Vital Stats

Genre: RPG
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Spiderweb
Software
Publisher: Spiderweb
Software
ESRB Rating: Unrated
(but probably T)
Release Date: 12/11/01

Platforms

• PC
• Mac

Geneforge came out in late 2001, so it might seem a little early to be doing a retro review. However, it offers a portal into state of the art RPG design circa 1988, so it’s fair game. Although fascinating as an historical artifact, the brutal difficulty, tremendous time investment, and spartan graphics and sound mean that Geneforge will appeal to a very narrow audience. That audience will probably fetishize it, though—it’s not like they make ‘em like this anymore.

On The Sixth Day
Do not pity the fans of dead genres like adventure games, even though they so rarely get to play new games they love. Instead grieve for gamers who loved a genre that marched on and left them behind, because they’ll never see those games again. Well, that is unless you happen to be a fan of oldschool RPGs, because then you may be in luck with Geneforge.

Geneforge chronicles the journey of a particularly unlucky initiate into the ways of shaping, a magical tradition where the wielder creates life from nothing. On his way to training, a mysterious boat sinks his craft and he washes up on the shores of a forbidden island. You’ll spend the rest of the sandboxy game spreading rack and ruin as you ally with and betray anyone you please.

You can pick from one of three types of specialist in the shaping world. One is a typical bruiser, another is a traditional spellcaster, and the last excels in shaping. Each class can function with some modest competence in the others’ bailiwicks, though character growth is fastest and most effective within your area of expertise.

Whichever class you choose, you’re missing the point of Geneforge if you don’t create some life. Summoned creatures are a boon to all three classes. They provide support for bruisers, run interference for spellcasters, and do pretty much all the heavy lifting for shapers. Creature creation relies on the same sort of magic meter you’d expect from any other RPG. However, any magical power you use to create and sustain life can’t be recovered until the creature dies or you reabsorb its essence. Furthermore, because the magic you allocate to your summoned creatures is unavailable for spellcasting, there’s a strategic element to power sharing between the two abilities.

Taking your creatures into combat is fairly straightforward for the most part. The world of Geneforge is presented on an isometric grid, which is the natural habitat of turn-based combat. Both you and your creations are awarded a certain number of action points every turn, and you can spend them moving, attacking, or spellcasting as you see fit.

Some people think they can outsmart me.
Maybe…maybe.
I have yet to meet one that can outsmart my dragony thing

The mix of action points and your custom party of summoned monsters makes for highly tactical combat. Shapers especially are fragile when directly exposed to their enemies, and much of your success depends on your ability to divert incoming damage to your decoys. Death comes on swift wings to unwary combatants in Geneforge, so try to keep your dignity when the tutorial fight creams you in casual mode. Get used to it too, because you’ll be seeing the title screen so often that you’ll wonder why there’s no auto-load for your freshest saved game.

Combat may be fairly simple and brutal, but the transition into combat isn’t. Enemies roam freely on the map in Geneforge, and though combat often initiates when you catch sight of hostiles, it’ll just as often wait until a hulking scorpion has you on the end of its stinger before the fight starts. Delicate shapers who don’t notice incoming enemies (a task only made more difficult by species overlap between your party and feral beasts) can find themselves one-shotted back to the title screen. There is a button that lets you enter combat mode whenever you like, but it feels more like an ad hoc bug fix than an actual gameplay mechanic.

Geneforge may be unforgiving to error, but where tactics fail, strategy often succeeds. Creature creation means that you can completely reconstitute your party any time you visit a town, and to a lesser extent in the field. So if you’re finding that tanks aren’t very useful against speedy foes, you can always swap them out for ranged strikers. You can even tweak a creature’s stats to make it stronger, faster, smarter, and tougher than the wild type, though doing so ups the creation price.

So this is where the magic happens.
Or wait, was it some other featureless gray room?

Your party flexibility is limited in the field by the 50% refund you get for absorbing unwanted creations. This magic recycling is good for an emergency spell, but inadequate to whistle in help when you need it. Running back and forth to town whenever you want to tweak your overall combat strategy makes for unwanted kludge and can kill the pacing for exploration.

Eventual martial victory rewards you with experience, and levels grant points that improve your stats and skills. Those stats and skills make you more effective in combat, and the great leveling treadmill stretches to eternity. Fortunately for players with no love for the grind, there are also canisters secreted throughout the world whose contents will instantly upgrade your stats and skills. Neither levels nor canisters are sufficient to keep you afloat in Geneforge, but the two conspire together to encourage a symbiosis of exploration and combat that prevents both from becoming stale while facilitating both.

Emancipation Proclamations
You may not murder everyone you meet in Geneforge, but if you don’t they’ll likely talk you to death. Ok, that’s not actually true, but be aware that playing Geneforge means reading, and quite a lot of it for a video game. You’ll meet dozens of NPCs on the ostensibly forbidden island, and every one of them has at least seven pages of text to his name.

To Geneforge‘s credit, little of this text is wasted. The game’s writer has actually given some thought to what kind of world it would be if we could create life as an exercise of simple will. Shapers have a society built around control, not just in the sense that your exploding flame dog says you’re in charge, but also because losing control means that the exploding flame dog is no longer your pet. The story explores in depth the consequences of freedom, slavery, and the balance of power in this context.

Freedom and slavery here may sound like little more than a cat’s paw for good and evil. However this otherwise featureless dichotomy is textured somewhat by slaves that are either dangerous or helplessly incompetent without their masters. Whether you favor servitude, independence, or vengeful rebellion for the downtrodden, your allegiance to a particular viewpoint will shape the future of the forbidden island and the world outside it.

However, for all the text content available in Geneforge, the graphics are dated, and the music is nearly nonexistent. Isometric maps are invariably home to tiny sprites, but the ones populating Geneforge are bland and featureless to boot. It definitely adds to the oldschool flavor, but the environments and characters you see during the game’s 40-ish hours will be quite tiresome by the end. Considering the game’s sheer scope, it may be a blessing that you’re not subjected to the same handful of songs ad nauseum for its length. However, the ambient sounds of children playing in every town are intolerable the first time and willful malice each time thereafter.

Geneforge is like a shark—it evolved to fit seamlessly into a particular niche, and pretty much stayed there. It’s the game for you if you miss that oldschool RPG feel, though gamers coddled by smooth difficulty curves and other modern design contrivances should give it a miss. That said, it’s just about the only fantasy game you’ll find that’s not riddled with Tolkien clichés, so it may cure your narrative doldrums.

What It Costs: $25

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10 (skip)
•To The Genre Fan: $15 (demo, then buy)
•To The Casual: $(skip)