Solasta: Lost Valley, Lost Aspirations

Given I bought Solasta a couple of years (and discounts) after release, and on sale, I bought it along with its expansion packs, gave the whole mess its fair shake, and it shakes down to disappointment. I'd hoped the Lost Valley campaign would address the original campaign's many flaws and even more lacks, but if anything it just feels even less creative, less mindful and less... developed. Which should be a red flag in game development. Mind you, a ten-level campaign isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as it uses those levels in a focused and detailed manner. Granted, their main selling point of integrating tabletop movement/spellcasting and other mechanics remains encouraging, but Tactical Adventures' failure to actually put those mechanics to use has more or less ensured Solasta will now quietly fade from memory, its considerable potential wasted.

All complaints from the main campaign remain valid:

The weak writing is now also so sparse as to barely justify the game even having text boxes.

The weak worldbuilding also seems to have lost any sense of its own scale (how long exactly has this valley remained isolated?) or ambition, but I'll get into plot below.

The music/ambiance remains bland, and though the voice acting is uncommonly good for such a bare-bones project (or even more expensive ones) the aforementioned lack of writing puts those voices to little or no use.

Skills checks are more rare and still skewed toward athletics.

Animations still tack on wind-up and clean-up half-second timesinks to every single action, and though you do get a few new monsters to fight (hags, giants) these once again include ridiculously overextendifieded casting or death animations as timesinks. Hell, Green Hags seem implemented precisely because their infinite casts of Invisibility lengthen fights.

 

To that, add a whole new range of incompetence, from bugged terrain

to bugged quests not triggering properly (entry into Dark Lab cannot be completed if you find your way in before finding the key) and bugged interactions (traps on treasure chests are untargetable) and you'd still have to address to almost aggressive incompetence of their actual gameplay. While Crown of the Magister's economy made you value the loot you found , Lost Valley showers you with endless food, ingredients and cash.

I finished a campaign where the most expensive loot runs around 2-2.5k with 40k gold to spare after buying everything I wanted and then some. Even Wasteland 3 was less ridiculous. Reminds me of the infinite money in VtM: Redemption, and that is NOT a compliment.

 

Rewards aside, even your actual adventuring turns sour by mid-game. This fort map for example was copy/pasted in seven different locations.

While this could have charmingly conveyed standardized imperial construction, aside from one hole in the wall they didn't even bother altering the decor the bare minimum to get that point across. It's just... the same fort. Moreover, I had to discover the hard way that (in, explicitly, a stealth mission!) my stealth skill meant nothing here, since the guards aggro automatically if you don't take the exactly single-tile path the devs wanted you to take.

 

Encouraged by the "Lost World" theme I'd hoped my druidic charms (as in, charming animals) would come in handier, only to discover none of the scattered beasts you fight in the second half even count as beasts.

 

Worst of all, this lack of imagination or foresight stretches to the storyline itself. Once again, ZERO roleplaying. Ostensibly, you do have to select a faction out of five, unlike in the Crown campaign, but their juvenile presentation pre-empts any emotional investment or curiousity. There's an isolated kingdom ruled by an ironfisted tyrant, and four plucky rebel factions oppose him.

The first has a nominal merchant theme but otherwise no personality.

One of them's supposed to be secretive, but it makes no difference in the context of being starved for information altogether.

Another's supposed to be the "nice" salt-of-the-earth commoners' faction, but they're all too milquetoast to stand out.

The last is The Rebellion, except all of these little cliques are rebelling, so... yeah, fuck it.

I allied with the tyrant when I discovered he's got a secret lab in the jungle. Nominally evil. You're seriously trying to pull this tired old anti-intellectual science:bad routine? Then your villain just became my hero. Needless to say, dialogues still trigger in the final zone as though you were playing one of the "good" factions.

Maybe this infantile moralism wouldn't rankle so, had we not all seen how much better this theme can be handled in Obsidian Entertainment's last game worth mentioning, Tyranny. Look at the moral and narrative complexity of the Tiers' multiple rebel factions fighting a tyrannical empire itself divided amongst competing armies, then look again at Solasta's mind-numblingly shallow little ditty about an evil wizard. Even more discouragingly, I find this mirrors all too closely Wasteland 3's or Wrath of the Righteous' own infantilism and pandering. If this children's storytime idiocy is all cRPGs can offer, twenty years after Bloodlines and Torment, then the genre's fucking dead and no number of athletics checks will save it.