[blog] The Archive of Ruben

So, I have decided to start a blog here. Well, it’s not entirely accurate to say that I'm starting a blog here, it’s more like continuing one here. A bit about my history then. I’ve actually been writing a blog since 2017, just, obviously, not on this site (or in English for that matter). However, the site where I was doing this is now kinda dead. Okay, not really, not completely, but the blogging part of it certainly is. Which, honestly, was dead for quite some time now, and really, it hasn’t been all that "lively" even when I started back then. This part, I honestly wasn’t all that bothered about. I knew when I began that it wasn’t a high-traffic place, and I was fine about blogging in a small and somewhat forgotten part of the net. It was, as that Star Wars: Rogue One reaction image says, a peaceful life.

Until now that is. The real problem, though, was actually a slew of technical problems with the site. I kinda got fed up with it, and decided it was time to move on (toward greener pastures, hopefully). I thought about simply moving to a site more geared toward blogging since the previous one wasn’t primarily about that. However, that solution felt a bit, for lack of a better word, lonely.

That leads us here, the HowLongToBeat site, on which I’ve been active for quite a few years now. This seemed like the best place to start anew. Well, to continue, more like.

As an important note, English is not my native language. After nearly two decades of daily use I would like to believe I’m proficient enough in it, but let me apologize in advance, if what I’m about to write sounds slightly off (and hopefully only slightly) or isn’t entirely grammatically correct.

So, what am I going to write about? Mostly games that I’ve beaten, occasionally visual novels too. What I’m not going to write about, are games that I’m currently playing. So don’t expect weekly status updates about what I’m doing. As to how frequently I’m going to write here, not that frequently, I’m afraid. Even before, my average post count was one a month, and while there were occasions of multiple posts in a single month, there were also times when I didn’t post anything for an entire month.

The unfortunate reality is, I don’t always have much to say about a particular game. Even if I finish at least a couple of games every month, sometimes, I just don’t have anything meaningful to say, so simply I don’t write anything. For example, I recently finished Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, and I would be hard-pressed to say much more about it than I managed in the "Post your wins" thread. If anything, I will likely still be more active on that thread than here. In many ways, this blog will be the place where my extended thoughts on games can be read. (If I have extended thoughts, that is.)

Also, the very first actual post, the one after this, may not exactly be indicative of the majority of my work that you will be seeing here. Most other posts won’t be quite as long, or go quite as deep as the Disco vs. Torment will. It’s just that I put a lot of thought into why I didn’t really click with Tides of Numenera, and why, in contrast, I did with Disco Elysium. I don't have such strong feelings about most games, so such blog posts don’t happen all that often.

I guess that’s about it for this introduction. So, hello there people of the internet, and welcome to my blog: The Archive of Ruben.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

Torment: Tides of Numenera is an old-school CRPG, inspired by Planescape: Torment. Inspired so much, in fact, that it took part of its title.



A spiritual successor that aims to imitate by presenting a very unique world and story, without the usual tropes you come to expect from role-playing games. In which they succeed, the world of Numenera is a thoroughly unique place and the story is missing the usual cliches too.

As for the gameplay, there’s an interesting approach here, because there are only a few battles throughout the whole game. I only found like 3-to 4 combat situations in the first 10 hours, and half of those could be avoided as well. Hell, the game doesn’t actually call them battles either, but these "Crisis" situations, so it’s clear from the naming alone that the devs were going for something slightly different. Not that the actual combat was all that satisfying. Although I can’t exactly outright say that it’s bad, because I just spent so little time with it, that I just can’t really judge it for what it is. There might be some depth to it that I missed, but it fell pretty flat for me.

Instead of violent altercations, they tried to gameify the dialogue a bit. As a cornerstone of the genre, there are quite a lot of skill checks in the game, except it’s not a binary you can pass it or you can’t type of system. In this game, you have three different pools called: Might, Speed, and Intelect. For example, if you come across a skill check to pickpocket, it uses your character's Speed pool, you attempt it, and on a separate slider, you can decide how many points you’re going to put into it, with more points increasing your chance of success. However, your character only has ten points in their Speed pool, and who knows when the next such skill check will come. So you have to think carefully and sometimes take risks, since, especially in the early game, you can’t easily refill these pools. Or you can just savescum until you succeed since it’s chance-based. One thing to note here is that it’s not just your main character who can do these skill checks, your party members can contribute as well, so it's wise to put together your party to cover as many specializations as you can. If I were to mention one small problem with this system, is that, between your entire party, it’s all too easy to specialize in absolutely everything as the game goes on, and trivialize skill checks. That’s just a small gripe, though, the system works well enough, and it’s kind of fun.

Now, if there’s one word with which I would describe this game’s world and story, it would be different. It’s truly different from any other RPG that I played. Different, however, doesn’t necessarily mean better. Honestly, I can’t say that game managed to grab me all that much. It might have been too different even, at least for my taste.

The world and story are interesting with a lot of weird and bizarre ideas, however, they are all weird, every single one of them, and when everything is weird, then nothing is. Every new location, every character, every new quest and plotthread has some wildly new and bizarre idea behind it, and when everything is this weird then that's just the norm of this universe. I could never get all that attached to anything because I could just never get a baseline understanding of… well, anything, really. It made me feel that trying to learn anything about this world is a moot point because it most likely will never come up again. The moment we move on from something, the next quest, location, or character will be defined by a brand-new set of rules and concepts. None of which is to say that what was there was badly written, there were some genuinely engaging stories in the game.

Planescape: Torment, for all its weirdness, had its roots in traditional D&D fantasy. I had, at least, a baseline understanding of things. It’s precisely because of that baseline understanding, that you could (or at least I could) appreciate all the weird twists that the game introduced to usual fantasy tropes and storytelling. In contrast, for Numenera I sometimes felt that it was only weird, to be weirder, and because Planescape: Torment did that too. It honestly felt a little self-serving. (Of course, though, I can’t really speak for developer intent, but to me, it felt like they overdid it.)

Also worth mentioning is that the main plot thread concerning our main character is very, very reminiscent of Planescape: Torment. Naturally, with their own interpretation of it, but it felt a bit overly familiar. For all the effort the game puts into being different, they might have followed in the footsteps of Planescape: Torment’s main plot a bit too faithfully. It might have been better if the game didn’t try to be such a faithful spiritual successor.

Another problem of mine was the variety, or rather, the lack of it. As interesting as the stories and quests could be, there wasn’t much variety in the way they were told. I’m mainly talking about humor, there is very little levity in this game. It’s one weird situation after the other, always seriously told. All of which, coupled with my above-mentioned gripes, meant that after a while, especially concerning side questing, the experience grew stale for me. At least, depending on how much I found any newly introduced sci-fi concept intriguing. I also want to reiterate that the game isn’t actually badly written, not as far as I could judge, it was just a bit too much for me at times, without a chance for a breather.

Endless text and dialogue that, after the freshness of the initial weirdness wore off, I just got tired of.

None of this was helped by how little of the game is voiced. Now, I don’t want to needlessly criticize the game, since this type of game is rarely Triple-A, and considering how much text there is, the limited voicework is little wonder. Still, it would have helped a lot. I bring this point up specifically because the other subject of my writing managed to pull it off.

In the end, I want to emphasize, that despite my many issues, Torment: Tides of Numenera is not a bad game. Not at all. It creates a genuinely unique and different world with some clever solutions. If you want a serious sci-fi story with a lot of meat and unique ideas then you can’t go wrong with the game. For me, however, it seemed the game wants to be too faithful a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment and tries to be too different from everything, and in its overeager attempt it becomes hard to connect with.



No Truce with the Furies.

Or Disco Elysium, if you are so inclined. I find the project name No Truce With the Furies to be much cooler sounding. Though I do understand why it ended up with Disco Elysium, and I can also see how that describes the game better.

This is another old-school CRPG, which, yet again, is inspired by Planescape: Torment. However, unlike Numenera which couldn’t deny its source even if it didn’t literally take its title from there, in the case of Disco Elysium I would not have immediately traced it back to Planescape: Torment.

I compare these two games to one another not just because of the shared lineage, but because I simply happened to play them one after the other.

The game, this time around, takes place in a much more grounded, and closer to our times world, even when compared to generic fantasy, much less compared to the bizarre world of Numenera. We get a world like ours at the beginning of the 20th century, where, instead of trying to find our creator god while avoiding a cosmic horror, we are a police officer tasked with solving a (seemingly) simple murder case.

(Although I called its setting more grounded I wouldn’t really call it mundane, considering the sheer ubiquity of generic vaguely medieval D&D-esque fantasy the early 20th-century setting is probably a way more exotic one. I’m not actually going anywhere with this, I just thought it was ironic.)

My biggest question about this game was this: Is it really that good? Less of a question, honestly, and more like a fear. Because I only ever heard good things about this game. A rare, unanimous praise that called this title a modern masterpiece, the kind of praise you don’t hear every day. When you put the bar that high, however, you cannot not be anxious about clearing it. Thankfully, though, Disco Elysium is actually, really that good.

Due to in big part the way your skills work. It’s such a clever and unique solution that I don’t actually even want to spoil it for anyone. You better see that for yourself. Unless, of course, you already learned about what skills do in this game, it’s a five-year-old title at this point, that’s plenty of time to hear about things even if you didn’t go out of your way to learn about the game. Let’s just say that Disco Elysium approaches the usual RPG skills in a very unique and incredibly entertaining way, it defines your character and role-playing in ways I have never seen before.

What I would like to talk about, is the way skill checks work, which is another clever solution that the game employs. In most RPGs (of this kind) skill checks are the all-caps SOLUTION to every problem. Provided you can pass them skill checks are the de facto best solution to every situation and quest. Not so much in Disco Elysium, here you can’t convince the local bartender cafeteria manager to give you a room for free just because you maxed out your charisma, persuasion, and bartering skills. In this game, you can’t solve every problem perfectly or convince everyone of everything just because you put a few extra points into your skills. Well, that’s just what the game doesn’t do with skill checks, what it does is that it offers positive modifiers for them if you do specific actions. For example, you come across a freezer that has been on for decades and is now frozen shut because of it. You would need a lot of strength to force it open. Unless you are smart enough to unplug it first and let it defrost because that gives a positive modifier to the chance to succeed at that skill check. If you also equip a prybar before attempting, then your chances increase yet again. All on top of your baseline strength stat. This sort of logic applies to conversations too, instead with information. If you do your detective work properly, which is what you are supposed to do, then you can catch people lying, or already know key information before a conversation, then you can increase your chances to succeed in dialogue-based skill checks. It’s a very rewarding system since it motivates the players to do their detective work seriously by chasing down leads and putting in the legwork. None of this is to say that investing in your skills is pointless, that very much has its uses, it's just that there are other ways to succeed than simply building your character right. The above-mentioned is most prominently true for story critical skill checks, the ones that you really need to succeed at to progress.

This game’s battle system is worth a mention because it doesn’t have any. Indeed, Disco Elysium does not possess a formal combat system, making it that much more unorthodox as an RPG. The only thing you are going to be doing during the game is walking up and down the map talking to people and occasionally interacting with the environment. (While playing I actually got a flashback to playing point-and-click adventure games.) Endless dialogue and text that without variety could easily run out of steam. Similar to what happened to my experience with Numenera. Except this game nails it, even without a combat system. The writing is excellent in Disco Elysium, and humorous too! This is one of the funniest games I ever played, it constantly cracked me up. And not because they filled the text with jokes and gags, the game is plenty serious many times, if anything the whole world has a more somber and melancholic feel to it. The game simply aims to entertain with its dialogue and does a damn good job at that. Thanks to this the game feels engaging throughout even though all you do is read dialogue, and don’t have that much quote-on-quote "variety".

The strength of the writing is further enhanced with the excellent voicework, because, unlike Tides of Numenera, almost the entire game is voiced. Every line of dialogue and almost every line of narration too. It gives an awful lot to the experience. Now, I understand that full-voice acting is a modern-day luxury. Old CRPGs didn’t have it and maybe thanks to that, the people who grew up with those games, who are the target audience for these newer ones too, and who I imagine to be an older kind of gamer, might be used to the lack of voice acting. Add that these types of old-school RPGs are usually not Triple-A with an incredible amount of text, and it’s no wonder why the voiceover is so limited. But damn it, Disco Elysium is one of the best examples of how much voice acting can add to these narratives.

So yes, Disco Elysium feels like a much more varied experience than Numenera, despite the latter’s much more unique ideas. Or maybe exactly because of them. Disco Elysium could always surprise me with how certain quest of plot beats went because they often went very differently from how expected them. Expected based on my genre knowledge and gaming experience. A kind of surprise I never got from Numenera, because everything was just too different there.

I’m reminded about a certain writing advice that was given about working with familiar tropes, I don’t remember where I read it, but I think it was actually several different sources giving the same advice. It was about how when you are using well-worn tropes you should avoid copying them as is because that just leads to clichés. Putting your own twist on it is what makes it entertaining, and when people recognize the trope being used they would be excited about its execution here, so that even those who would groan after recognizing the familiar trope would be pleasantly surprised about your different execution of it. Also, your rendition of said trope should avoid being too different, too alien, because in that case, it would just be impossible to connect with it.

Now, I’m not saying that’s exactly how it went with Tides of Numenera. That they took well-worn tropes and twisted them too much. However, this analogy might just accurately describe my experience with the game, that it was too alien for me to connect with.

As to how fair comparing Disco Elysium and Torment: Tides of Numenera actually is… that’s a different question that I don’t have a definite answer for. Somewhat maybe, considering their shared source of inspiration, and same genre, but I personally mostly did it because I happened to play them after each other. They went with very different approaches and probably for different goals too. Despite my gripes with Numenera, its approach was not inherently wrong. Heck, I wouldn’t call it bad either, it’s a fascinating game with a lot of interesting ideas. However, if you only had time for one, I would definitely and wholeheartedly recommend No Truce With the Furies. And not just to hard-core fans of CRPGs but to any enjoyer of role-playing games.

I have both of these games in my backlog, although it will likely be years before I get to them. Interesting comparison!