Miasma Chronicles

The developers at Bearded Ladies, the creators of Mutant Year Zero, have done it again. Doing it again in this case being putting out another turn based tactical strategy game. Unfortunately, this one, Miasma Chronicles, falls a little short of the studios previous game. Much like reality television stars, it looks beautiful, but ultimately is kind of dumb and the difficulty curve is all over the place. One minute you're enjoying a nice day out at the miasma-torn city, and then suddenly, they begin drunkenly beating the shit out of you with the giant robotic dildo they keep in their bag, and left wondering how you could have possibly defended against that. That combined with a lackluster story, and mixed bag cast of characters lead the game astray. It's odd, that everything was going great for a time, but after a while it seemed like they stopped taking their meds and it started going off the rails, and just when everything seemed to be going great again, they shit the bed.

At any rate, we need to look into the core of the gameplay, the day-to-day activities of our relationship. Which were pretty solid, reminiscent of the studios previous title (MYZ) and other genre defining titles like XCOM, with a few interesting changes, namely the miasma manipulating abilities. Gameplay also boasts the genre standard difficulty, making encounters challenging and rewarding... for the first half of the game. For that half of the game, it is great all around, the story is somewhat compelling, the encounters, outside of a couple, are challenging but at least fair, and the difficulty of the unfair one's made completing them all the sweeter. That changed however, shortly after the honeymoon phase once they got a bit too comfortable.

A few things led to this, in the game that is, not my former relationship. Firstly, are the games upgrades, given via weapons, weapon upgrades, miasma powers and unlocking characters skills, all heavily stagnate. You start to notice finding new weapons, often times through encounters that waste your very necessary consumables, aren't any better than the ones you currently have. Experience gains that are needed to unlock new skills stagnate in the midgame, as a lot of exp is backloaded towards the end of the game's story quests. Miasma Powers become necessary to win difficult battles, but they require energy, that is largely gained through a sparsely given consumable. That's when the game started to really grind me down, when I realized I needed to constantly go back and restock consumables to get through these fights, because if you didn't have them you would be screwed. Secondly, is that the game stacks the ever- loving fuck out of some enemies and encounters in the back half of the game, while you're still left with equipment that isn't much better than what you had in the first half of the game. Basically, weapons, upgrades, miasma powers, and skill unlocks don't scale with the difficulty curve of the game.

There is also an addition of a stealth mechanic, which can aid to thin out numbers in encounters, but it often relies on critical hits and can't be used reliably. Also, I only ever had two stealth weapons, a short-ranged sniper rifle that came with Jade, and an assault rifle found later. Which, because of the poor balancing, needed to be used in tandem to actually be useful in the back half of the game.

Which coincidentally, coincides with the quality of the story as well. It's around that same point that the story goes into what I like to refer to as, the stupid. As the game and the insufferable "Bha Mahdi", lead us to believe the dimwitted protagonist, Elvis, is the reincarnated Head-Editor, who she found in the late Head Editor's Tomb, and whom exclaimed he would be reborn to lead the Editor's to Victory right before he died. The Editors, who are basically a miasma-religious cult, went to "war" with the First Family, who is revealed to be the mega-corporation behind the miasma Edenzen, because the editors won't teach them how to use the miasma. Thank fuck, they pulled a twist at the end, and revealed they'd been gaslighting us the whole time (like my ex), or at least Bha Mahdi had been. Really, she just stole a Head-Editor clone from the First Family Factory, and added all the cult religious bullshit herself, solidifying her as the most insufferable character in the game. Unfortunately, for my brief relief and hopes that the story might not be shit after all, this revelation was enough for Elvis to turn against them and be evil for all of like a day. After we give him an ass beating at the climax, he turns good again and helps us defeat the big bad First Family member Quen, where they then set up for a hopefully better written sequel.

All in all, the game showed a lot of promise only to be hindered by poor writing and poor balancing. It's worthwhile to people that love the genre, but even then, may want to wait for a sale. It earns itself, a score of 6 out of 10, and while unlikely it'll ever be reinstalled like I do with Mutant Year Zero from time to time, it shows enough promise that I'll keep an eye on anything The Bearded Ladies put out in the future.