Frustrated and annoyed.

Full disclosure: I backed this game on Kickstarter. Beautiful 2D story-rich isometric Fallout-esque game? Yes, sign me up, definitely! Project started in the beginning of 2017, and I was prepared to wait, and wait, and wait.

ONCE AGAIN, I should have read the description more carefully…

For ♥♥♥♥’s sake! You cannot make a good game with good graphics alone. You cannot make a good game with a metric butt-ton of padded pointless dialogue (looking at you, Tides of Numenera!). You cannot make a post-apocalypse game without explaining how the game world EARNED that apocalypse first. And you cannot make a world without providing proper context and exposition.

There may be spoilers ahead. Or not. I don’t care. Like I said, I played the game top to bottom and now I am annoyed, and frustrated.

Forget about Fallout. There is no character progression, no combat, no Actions Have BIG Consequences, nothing.

Forget about exposition. Most of the stuff you see in game is never explained, not even a tiny bit.

Story time. So you… who the bloody, bloody, bloody hell are you is never properly explained… drive down this very dilapidated road towards something with someone who is somehow important, and then this Big Huge Thing appears and there’s an explosion or shockwave and the world fades to black! DRAMATIC! OOOF!
And then it’s future! And it is the aftermath and it is not the apocalypse yet somehow is… because South Africa, and South Africa does not play Fallout because South Africa IS Fallout, only worse, and everything is made of rusty scrap metal and repairs are for wussies… and you get somewhere like an airfield which looks like is survived a nuclear apocalypse but it’s actually not because it’s actually the bright future (does not look bright or futuristic) and you wander around looking for something because you have someone’s eye (WHAT) that requires something for some reason, and you have to go to this Big Huge Thing to do something because GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY… and then it all no longer matters and you literally never come back.

If you read all that and have not lost my train of thought, congratulations, hop aboard, because you will need at least this level of resilience to trudge through gameplay.

Full disclosure, again. Big Huge Thing will never be explained. It’s not even needed for the story, really. And it will never be explained why you have an eye and why it is called the way it is called.

Come on, people, logs and books and codex entries and whatnot exist for a reason.

Ok, so maybe the game presents itself through dialogue? Well, yes, kinda, but again, without providing any context.
Most of the time all this incessant monologuing spat at you will be structured like this:
“Something something of something does something something because something reasons something”

Human mind that is properly learned can infer at least the structure of what is said even when you speak gibberish (provided that gibberish really does have any structure). So that will be you fallback option – try to grasp the basic relations between all those words that are not words and infer what is required to progress.
Any immersion is immediately broken. Roleplaying goes out of the window, because if people speak gibberish but carry handheld guns that can one-shot future choppers, and you don’t carry anything like that and want to survive, you tend to be polite unless you have a death wish.

Hint: there is NO direct combat system in the game. At least, not one that you directly participate in. So, don’t go my way – feel free to vent your frustrations whenever you like it.

This brings me nicely to my next point.

CHOICES. Developers drank deeply of the cool-aid provided by ELEX, unfortunately, and it shows. Most of the outcome of the game will be solely dependent on the WAY you spoke to people. Not what you did, not what genocide you caused, not who got what.

A careful balance of naughty and nice will unlock you Four Colored Endings! Because we don’t want to go the Mass Effect way and have just three!

Again, this is an adventure game, not an RPG, so consider this a long fetch quest that nests subordinate fetch quests. Also, be prepared for puzzle-quest logic, when items interact in mysterious what-the-heck ways.

Like this one time when you have to play a game (only actually you don’t have to) and there’s an arcade machine and you have a guy who’s really proficient at arcades and there’s a token slot and there’s a little bit of gold economy going on… sooooo, insert some gold? Exchange gold for tokens? Maybe there’s a kiosk for that? Sounds reasonable? WRONG, go do multiple fetch quests, you imbecile.

The auteurs went the Ace Combat 7 route – it is quite possible (I did not check) that you have to play the game multiple times to get what the heck is going on and what is what and what are all those words that are not words. What Desolation lacks is engagement to make you play all those additional times.

I did finish the game hoping for some resolution or explanation or SOMETHING in the end. There will be none, don’t repeat my mistakes.

BTW, see what I did there? Desolation? What about beautiful?

Ahhh, this is my last point.

The backgrounds are beautifully crafted. There are beautifully crafted backgrounds. The authors definitely poured a lot of work into backgrounds.

Finding paths through them is a hot mess. Most of the time I could not even fathom what was a path and what wasn’t.

As for beauty… I don’t know. Looking at all that made me desperately wish for more order and structure and even more explanations on what were all those things littering my screen like so much hot garbage. Mostly it’s just that – Desolation.

There is no hope, no gains, no world deserving to be saved, no choices that will matter in the end for you personally, no resolution… only desolation.