Good riddance to wasted time.
Here we go again. Another remake of a decades-old CRPG that’s obviously either unable or unwilling to escape the past. There’s the party character portraits running down one side of the screen. There’s the minimap in the opposite corner. There’s the hotbar along the bottom. There’s the squareish area between, filled with tiny pre-rendered sprites just begging to be clicked.
I assumed I knew exactly how Geneforge 2 was going to play. I’d work my way through a slightly awkward character creator and then stumble on a party’s worth of adventurous souls within about an hour, and we’d go and RPG our way across a legally distinct fantasy land until I either found the cackling madman behind whatever god/world/region-ending threat the game had cooked up or I got so lost working my way through sidequests spun off from other sidequests I forgot where I’d left the next main plot thread and gave up.
I was wrong.
Geneforge 2 has no interest in offering up reheated Dungeons & Dragons, token Tolkien, or a sprinkle of sci-fi based on the « -punk » flavour of the moment. This is a world of Serviles and Creations and Shapers, a place where magic, machinery, and twisted biology mix to create something entirely new. This is great, in theory—a genuinely new land to explore. There’s sinister intrigue, involving various groups I’ve never heard of fighting over made-up politics. There’s got a quirky monster creation system I’m going to have to learn from the ground up, and a whole dictionary’s worth of fictional terms to memorise if I want to make sense of any of it.
I’m not entirely sure all that work sounds like fun if I’m honest, and even if it is I definitely don’t have the time for that sort of high-effort homework. Maybe there’s a reason why so many CRPGs make elves great archers and humans bland all-rounders after all.
But again, Geneforge 2 is different. It doesn’t want to assault my eyeballs with an endless string of Mysterious Nouns and meaningless stats, it wants me to fall in love with its setting as quickly as possible, and it knows I can’t do that if I haven’t got a clue what’s going on.
And so every new area brings up at least one fresh, easily digested morsel of flavour text, the game keen not only to explain why its fantasy world’s different, but also why any of it should matter to me, Trainee Shaper Person.
