The Butt Ugly Weblog

OK, so I've been running a ShadowRun game since, well, pretty much late teens, that is, over 20 years now. I've been there pretty much from the first edition of the rules, and been through quite a lot of revisions and world expansions etc - but still, my favourite era in SR is the decade of circa 2050-2060, where everything was still fresh and new and the writing was great. So when the original desktop Shadowrun line developer joined forces with some smart people to make a computer game, I was somewhat excited, but a bit wary - would it truly live up to the expectations?

I may have gushed over the original SR Returns campaign (Dead Man's Switch), and the empty, gutwrenching feeling you have when you realize you have to peek inside an "Universal Brotherhood" -chapterhouse in one part of the game. Without spoiling too much, that place played a pivotal role in the desktop campaign, and as such the campaign for the computer game hit just the right spots, but it was more or less riding on the excellence of the world rather than the writing itself. So it was okay, and promised good things about the future.

However, I just finished the new campaign for SR Returns - Dragonfall. And boy, that's exactly the kind of game the evokes the same feelings as the best game you ever thought you ran as a teenager. That's really where it's at. It's exciting, well-written, and completely and utterly engaging. And it's, well, different from a lot of games. At some point I realized I wasn't playing to win the baddies. I was playing to protect the people - the characters in the game - who were depending on me. I started to take things personally, and at some point I did my darndest to avoid making certain decisions, because they would be bad for the people. And I started caring for those well-written side characters, and wished there was more dialogue written for them. My character "Sparrow" started out as a cynic, no-nonsense street samurai, but over the course of the game he found a soft spot and a home for himself. The character evolved through roleplaying. I would never, ever have thought that that would actually happen in a computer game.

And there were some aspects of some of the missions I just hated. Hated with burning passion. Not because they were bad, but because there were only bad and worse moral choices to be made. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It was wonderful.

Honestly, the last time a game evoked these kinds of feelings was the original Homeworld, where the story and the soundscape created something more than just a game - a feeling of being a part of a story. This is really gaming at it's best; something that lets you discover things about yourself too which you did not realize. I'm really glad to see yet another example of how powerful a game can be - truly justifying games as equal to books or to movies.

I am really looking forward to whatever Harebrained Schemes do next with this game. There are many, many wonderful stories still to tell - I have been telling some of my own for the past 20 years. The goodness of all this makes me giddy.

(You can download Shadowrun Returns on Steam. Well worth it. Both campaigns together took me about 35 hours over the course of a few weeks, an hour here and an hour there. And I just love the soundtrack.)