When the protagonist of Bioshock Infinite, Booker Dewitt, arrives in the floating city of Colombia, local police set out to obtain an account of the false prophet they had long anticipated. The only problem is that they whip the masses into a frenzy of xenophobia for years. And when they talk to witnesses, biased fear is everything they are back.
On the radio, I heard that Booker was either a mixed race dwarf or a French man with no left eye – 4 feet and under 9 inches. And when DeWitt stumbles on a sketch artist who puts together facial composites, the conversation he overhears is far sexual.
“He was taller than that… slim. His eyes were even further apart. He was bigger. A bit. His hair… hmm, red, curly? He looked Irish to me. Yes, oh, he was certainly an anarchist.
It’s stupid, but it’s one of the subtle touches of Bioshock Infinite – the way developers’ irrational games show how backward society is being undoubted by their own narrow belief systems. And that came to mind during this summer’s Xbox showcase. There, the clockwork revolution has finally been revealed on a massive scale.
BioShock Infinite was an immediate and obvious reference point for a first-person action game that deals with Victoriana and Time Twist Mechanics in order of century. We’re going to “play in the mud” rather than in the sky, but Inxile’s new game depicts a society in which power imbalances are connected to the atmosphere of powder kegs. Here, traditional rifles and temporary magic and gunfights are fought on the factory floor. Using a wrist flick will bring the pile of tiled rub back into the wall and cover it behind it. It all matches very closely with the memory of the swans in Irrational.
There is even an early scene in which an angry nobleman in the police station lobby provides an account of an eyewitness of a suspected robber. “Thigh…built quite slim,” the Lord mutters to the mechanical constable. “Well, muscular. He was very fast and agile. His mustache. No, big!”
However, this time, takeaways are very different. What Inxile emphasizes is not bias, but the flexibility of its character creation tools. Among them, because Clockwork Revolution is not a first-person shooter game, but a Western RPG in the wasteland tradition, the Bard’s Tale and Plane Landscape: Suffering – all the games the studio has provided successors in the past.
At the beginning of the campaign, you can define your background as Geasmith, who ran through life, or as the real thing saved from an orphanage by a wealthy sociologist. Choose from traits with names such as Street Stalker or Steam Whisperer and distribute attribute points to determine your resistance to chemicals and conversational atmospheres. Your journey back to the past will send ripples into the future and change the nature of the cities around you – an appetizing prospect for RPG-reactive fans.
In fact, despite its first appearance, the clockwork revolution has nothing in common with Ken Levine’s Opus. 2. The upcoming sequel to Obsidian, also featured in this year’s Xbox Game Showcase, focuses on similarly reactive world building and many custom kills that make up truly unique player characters. As game director Brandon Adler explained directly in Outer World 2, you are cast in the role of the Earth Station Agent – essentially Sky Marshall. However, the game does not lock down the background or personality of your character. You may have joined the Directorate General to avoid unpaid warrants for crimes you committed. Or you might be a scam and run a coast with the fatal reputation you gained through accidental killing. You can’t become a Geass Miss, but you can become a Looster Bout that fails upwards.
Both games share the quality of the wizard in the direction of art, with a slightly flashy palette and overwing armor design that look like John M. Chew chose. They don’t scream that they’ll be taken seriously – especially in the clockwork revolution, not when mechanical dolls are screaming to “steer your dirty picker away from me.” In either case, its top tone actually helps support granular RPG systems. It not only fits into the biggest hits of the genre, but also creates room for character decisions.
For a specific example of that last point, look at the flaws of the outer world 2. If you have bad knees, you’ll move faster throughout the game – but your joints pop up every time you get up from your crouch, signaling your position to nearby enemies. And if you are a Kleptomania, your character may grab the items you are looking at in the store without warning – leaving you with the task of explaining yourself to the security guard. Is that trade-off worth the better price you get when selling loot? You can only decide.
In unconventional power fantasy, you can choose to be foolish in Obsidian RPGs. This not only makes conversation embarrassing, but also allows you to shove a bunch of hot dogs into a fuse box to repair your computer. This range of intentionally ridiculous decisions is undoubtedly reflected in the clockwork revolution. In the trailer, the protagonist repeatedly ignores the devouringly intimidating shopkeeper and instead speaks to his Underling Errol. After an unwise dialogue option, poor Errol splattered onto the floor, his head was hit by a candlestick by his upset employer. “Brain,” Alfie laughs. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.”
Such a scenario is surprising – it is rare in RPG genres where character and dialogue choices are often familiar. More importantly, they would not simply belong to the more serious universe of obsidian avowed, or the tide of Numenella, which is the suffering of Inksil. In other words, the absurdity of these settings can help keep this genre diverse and fresh, and perhaps even push it forward.
Of course, Zanness has an acquired taste, and it could potentially step into the realm of tones that these games become lattice rather than satisfying. However, the nature of choice-driven RPGs is that their most extreme aspects are optional. If you can hit enemies with beats, you don’t force them to use Spectrum Dance Saber, the musical sword from Outer World 2, which rewards you with a damage bonus. It is your choice and the tone of your experience can be adjusted to your taste.
For now, I look forward to building my own cockney criminal complex in the clockwork revolution – with the help of a suspicious robot constable when I put points into social skills. “Why do you think they are so charismatic?” he asks carefully. “Was this not Gilt’s girlfriend?”
Jeremy Peel is a freelance journalist and friend of someone who sees photos of dogs. You can follow him on Twitter @jeremy_peel.
