The Age of Decadence

This old-school style RPG succeeds brilliantly at creating a series of vignettes for the player to interact with. The system is heavily based on your skills and attributes, and the wide plentifulness of content is gated by skills which makes the player constantly guess what they're missing.

The problem is that everything else--and I do mean everything else--is mediocre to bad. The setting is unimaginative and the characters are intentionally made flat and unlikable, which means that for all it's success in creating a game with mystifying and challenging goals, both the background, pulp, and the payoff of these goals feel completely hollow. Dialogue is extremely uninteresting and nearly all of it has the same literary voice. There's a conversation with a certain character that has very strict requirements to initiate, but once you do initiate it, they basically end up spelling out every single secret the world has to offer. Once you get to this conversation, you have no reason to ever pay attention to any of the dialogue except for your own options. This is drilled into your head by the fact that there is a skill check in nearly every dialogue menu and there are only 2-3 instances where you can do anything meaningful without a skill check.

The combat system is acceptably mediocre, but the way that encounters and combat skills are managed is truly awful. The developers favored realism over feasibility, except in cases where realism would ever favor the player. For example, during the first act, you are tasked with taking on a bandit camp. True to what would be the case in a realistic scenario, these bandits travel in packs (5 people), and have poor equipment, but are roughly as good in combat as an inexperienced imperial guard. The problem is that the player *physically cannot* reach a point where they are better than an imperial guard. Consequentially, this means that the player is facing five opponents equally as strong as they are.

The intricacy of the vignettes wears off quickly when you realize what you have to do to meaningfully interact with them. Because the world is so boring and the game is so skill check heavy, all you're doing is unlocking meaningless content. The whole game is a glorified excel spreadsheet.