mea culpa

[Azrael the cat]

Ok setting myself to get shot down here (by the way - I'm concocting a l33t necromancy spell to resurrect my 'tragedy in rpg' thread into an undead vampirous monster that will suck the blood of the codex and regurgitate it multi-stomach-cow style into some kind of marketable fruit drink promoted by overly happy teenagers....wait where was I going with this...

..Oh yeah - I am VERY HESITANTLY recommending the adventure game Culpa Innata.

Having said that - I'm enjoying the hell out of it so far. Dialogue driven. Great setting (a tad cliched orwellian, but well-implemented). Very non-linear adventure game. Yes - NON-LINEAR....ADVENTURE game. Characters, paths, solutions, quests can all differ between games depending on your approach.

But I say hestitantly because:
- whilst some sites have given it 100%, others (eg IGN) have slammed it as unplayable boring trash (43%).
-general fear of suggesting something not already sanctioned by the hivemind (is this like D'n'D paladin thingy, where I have to carry out a deed of atonement in order to appease the hivemind for my blasphemy? It doesn't seem fair - none of the dialogue options told me in advance that the codex would lock up and exclude further questing)
- game very obviously aimed at females (female main char, world in which females are dominant sexually and socially, where men are expected to play it coy, plenty of sex references, no direct violence)
- MANY reviewers have been put off by the massive amounts of dialogue, and the fact that most quests and puzzles are dialogue based. Very few inventory-puzzles in the game - mostly about asking people the right questions.
- you can only interrogate each person for a certain number of questions per day (taking up too much of their time lowers citizen efficiency), The questions range from sensible to stupid (eg focusing entirely on someone's hair cut and sex life - sex life actually is relevant in some cases, to find out the murder victims love interests and connections). Lots of reviewers complain about these conversations being endless and inane - nope, that's just part of the puzzle - you are expected to (gasp) THINK about what questions to ask, in order to get useful info to progress the case.
- some reviewers complain about the QUALITY of dialogue. Again, there's an element of 'ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer' back to this. But I found the oddity of some dialogue in keeping with the setting - maybe it's a subjective thing, but I accepted people talking about each other in terms of their 'having good analytical skills' given the setting where that sort of scientology-esque self-help self-classification has been elevated into a government-manded religion. I found the dialogue fine. That isn't an answer to those who found it god-awful - frankly I have no good answer for that. Maybe they are right. But i have 'some' reason to be confident in my opinions on language - I'm a PhD student and casual lecturer in philosophy,have been a professional stage actor with a fair amount of shakespeare experience - I am genuinely sorry for that boasting, and that does NOT IN ANY WAY invalidate the views of those who thought the dialogue was shit, but I am confident that my tastes aren't so wierd either.

Anyway - am I the only one who enjoyed this game. Seriously - I'm loving it (it pulled me away from some very enojyable star trailling, which I'll go back to when I've done with culpa innata). Any other comments?

 

[Starwars]

There was another thread a while back that talked about the game where I posted my impressions.

When I first read about the game I was very excited about it, but I don't think it delivered completely.

Now, let me just say that I love lots of dialogue in my games. One of my main complains about most RPGs is that combat is not more toned down (and more memorable) and that they don't have enough long and well-written conversations.

But Culpa Innata is just far to repetetive if you ask me.
I never found the writing to be good or above, but it sometimes dipped down into quite bad. Most of the time it was very average, which goes for the voiceacting as well. Now, with almost all of the game being focuses on dialogues, this got rather boring after a while. The main story *is* interesting however, as is the setting (which I actually think keeps the game alive), but it takes far to long for things to get moving.
Investigation gameplay can be fun, but it's extremely repetetive in Culpa Innata. You have a few puzzles here and there that are very easy to solve, and that sometimes suffer from the lack of logic that many advenure games do. But it's not enough.

It also presents a game world that is fairly open to you, but yet it has the rather annoying mechanics of the player "unlocking" things, which makes the whole exploration aspect very pointless.

And perhaps a thing of taste, but the the very obvious sexual innuendo throws at Phoenix just flies right over her head. OK, Phoenix is the rather "innocent" girl, but it gets rather annoying to play a character where you're shaking your head at the screen thinking "get a clue". Some of this stuff makes sense when one thinks of the setting in general, but I never think it's a good idea for developers to develop a game where the setting sort of encourages "stiffness" and boredom, if there's not a good way to break through that.

I applaud the developers for making a slower paced game, with lots of dialogues and investigative gameplay. But the real quality for this to work well is lacking in Culpa Innata if you ask me.

That said, I would still recommend people to give it a try as it is rather unique. Even though I'm criticizing it a lot, I still enjoyed it to a certain extent and it did hook me while I was playing it. But a lot of it was "come on, get the fucking story going already" or "can't something exciting happen?!".
An interesting and unique game though, and I hope the developers will get to make more games.

 

[Section8]

Is there a demo at all? Their website tries too hard to be a work of fiction and tragically fails to be informative.

 

[Shagnak]

Not as far as I know.

There are some preview movies here though:
http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/C ... downloads/

 

[Longshanks]

My thoughts on the game are much the same as Starwars' (I posted detailed impressions in the other thread on it).

Plenty of dialogue is not a problem, but when it's virtually the whole game it should be good, CI's was mostly mediocre and repetitive (especially the painfully boring "friend chats", where Phoenix discusses the day's conversations). Given fast travel, the game is pretty much a long line of mostly non-interactive conversations with a puzzle or two in between, exploration is mostly optional. I found the PC irritatingly naive, with exaggerated and immature reactions to events, the voiced monologues being particularly odious.

I like investigation gameplay, but it was poorly implemented in this game. Phoenix is in the dark for most of it, as a player you don't get the chance to piece together evidence and make logical conclusions as to the culprit, the game does not give you the pieces.

The non-linearity was disappointing for me, it seemed to be limitied to the order in which you complete interviews (maximum choice space about three).

The world was quite well realised, with a good amount of detail, but the imperfections of the supposedly perfect society were made far too obvious. Part of the game seems to be Phoenix's journey from being 100% accepting of the social structure, to being more sceptical, the thing is that I was questioning from the first minutes of the game, so her naivety was very frustrating.

Overall a solid game, which could have been a whole lot better. I could imagine someone who likes the PC and the dialogue could very much enjoy it, it was certainly well received by most Adventure game sites.

 

[avatar_58]

I find it's not the dialogue thats boring or medicore....but the delivery. The voice acting is terrible, and needs an off-switch. Also whats the deal with no subtitles for her thoughts?

The non-linearity is pointless, it just makes you have to return each day to talk to the same people....sometimes asking the same topics. Very silly. Some scenes that would have taken 20 minutes in a standard adventure take an hour and half due to the timelimited interviews and really crappy interface for moving around.

I'm giving it a chance only because the plot should get better. I hope.