip over the text to get to other parts of the game. Naturally, this will impact your enjoyment, since you likely wont be as immersed in the world as I was, but it will also actually impact your ability to grasp what is going on, where you need to go, who you need to talk to, how you should prepare for certain areas and which areas you better ignore. There is a handy notebook keeping track of the most vital information (which you absolutely should read every time something new has been added), but reading the full conversations will give you insight on more subtle hints. One example would be that I was helping a certain character for which another character was voicing clear antipathies for. Instead of being able to talk and trade with both of these, my choice of helping character A, led to better prices from A in trading, but the reluctance of B to talk to me at all. Another example, and I love how this ties back into the inquisition theme, is that you can accuse someone of a crime and if you go by your notebook and the collected evidence you might get him to be executed, but if you consider more conversations about that accused person, then the picture might not be as clear. Will you accuse people based on the first evidence you find or will you dig deeper?
Okay, text. What else?
The combat itself is strictly speaking turn based, but has no pause/plan function. Imagine Baldurs Gate 1 without the ability to order commands in a pause screen. I dont know why the game doesnt have that, and its definitely missing something like that to make the combat a bit more approachable, but you can at least go into your inventory (which pauses the game) and equip yourself with other skills or use potions on yourself and your allies (a feature you will use a lot). In the beginning, you are stuck with some basic attack options and fairly simply equipment. Eventually, you'll start using your skills, learn more skills, level up your ability to use more sophisticated weapon and armor (with yummy extra effects) and are presented with a variety of spells, usable items and skills to use in the situations the game throws at you. So far so good, but lets get to the second issue that will be a deal breaker for many.
Difficulty
I'd divide the reasons for the high difficulty into these 3 categories:
1. High difficulty balance
If you want to find companions/subordinates to help you, you'll need to find them. Exploring and talking to everyone is a necessity. Almost every monster can easily kill you, and with the exception of the normal bat variant (the first monster of the game), all the others still can if I am being careless after 14 hours of playtime. Equipment breaks, poison sucks HARD and the game will frequently throw some challenges at you that feel unbeatable. Figuring out how to deal with any of those issues is an interesting challenge, but expect to save/reload a lot. Here is one example: Pretty early on you can encounter a poison puddle inside of a cavern. If you walk across it, you and your companions die 99% of the time and just past that spot are a few tough enemies that will pick you off once you passed the puddle. What are you going to do? There are multiple ways to deal with this actually, but I'll let you figure out a solution yourself.
2. Unorthodox game design and difficulty spikes
The game is challenging all the time, but there are some things we take for granted in these games that doesnt apply here. There is a spell that lowers the chances of being poisoned, but once you are poisoned, you'll quickly learn to hate it since there is no antidote (at least I didnt find one so far) and your only option is to deal with poison draining your HP for 200 seconds. Another example would be how games usually deal with dungeon progression. Lets say easy dungeon, slightly harder dungeon, medium dungeon, etc. Ignoring the fact that all dungeons here are hard and bosses might just 1 hit K.O. you once you meet them the first time, going from hard 1-2 level dungeons in chapter 1 to a whopping 10-fucking-level-monster dungeon at the end of chapter one with AoE Fireballs slinging bats and orc shamans is just downright devious. Its not impossible, but it sure doesnt feel fair if your equipment breaks at level 8 and you run out of potions. Oh, speaking of which:
3. The End of the world is not convenient
Now we get to the parts that will put off another huge chunk of interested players, mainly because there isnt any justification for these and it really downgrades the overall quality of the product from what could be a stellar game. The game doesnt explain its game mechanics. For example, it took me quite a while to notice that your character attacks less (and seems to have less accuracy) if you run out of Stamina, so keep those yellow potions at hand. You'll also do a lot of inventory sorting to use your items and regularly sorting 4 pages without an automatic inventory sorting option is quite nasty. Or how about the action hotbar, which allows you to modify the spells and skills you want to quickly use. Considering you'll turn into a jack of all trades before long, you'll need stealing, lockingpicking, fire resistance, ice resistance, water resistance, healing, reviving, stamina regeneration, accuracy buffs, damage buffs, slots for potions and some more intricate spells, but you only have 10 slots. Considering the game pauses in the inventory, you can switch around active skills, but its certainly not convenient in the middle of a fight. Oh and yeah, remember those Diablo town portals? Combine not having those town portals (at least in the first chapter) with the aforementioned 10 level dungeon and broken weapons at level 8. Even though I decimated most enemies, the game made sure that just getting back out stayed exciting due to me only having bare fists to fight with and the help of my subordinates.
So why did you play 14 hours in one sitting?
Admittedly, part of that was that I havent played a decent isometric RPG in quite a while, but even despite its flaws, the game is really darn engaging. I havent been as immersed in a story for a long time, and the huge odds the game throws at you never feel completely impossible and are just hard enough to make me want to learn another skill and try again in 1-2 game hours or to come up with creative solutions. I think I spent the last 4 hours of my playsession in that aforementioned dungeon, despite it already being very late with the "just one more level" syndrome. In the end I noticed I might not make it all the way to the end, so I wanted to get as far as possible and then pull back out for another try with fresh equipment and resources the next day.
If you like well big amounts of well written story text, challenging games, exploring game mechanics to figure out the best way to handle situations instead of being told what to do and can look past the issues the game undoubtedly has, Inquisitor might just turn out to be one of the most interesting RPGs you ever played. Objectively judging the whole package its probably in the 7/10 range, but I noticed that for certain players, this game might just turn out to be quite a bit more than that.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Media
-------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------
Beginners Guide
-------------------------------------------------------------
I enjoyed figuring out that stuff alone and you cant totally screw yourself over, but just in case you want to be eased into the experience, there are quite a few hints that will make the start of the journey easier. Taken from here: http://levelupguides.com/inquisitor/inquisitor-beginners-guide/
General stuff:
- Press F4 to always show items on the floor
- Dont sell Devil's Roots
Spoilers:
There are 2 subordinates you can recruit in the starting area. You'll find them by thorough exploration or by doing this:
-
Go into the sheriff building, down the stairs, talk to the dog.
Accept the main quest from the bishop, talk to master of paladins outside of town(top right), then go back to the paladin headquarters (north of the city)
2 stats useful to boost in the beginning are:
-
Speed, to move around the map faster
Intelligence, used for a variety of things and conversation checks, and you likely want to use some spells in any case.
Every skill has its fair usage in the long run, but 2 skills useful to grab in the beginning are:
-
Perception, to level 6 to find hidden passages and goodies
Identification, to level 6 since identifying items costs a ton of money.
