You’ll still have to do plenty of reading but they do a good job of making the world look, feel, and sound unique. I will say the amount of art, voice overs, and unique environments is really impressive. A synthesis of old school and new school would have made Encased a much better game.
I can understand wanting to do a game that’s faithful to your inspirations but that doesn’t mean you can leave modern design at the door. Things like that would have gone a long way to making Encased a more engrossing experience. Not only did you need to be tactical and control the map, but you got treated to cool kill-shot animations and neat closeups. A game like XCOM put that franchise back on the map by making turn-based combat dynamic and exciting. It really comes down to a matter of personal taste and I would have liked it if they’d jazzed the formula up even just a little bit.
At least Fallout gave you enough weapons to play around with whereas Encased gives you a pistol and a shotgun to tide you over for the game’s first act, about four hours.īut if you have a ton of time on your hands and you love old school RPGs, Encased is the game for you. It’ll boil down to standing face to face taking potshots at each other until one of you dies. Facing off against multiple enemies versus you alone results in some drawn out battles.
The first act familiarizes you well enough with the game mechanics but some of the early encounters can be a bit of a slog. You can probably imagine that things don’t turn out well at said research station and the game kicks off from there setting you loose upon the world. You’ll bring only the skills of the class you choose and a basic set of gear. You play as a new Chronos employee and your first mission is to go investigate a research station that’s gone dark. The whole ethos has a ‘70s corporate vibe like if Bioshock took place in the age of disco. The plot’s a slow burn to start but here’s the gist of it: a mysterious zone called “the Dome” has been discovered in the early ‘70s and world powers form the Chronos corporation to explore and develop the strange alien technology and anomalies found there. But as a love letter it tends to go too far and reminds you just how far games have come from cycling through text conversations, searching every bin, chest, and container for loot, and trading bullets back and forth with turn-based enemies five minutes at a time. Clearly a lot of thought went into setting up the game’s world, its scenarios, and developing its story.
Games like Disco Elysium make up for simplified mechanics with story and tons of choice the old-school aesthetic in that case works but has to make up for in volume what it doesn’t deliver in looks and gameplay. A few modern touches would have gone a long way.Įncased is a good example of a game that fully embraces the long list of old school RPGs we all know and love but struggles between being overly faithful to game design now twenty years old and what modern audiences are used to and, to a certain extent, have come to expect when they buy a modern game.Tons of original art, voice overs, and environments.
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