The Nomad Soul

In many ways, this struck me as a quintessential Quantic Dream game - interesting ideas and an ambitious overall design vision that seeks to use video games as a platform for immersive fiction, undermined by pretty horrendous execution that doesn't fully realise the potential inherent to either its design or its narrative. The writing in particular has the stiltedness and crude conception that I've come to associate with David Cage's scripts in general.

This being said, I do think that Omikron might actually be more interesting conceptually speaking than many of Quantic Dream's later releases, even if its pretty unsuccessful in its execution. Rather than trying to emulate film-making, as all of Cage's later releases have aimed to do, The Nomad Soul has a more open design which, while still placing primary emphasis on narrative and immersion, nonetheless feels much less constrained by the conventions of cinema. Ironically enough given its bizarre tendencies, I suppose it does ultimately feel like a more traditional video game now, given how the medium has evolved since 1999. But, in historical context, its open-world design would have been much more innovative. And, even now, there's something distinctly refreshing about an open-world adventure game (as opposed to an open-world action/driving game, as has become the norm in the post-GTA era), and the way QD have tried to use design to directly immerse the player in their fictional world, and within the role of their story's protagonist, and the progression of its plot, is also quite inspiring. The postmodern narrative, where the game itself and the person who plays it both have an explicit presence within the story, alongside the reincarnation mechanic that contextualises fail-states, both serve this purpose. It may seem like a trivial example, but the way the player character physically picks up objects and then either pockets them or puts them back also felt like an interesting way of giving the player a more tactile connection to the gameworld. Throughout my playtime, I continuously found myself appreciating design ideas like these.

Furthermore, unlike most modern Quantic Dream games, which, in my view, suffer from increasingly hackneyed and conventional narratives, The Nomad Soul actually has quite a bizarre and idiosyncratic fictional world and artistic vision, with lore that's distinct and intriguing, if not as well developed as it could be. I can definitely see why Bowie was attracted to this project. In many ways, playing it just confirmed for me the sense that I already had, which is that David Cage's games have become simultaneously more polished and blander with every new release.

Overall, I wouldn't exactly describe The Nomad Soul as a forgotten gem. Bits of it are almost unplayable by modern standards - the dreadful retro-FPS and fighting game sections, for example, or the frequent point-and-click-esque moments where it's virtually impossible to progress without tediously following a walkthrough because the game just gives you no clear context whatsoever for what you're meant to be doing. That final boss fight is also just bullshit, quite frankly. I've also seen a lot of people complaining online about the control system, though I didn't have a huge issue with it myself. And, ultimately, it doesn't do anything that narrative-focused games haven't done better since. But, despite all its problems, I still found playing Omikron to be a mostly immersive experience, and actually quite a surprising and inspiring one as well, particularly in its approach to design. In my view, it's perhaps a shame that it's been overshadowed by QD's more successful, but possibly less interesting, later releases.