But I am something that you'll never be"
Marilyn Manson - Better of Two Evils
The Age of Decadence is not just an intriguing RPG but one of the most interesting games I've played over the past decade. Just to start things off, let's admit that doesn't always translate into high praise. If you hear someone mumbling the phrase "oh, what an... interesting... Christmas gift, Grandma" you know it's a damn pair of socks; you just know it! Long story short, if you agree with me that strategy means turns and tiles and you want a single-character isometric RPG and most importantly you have a high tolerance for needless frustration, buy it... but buyer beware!
I've replayed this fight dozens of times, and that's not even counting the first-round quits. Those byway robbers are blocking off a fair chunk of the main city's map, they charge an exorbitant fee for passage, and even in a game that routinely describes itself as "brutal" they're overpowered for their spawn location. Moreover, killing them spawns a nigh-unbeatable ambush which, thanks to a bug, triggers on all of your saves for that zone, making you backtrack much farther than you'd have to -- and repeat this fight another two dozen times in search of a lucky crit.
Which is to say, AoD is an indie game, with indie flaws.
It's severely lacking in bells and whistles (no voice acting, apt but simple music, no aesthetic character customization) and its writing, while delightfully evocative half the time, is perfunctory or anachronistic the other half. It's great when a merchant tries to sell you an armor described as "'River horse skin. Two inch thick,' [...] You can only wonder what monstrous beast it came from." Bonus points for remembering what mythical beast the ancient Greeks dubbed a "river horse". Less great when the assassins' guild advertises itself as having "killed more people than malaria" as that word would've sounded much better as "the three-day fever" or some other less precise pseudonym. Also, while the occasional modern colloquialism can do wonders in driving home the universality of human culture, using the same flavor text in combat for all NPCs results in some mildly jarring moments like the odalisques in a noblewoman's mansion dropping f-bombs. Hilarious... and a little bit hot... but still somewhat odd. Then there's the occasional innocent typo like "turned and fled in a disorderly route" instead of rout.
On the other hand, its setting dodges the standard D&D fantasy-medieval world and heroic premises with an atmosphere loosely flavored, instead of imperial Rome at its height, by a crumbled Eastern Roman Empire looking back enviously on its ancestors' glory days centuries past. The official description is of a "low fantasy" setting... and in the interest of avoiding spoilers I'll leave it at that. I'm tempted to complain about its ending being derivative of a certain famous author's works but it would be hypocritical of me after deriving from the same source for one of my clumsy attempts at short stories on this very blog. They handled it better than I did at least. Aaand I'll leave that at that!
In any case, Age of Decadence's main selling point is usually summed up as "vicious" or "brutal" both in terms of roleplaying and of skill choices. Your opportunities for benevolence are severely limited while those for betrayal are quite abundant. Your opportunities to earn skill points are even more limited. Ostensibly this should create meaningful player choice, with you thinking about every skill point as you buy into it. In practice it overshoots its mark, leaving you no room for error whatsoever.
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| Me at end game. |
(No, I never actually ranked up any civil skills except Lore, Alchemy and Crafting. The rest are quest reward bonuses.)
I had started with the intention of fighting more via alchemy than poke-craft but was stymied by the scarcity of alchemical components and wound up having to struggle through the gladiatorial arena just to work up my survivability. It doesn't help that while most quests offer both a combat and a diplomacy option, they're usually lacking in MacGyver solutions for antisocial tinkerer types. Or that there simply aren't enough quests in the game to justify some of the redundancy: Word of Honor / Loyalty, or Persuasion / Streetwise / Etiquette / Impersonate - I can't remember a single Etiquette skill check the entire campaign. Or that you're frequently catapulted past points of no return with little to no warning. They made some minimal effort to puff up some quests as more important, but "you get a sudden feeling of impending doom" is not clear enough for an act transition, much less for being the only warning you get until three missions later when you find yourself standing before the Act 2 curtain. I even missed out on some interactions because of idiotic old-fashioned pixel-hunting. While there is an option to highlight interactable objects, the icons used for these can clip behind scenery, and one of them... well, try to spot it here:
Much of this can be chalked up, again, to a low-budget game not nearly as fleshed out as it should have been for its ambitious tangle of consequences. It could be fixed with more content. More quests, more skill checks worked into quests, a couple of passes over the script to elaborate or clarify descriptions and prompts. And, indeed, I've never seen developers more eager to resolve their customers' confusion. "Vince" shows up in almost every AoD Steam forum thread with helpful details, rational justifications or even (shockingly!) acknowledgment of faults. Still, as testament to what a chore this damn game can be, consider that replaying it is the one thing I don't want to do despite its selling point being a high amount of replay value as different classes/factions uncover different parts of the story.
Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of high points. A captivating main plot. Mature, internally consistent setting and characters. Repercussions for your actions at every turn. Even the combat, frustrating as it is, does a good job of not only reiterating the Fallout turn-based routine but building on it with a variety of weapon ranges and special abilities as Dead State did. The fight in that first screenshot started half a dozen turns' walk away. I retreated to the doorway while pushing my pursuers back with my spear turn by turn, and while choke points and corners are a fairly limited use of terrain it's still always nice to see an RPG where positioning matters. Two aspects of Age of Decadence's design philosophy however ensured that it would fall short of its potential.
First off, the more you imbue player actions with irrevocable, high-impact repercussions and one-shot wipe-outs, the less you can leave up to chance. I addressed this with regard to Into the Breach, where even the minimal randomness (enemy types, building resistance) often grates. But what "kaiju chess" didn't have were miss chances or critical strikes. AoD acknowledged this by removing dice rolls from skill checks in quests, but leaving it as a central feature of combat just turns every fight into a luck-based game, reloading fifty times until the string of crits goes your way.
Second, you can't bank on replay value so much that you turn a first playthrough into merely a maximally frustrating tutorial. Too many player decisions can only be made while knowing every detail of later events. It would've been nice, for instance, to know that the best spear I can loot is a one-hander and I should've invested in shields and not dodging. Or that I have to visit a specific healer three times in order to get a quest for a permanent regeneration effect - a situation negated, counter-intuitively, by me being an alchemist and making my own healing salves. Don't even start on knowing exactly which map locations can be re-accessed in later acts and which become permanently locked after the first visit. When your customers' success is so utterly dependent on foreknowledge of the campaign, you're leaving them with very little role to play. Might as well copy/paste your decisions from a walkthrough.
Yet still... no-one else is doing anything quite like this. The setting, the skills, the do-or-die quest interactions, the honest attempt at providing multiple paths to success. Whatever else you might say about The Age of Decadence, it stands out in a crowd. Despite being glad I'm done with it for the moment, I'm even happier I played it, and I'm pretty sure my fumbling, save-scumming, arduous playthrough as an antisocial, nerdy, bomb-throwing hoplite assassin resulted in a more unique experience from other players than I could ever get in Skyrim. Better to be frustrated than bored.
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P.S.:
Sometimes indie games deliver features otherwise ignored by the entire industry. The Age of Decadence autosaves both at the beginning of quest-critical conversations and the beginning of combat - Yes! Thank you! Why is that so hard for every other game designer to do?
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