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Vanquishing Roman legions by the power of positive thinking!
Ah, so many quips, so little time, where to start?
Maybe with the title? Sacred Fire: A Role-Playing Game! Branding like that always sounds like buying a pizza proclaiming "assuredly edible food nourishment" right on the package. I can just see the sequels lining up: :Another RPG and :Yet Another RPG.
Sacred Fire, a 2D adventure/RPG hybrid about tribal resistance to Roman expansion, came out in '21 as "early access". I bought it a year later, hedging my purchase with the noble enterprise of promoting such projects even if this representative proves bad in itself, only to discover it still unfinished. But, if I'm willing to wait for Colony Ship to crank out its last zones, in the interest of fairness I gritted my teeth and gave Sacred Fire another year... only to now discover at the end of chapter 12 that it's still unfinished. Ah, indie gaming. Such occasional fun.
Nevertheless, I did give its current showing a fair shake, approximating my usual support caster role, which in this case involves casting both arrows and aspersions.
Despite its flaws and relative brevity, Sacred Fire, though not quite as memorable as Strangeland, is still worth its asking price for sheer density. I traversed its existing content (about 2/3 of the intended total?) in one breathless seven-hour dive, and can see myself replaying it in full. Not to say I didn't nearly uninstall at the very first scene, coming out as it did strong in politically correct idiocy with a warrior princess butchering men by the bushel. Or, later, this little gem:
^ particularly funny because that line about the damsel not needing your protection (you filthy presumably male presumably chauvinist presumably pig) immediately segues into an entire chapter about protecting her from an arranged marriage.*
You can expect a smatter of other standard SJW nonsense, notably the emphasis placed on the Romans as slavers, stemming from the naive viewpoint of The Empire as default baddies, juxtaposed with the usual noble savage, salt of the earth, plucky rebel tripe. This despite your character's possible origins including Celts, who liberally traded their own slaves to the Romans, and Nords, who rather infamously raided all of their neighbours for slaves for much of their history. (Hint: the word "thrall" was not invented by Blizzard Entertainment.)
As usual though, feminism benefitting from a majority of the population as default audience, it occupies most of the bigoted pandering, and here's where I have to give the folks at Poetic some credit. They included exactly one token good man and exactly one token bad woman in their story, which is more than you'll see in other entertainment these days. The rest? Saintly mother, plucky clever little orphan girl, hypercompetent swordswoman,
erudite and charming healer and bow-woman, stalwart and politically
savvy queen... vs. violent father, bumbling orphan boy, thieving cheating orphan boy, braindead thug, sadistic commander, idiot treasonous king, sociopathic Machiavellian raider king, etc. There's hints of a second good male among the Romans. Fingers crossed, but I'd bet on him being revealed as morally compromised somehow.
In a larger sense, while the ancient village politics inevitably recall King of Dragon Pass, Sacred Fire lacks all but the barest hint of that more respectable game's awareness of tribal customs and dynamics, or the intrinsic, impulsive pettiness of human behavior. Even when they're not spewing romance novel drivel, characters simply do not come across as anything other than idealized 21st-century yuppies LARPing.
However...
Sacred Fire also shares KoDP's take on consistently imbuing obscurantism with narrative payoffs to keep gameplay flowing, maintaining a bit of mystery without punishing the player for lacking foreknowledge of the campaign. I would also be remiss not to admit that more than even big-ticket RPGs, it appeases some of my more strident demands from the genre, voiced here in the past.
RPGs are a middle ground between strategy and storytelling. They began as strategy wargames and still function best on that basis. Nevertheless, I make a distinction between RPGs and stat/squad management games. The roguelike random encounter dungeon crawl does not in itself constitute roleplaying. At the other extreme, neither do mere theatrics, declaring oneself performing deeds without some well-defined basis for success and failure and costly decisions.
That middle ground between storytelling adventure and plotless tactics was so far best approached by Torment: Tides of Numenera minimizing the grind, integrating noncombat options, timing attacks, lines of dialogue and environment interaction all on the same action ticks on the same playing field. From the other angle, where Gamedec failed so miserably at building up a linear adventure game campaign with character stats and branching choices... Sacred Fire largely succeeds. I've breezed past archery checks but died in two(?) fights so far where forced into toe-to-toe combat, fitting my stat choices, my support caster approach (boosting their confidence, increasing trust, etc.) at least superficially appears to have resulted in higher synergy with NPCs, and choices are carrying over to later chapters with pleasing frequency. Plus, through chapters 3-10 or so, after the introductions and before it starts sinking into Harlequin Romance theatrics, the wilderness adventure story's a hoppingly engaging little page-turner.
However again...
The stat system, while initially multifaceted, gradually boils down to either playing nice or playing mean (with a heavy push toward the former) and while the focus on "psychological" roleplaying is a welcome novelty, Sacred Fire overplays it by a degree of magnitude. The developers chose to utterly ignore practical knowledge (episteme and techne) in favor of emotional manipulation. Steady character development leading into pitched battle scenes makes a solid narrative pattern, but with all actions sharing a common action point pool I've found myself farming action points via dialogue to expend on combat. It just comes across as goofy. Whatever immersion you'd managed to build up goes out the window when my decidedly un-Conan-ish character manages to trounce veteran soldiers mano a mano... because yesterday I came to grips with my feelings of resentment toward Lucy pulling my football away, empathized with a completely unrelated character's love of dogs or leveled up my reassuring cooing skill. At least with old-fashioned XP, you could pretend you're channeling some abstract concept of practical experience toward focused training in your chosen skills and feats. You weren't directly leveraging the power of fee-fees into cranking up your kamehamehas. Primitive, instinctive codependence and wheedling is just parasitism.
Sacred Fire is... pretty decent, surprisingly so in its stat-dependent choose-your-own-adventure buildup of player actions, and well worth a look for anyone interested in the art of game design. Still, I do think its fans are over-hyping it, much as happened with Divinity: Original Sin, simply because it's a welcome novelty straddling two woefully ignored, thoughtful genres. The iron age setting never gels. The different mental blocks overlap too much in practice and encourage/soothe actions are overemphasized to the point I ended up relying on them despite starting in the exact opposite direction. Too much of Sacred Fire caters to parochial, navel-gazing, narcissistic snowflake twits who want to pretend their personal happiness underpins the very fabric of reality. Worthy attempt in its weight class, but it'll take more coldly rational developers to make good on adventure RPG hybrids.
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* I find unending hilarity in just how often the new mythology trips over its own propaganda.
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