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immediately murder-hobo’ing it? I went to the Isle of Iman after and read the book about the Roc, and it sounds like I could have spoken to it if I brought it tuna. Curious how that would have played out. More an Easter egg, or an actual interesting quest line?
The roc is a means of fast travel. You can call it from anywhere by cooking tuna and it'll fly you to any island of your choosing. You don't even need tuna to talk to it first, you just have to approach it.
What I like about this game is that there are a few instances where it more or less spells it out for you in yuge neon letters that something is a quest that you shouldn't take or finish, and if you do that you have only your own dumb ass to blame lol
WTF really?! I went exploring, found that damn egg and took it. Because, out in nature there are no morals snapping an egg hardly is immoral. Adventurers gotta eat, don't they? Naturally I had to defend myself from this flying piece of shit that attacked me. And now I seem to have fucked myself by this move? Man, that's mean, really, really mean. Especially as there is only one single savegame.
WTF really?! I went exploring, found that damn egg and took it. Because, out in nature there are no morals snapping an egg hardly is immoral. Adventurers gotta eat, don't they? Naturally I had to defend myself from this flying piece of shit that attacked me. And now I seem to have fucked myself by this move? Man, that's mean, really, really mean. Especially as there is only one single savegame.
What I like about this game is that there are a few instances where it more or less spells it out for you in yuge neon letters that something is a quest that you shouldn't take or finish, and if you do that you have only your own dumb ass to blame lol
yeah, and I especially had no excuse bc I talked to the guy who wanted the egg for his _breakfast_. Killing a huge mythic, one of a kind regal intelligent bird bc some dude wants to spice up his breakfast routine? yeah, warning bells. the game is really asking the player to think with moral logic, not muderhobo logic. It’s wonderful
Man, seems I'm lucky... found out (didn't remember) that I'd made a emergency save game (in other words: I zipped the savegame folder) a short time before I went to that darn Island with the Roc. I praise Allah I don't have to begin the game again (yeah, I know killing that bird wouldn't force me to restart the game, but it'd suck big time not to be able to use that thing).
>Please visit the ruler of this island and give him my letter, btw he's into black magic and I'm worried he's become too obsessed with it, if he gives you a task maybe don't do it
>Hehehe there's a special thing I need hehehe please find it for me *sinister cackle*
>Item is hidden behind 500 signs that say "DON'T DO IT"
And if you ignore all the warnings and hand over the item anyway (because that's what you'd do in your average RPG) you get the harshest example of C&C I've seen in a game yet.
Damn, this is out?! This was one of my most-anticipated games this year, but I'd been away from the forums for so long I hadn't realized it was finished. Definitely buying a copy tonight!
So, I just accidentally attacked the Sea Monster on the first island before its sprite even fully surfaced and it fled after one hit. Annoying since there was nothing to indicate you could resolve the quest through any other means but violence (Never mind expecting that a player should know he can converse with sealife in the first place). Is this a game where the dev expects you to be a mindreader? The only clue I had was from one random guard complaining he couldn't sell random eggs he found in the sea because the gate to the trade quarter was locked or some shit. Sounded like flavor text at the time and he didn't give me a quest to gather eggs at that point, so I thought nothing more of it. Never returned to him. Two hours of gameplay later and this shit happens.
From the brief line of dialogue I received after I hit the squid, it sounds as if its gonna come up again later, or perhaps would have unlocked other quests had I found the stolen eggs instead of attacking it. Naturally the fucking game autosaves immediately after I "made my choice" so there's no going back. Thanks gamedev, very cool... Totally, anticlimactic for two islands worth of content as well. Am I missing out on anything good here? Am I gonna have to start all over? Honestly, shit design.
There were a few doors I couldn't get to open either.
I don't remember the key colours with certainty now, but I think I never got the brass key, and the onyx key is an easter egg - it can pop up randomly when you dig around tiles that don't hold any special content
There were a few doors I couldn't get to open either.
I don't remember the key colours with certainty now, but I think I never got the brass key, and the onyx key is an easter egg - it can pop up randomly when you dig around tiles that don't hold any special content
So, it's been about two weeks since I finished this, enough time to ruminate on the experience, so I think I'll create my own little commentary to Roxor's review before it all begins to fade.
On stat distribution: Take Vitality over Speed though both are important. Everything else is useless and irrelevant. The sheer amount of snake anti-venom you're going to guzzle in this game is absurd and unfortunately all you have to combat that is the vitality stat which woefully only gives 1% resistance per two points invested. I believe mine was at thirty by the game's end and had I known how pointless strength would be, it would have been higher.
Had no idea that exceptional swords could bushwhack, the game never tells you this and tbh, I don't think I ever came across an exceptional sword that was good enough to warrant selling whatever else I had at the time. Actually, finding exceptional weapons at merchants almost never happened, nor did I find any as loot, though that may be down to bad luck with chest spawns. IOTC is also kinda weird about weapon quality damage values. Eventually there was a point where a random fair quality hammer I found late game was outclassing the exceptional one I found as loot mid game. Players would do well to keep an eye on the values closely. Trying to cycle the gear merchants' stock is also a pain in the ass due to the amount of rest it requires to cycle to the next day. This is due to the game waking you up automatically in time for every Islamic prayer every few hours. Would have been nice to be able to opt out of that via a toggle but whatever.
On the Inventory System and Management thereof: Space is at a premium in this, but also kinda doesn't matter much. You rarely find anything of real value and merchants usually aren't that far away. Most of your pack is going to be full of tools, bandages, medications and food. For early game, one or two torches is sufficient to be replaced with a lantern and a single stack of oil when convenient. You'll never need more burn-time than that, so don't over-pack. For medications, do yourself a favor and eschew eating fish. No eating fish = no need to carry fish anti-venom. It's also time-of-day and location dependent and therefore not a great way to feed yourself. Go vegan, buy a stack or two to eat, and buy extra stacks of all food types before leaving the given island. Often times NPCs will ask for food from other islands as sidequests. This will save you money booking passage and earn you money. Carrying a good supply of food also eliminates the need to tote around stomach medication. I don't think I ever needed it because I kept well-fed. Always take both fever and blister medications. Inevitably, you'll get fever when the game gets autistic about where you can and cannot set up a tent. Blister meds are for undead/vermin encounters. Always take at least 2 stacks of both snake and arachnid anti-venom when you can afford it. Eventually the game allows you to pay a little more for all-purpose meds and antidotes but from experience, these turned up far too late in the game to matter.
On combat, difficulty, or lack thereof: I did not find the dancing to be as easy as Roxor did, but that may be due to my inexperience with grid-based movement systems. I got somewhat better at it as time went on, but even so I'd say at least 70% of the game I spent just face-tanking and out-damaging the enemies. Block never felt reliable enough and I quickly abandoned trying to get the timing down. It seemed to me that there were too few frames of attack animation on some enemies to reliably block, not to mention that I found it generally difficult to gage whether/how long I could be within a tile to incur or avoid an attack. Movement being so imprecise, trying to block instead of attack just seemed like a good way to ensure fights lasted longer than they needed to. In regard to the dance-dogding in general, I often found this wasn't practical due to the terrain, various trees and rocks being in the way.
That being said, most of the enemies are pretty fucking easy. The only points in the game where I truly felt any challenge whatsoever were
when I first fought the ghouls on Hikmah (central island) after first arriving from Tarbiyyah and the Snakemen in the Djinn Ruins. The former were a huge difficulty spike from the mild inconveniences of the first two islands. Going into their domain you're likely dealing with inadequate equipment, constrained movement in tight corridors making dodge-dancing even more impractical and the ghouls themselves attack fast and remove about a fifth of your health per hit. I can see a lot of players being filtered by this difficulty spike and if not for pure chance in choosing a path that led to a free warhammer which had the added effect of stun-locking enemies, I would have been one of them. Had I picked any other way to go, I'd have likely said "fuck this game" and uninstalled. The Snakemen were less irksome due to the overstock of bandages I was carrying, but admittedly my supply was cleared out upon completing their dungeon.
I think I'll break this up into two posts given the size. Cont'd below.
On Exploration: The chief problem I had with it was that the loot was underwhelming. Just to be clear, there are no unique items or artifacts to be found in IOTC. You're never going to find a flying carpet (why the hell wasn't this included as a feature to the prayer rug?), you're never going to find Suleiman's Magnificent Turban or Aladdin's Shoes of Sprinting or a Dancing Scimitar or anything of the sort. Overall, very utilitarian, very boring and very sparse. At least the scenery is atmospheric I guess, though for a game set on a chain of islands there's remarkably little to do with the sea and ship travel. No storms, no random pirate attacks, kidnapped princesses, no sea-serpents, sirens or giant tortoise-islands to find, no getting shipwrecked etc. just a way to go from point A to point B while being a money sink. I would go so far to say that this game could be set in the middle of the Arabian desert with caravans substituting ships, Giant Snakes in place of Squids and nothing of substance would be lost. The maritime setting is mostly wasted. Honestly, the game needs more sidequests that don't involve finding x items and playing courier. The more involved ones it has are great, but there's too few of them.
The enemy variety was also severely lacking, you can expect to fight hundreds of snakes, scorpions and spiders and then be underwhelmed when you find one of the cooler enemies like Manticores are utter pushovers, obliterate them in a few swings, and realize a few hours later that that's the last time you'll ever see them in the game. One that was most conspicuous in it's absence were human enemies. No bandits, no pirates, no infidels to slaughter! No other cultures or religions to interact with save the dead Chaldean civilization's aesthetics. No mythical creatures from Babylonian or Assyrian mythology.
On UI Navigation and Questlog - There's no good reason that this game shouldn't have mouse support. It's billed as a throwback to 80s RPGs but this is firmly mid-90s. There's a lot of superfluous key presses/confirmations in navigating the inventories and dialogue. For example: Forward key up to an NPC to start dialog - Enter key to get next bits of dialogue all the way up to the offer of a quest - Y key to accept quest. Two different keys for confirmation. Should be just Enter again to accept, if you weren't reading it's pebkac, you're retarded. Same story with Roc travel. Running up to the rock should trigger a dialog box to start the damn fire to cook tuna. Instead, you have to go into the inventory hit enter on the firewood, fire gets made, enter again asks if you want to destroy the fire... obviously fuckingnot dev... You wanna cook the tuna so then you have to go back into the inventory, navigate to the tuna, hit enter on the tuna, then hit escape to get out of the inventory and then multiple separate keys to destroy the damn fire which is in front of the rock, then forward key to talk to the Roc. Needless fucking busywork and there are many such cases of this cumbersome design.
The quest log gets very, very vague in places. There are many spelling errors both in it and in NPC dialog to where you'll ask yourself "Have I been there already? I was at Tazmaia but this says Tezmiyyah?" During the last leg of the main quest the game asked me to look for clues all throughout the islands on what to do next and to not discount taking the advice of madmen. I had a pretty good idea of what I actually needed to do because I had been talking to everyone and taking notes. I knew who the madman was, where he was found etc. The journal made no acknowledgement that I already found the relevant information to solve the problem, nor did it ever update again until the game ended. Wasted an hour looking for a guy I had already found multiple times over.
Anyway, I'm probably forgetting a few things, but this is a 6/10 game. 7/10 for the unique setting. I enjoyed my time with it, especially the times where it felt like you were accomplishing a lot in sequence, but other times the momentum screeched to a halt due to amateur hour game design choices. It is a comfy game though as Roxor said, I think it just needed a bit more time in the oven.
So it does. I read it before I played but not to the point of memorization. Regardless, that sort of info should be in the game, not buried in a pdf. Not that it would have helped, I never found an Exceptional Scimitar (not for lack of searching).
