Hard to Be a God Review
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Story & Setting The Noon universe as a setting is sure to turn some heads. There's a lot of potential in its particular combination of science fiction and high fantasy. The possibilities it offers are fairly well utilized in the novel, which takes the perspective of how hard it is to do good for lesser beings as a (god), but how well does the game do this?
Well, the game's plot is pretty good, but this is mostly nullified by the fact that it's pretty hard to understand what's going on. There are two reasons for this: on the one hand the game doesn't both to introduce you into the backstory or setting, on the other hand bad localization means you won't understand much of the longer expositions.
The first is obviously caused by the fact that this game was made in Russia for Strugatsky fans and the game makers assumed you'd be familiar with the backstory, kind of the same way BioWare assumes that for Knights of the Old Republic here. Working on that assumption, you're offered no backstory or much of an explanation about who is who to start of the game.
And that's fine for Russia, but it is the task of the publisher abroad to ensure that people who haven't read the book the vast majority here can still understand what's going on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they didn't, which leads to a feeling of being tossed into the world with no clue. Partially this makes sense, because you're supposed to flounder about a bit while unravelling the plot, but a part of this is just a bad set-up.
The second is typical of bad translating. The plot is deliver through long expositions from the key NPCs including (Stranger) (see more about him and why I hate him later on). While you should be able to get the gist of what they're talking about in those expositions, the plot is pretty sensitive to nuances and details that haven't carried over well. It's a plot full of intrigue and back-stabbing and political powerplay, but it'll take added effort to unravel because of these flaws.
But it is complex, and it will take you right until the end to figure out what's going on, who was doing what all this time and of course that the world is a terrible place. The bleak vision on humanity carries over well, even into the endings, none of which are very positive or heroic (I could find 3, not sure if there are more).
The game follows the events of the book, and you arrive on Arkanar shortly after the book's ending. I'm not huge Noon fan, but even I can tell the game makers took some daring liberties with the story. I'm not that surprised that fans reacted with (they raped the book's story), but it's not really all that bad. The story is good even with elements that will annoy Noon fans.
As for the setting, most of the game is really just medieval-style fantasy. If you're really expecting a complex mix of science fiction and medieval, don't look here. Science fiction replaces some of the standard functions of magical items: there are magical (temporary booster) potions and high-powered armour and weapons, like an armour that slowly heals you, weapons that add points in your skill or stamina, a gun that is functionally a really powerful crossbow (though with sparse ammo). These will make your character significantly stronger, but they're functionally the same as (sword +1) in a D&D game.
The combination of levelling up and these items do stack up to making you feel like a (god) amongst these mortals, as you should hardly break a sweat in the end if you single-handedly storm a fortified castle held by a contingent of guards and slaughter them all. But the world does become stronger as you progress (not through level scaling, but through story progression), meaning you do have to keep your wits on you during combat.
One positive note here is the world design. Particularly the design of cities is very detailed. The city lay-out is very real. They are delightfully hard to navigate without a map in a way that feels pretty natural instead of frustrating.
Dialogue & Gameplay
Here we come to a really mixed bag. Dialogue is plentiful and if you try to see past the bad translations not all that bad. But it's so one-sided it hardly deserves the name (dialogue). The only player input is pressing enter at set intervals to select the one and only option available to you, where the game determines for you that you're feeling angry or that you changed your mind about killing someone.
About 90-95% of dialogue is like this, the rest are options like (convince or fight) or spots where you can ask a handful of questions. Situations where you have real choices in dialogue are pretty rare, which reduces some quests to (follow the quest marker, click on the relevant NPC, and press enter a few times). You don't even have to understand what you're doing to finish such quests.
And that ties in to what probably bugged me the most in this game: the linearity combined with some intrusive hand holding.
The game gives you some illusion of freedom and to be fair you do have some choices in how you finish quests. But that's just the thing: you have a choice about finishing side-quests, but the main questline is extremely linear. You have to finish the quests in a set order, going through the same set of locations and only having an option in how to finish them for the minority of quests. Because if the game wants to keep an NPC alive he'll make him immortal (most innocent civilians are immortal), if the game doesn't want you to go elsewhere it'll tell you (I'm not done here yet) if you try to leave the area.
Add to this an insulting amount of meta-narrative and handholding. Your journal will blatantly tell you who to trust and not (at least on the short-term) and when something is wrong. Map pointers show you where your quest objects are located even if you have no way of actually knowing that. And, to add some annoyance, at key points in the main storyline you're visited by a doppelgänger called (Stranger) who will share his thoughts and tell you what you should do whether you want to or not (though thankfully, he's not infallible). Instead of letting the player figure things out based on the hints and information he got from NPC dialogue, (Stranger) simply tells you what you should conclude.
Side-quests offer some relief here. Situations are often not as simple as they seem and you'll find that in some cases people are trying to double-cross you. In other cases, including in the main questline, you can choose to try and solve something with diplomacy or bribery or to immediately grab for your weapon. This is possible in quite a lot of side-quests and a few of the main quests.
To deepen this out a bit, the game has a handful of disguises you can wear. There are five different roles you can assume on top of the standard role (which is mercenary) and they will influence you quite a bit (the guide says six roles, but as far as I could figure thief and robber are the same role). Robbers won't attack you if you're dressed up as one of them, but on the other hand baron's guards will. The Free Republic of Arkanar guards don't mind mercenaries or even robbers, but will attack you if you look like a noble don. It's a bit ridiculous that even people that know you will sometimes not recognize you if you're in the wrong get-up. But other than this it is pretty well-applied, and offers some alternatives in quests, such as walking up to robbers dressed as one of them and getting them to flee by warning them the guards are on the way. To assume a role, you have to wear 5 matching pieces on 6 possible slots (heavy armor, light armor, hat, cloak, pants, shoes). You can't switch roles if someone is watching you.
What's a bit weird is that nobody seems to care how you solve the problems you face. In fact, people don't care what you do much at all. A good example: at one point, you'll be stopped by a group of guards and told to see their leader. The first time, I just did what they suggested and talked to their boss. Then I tried the alternative, namely fighting them all off and then storming the city gates to escape. My escape was successful, but I then found that even knowing where to go I couldn't progress the main quest without talking to their boss. So I went back and talked to him. Did he mention that I killed two dozen of his men? Did any of the remaining guards care? Heck no. The reactivity of the world is pretty damned low.
