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Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we have a good time PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to seek out out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have grow to be obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon peak of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
A Game of Thrones CRPG is such an apparent licensing match and but, culturally and corporately, all the time seems to be two zigs and a zag away from really taking place.
Perhaps Warhorse Studios was the probably candidate, within the wake of two unflinching medieval simulations underneath the Kingdom Come banner. But the Czech studio’s proprietor, Embracer, can also be cradling the clumsily named Middle-earth Enterprises, and so Warhorse’s future belongs to The Lord of the Rings. As for that different RPG powerhouse, Obsidian? I’ve seen Josh Sawyer complain too many occasions from his social media armchair about HBO’s unrealistic battle formations to anticipate that can ever occur.
And so we flip to historical past, simply as George RR has finished so many occasions when sourcing inspiration for his novels. Turn the clock again to 2012 and you may uncover the largely forgotten Game of Thrones—its place within the annals not helped by the truth that Telltale launched a recreation with the very same identify simply two years later.
2012’s Game of Thrones was a Cyanide manufacturing, one of many Parisian developer’s lengthy record of eurojanky initiatives with a fantastical bent. Though at this time finest identified for Styx and Blood Bowl—the latter of which manages to be each mechanically and thematically crunchy, all the way down to the bones—the studio was experimenting on the time with CRPGs. In the identical 12 months as Game of Thrones got here Confrontation, set within the universe of a French tabletop wargame, and Of Orcs and Men, a Styx spinoff during which you performed a chunky greenskin.
It’s evident that Cyanide’s employees had their noses buried deep within the novels
All three launched to combined evaluations, nevertheless it appears to me that Game of Thrones is the decide of the bunch—low-budget and coarsely textured, however elevated by its dedication to weaving a narrative by the dense material of Westeros. This is, I think, partly all the way down to the truth that it wasn’t conceived as a tv tie-in.
Yes, you will come throughout the voices and likenesses of HBO actors whereas pottering across the Gift and King’s Landing. A smug rendering of Lena Headey is stinking up the throne room. The Night’s Watch is held collectively by James Cosmo’s Commander Mormont. And at a crucial second, you will profit from being swept up within the thriller machinations of Conleth Hill’s Lord Varys. But in any other case, it is evident that Cyanide’s employees had their noses buried deep within the novels.
That’s most apparent in the Game of Thrones RPG’s structure: you’ll flit back and forth between two perspectives, chapter by chapter. It’s a common device in fantasy literature, but far less so in our own medium, and has a profound impact on the way the game is experienced. For one thing, you’re embodying two different character classes: a fire-flinging priest of R’hllor, who shares his unusual choice of god with the red witch Melisandre, and a brother of the Watch who deals in mace-swings and headbutts.
Cyanide takes full advantage of the split to tell its tale from different angles. While you begin the game battling apparently unconnected plights, the two gradually intersect, and it becomes apparent that your dual protagonists might not share the same interests. The priest loses his titles, and must become a Lannister lapdog if he has any hope of regaining his seat as a lord of the realm. Meanwhile, your man in the north finds himself hunting down lapdogs to protect the Night’s Watch from coming apart at the seams. As it turns out, a handful of gold can be all it takes to turn a Brother against his fellows. And the Lannisters are famous for their access to gold.
The action kicks off a month or two before the opening stages of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which gives you a front row seat to the events that precipitate war in Westeros. Robert Baratheon is still stumbling around, filling his belly with boars that haven’t yet managed to gore him. And Cersei Lannister is busy moving chess pieces around the board. You might not be a pawn, but you certainly play one of her knights, and quickly wind up complicit in dark schemes.
Game adaptations often take place in the margins of their parent properties, and the Game of Thrones RPG might have felt peripheral to the point of triviality. But George RR Martin has always embraced the agency of bit players, expanding rather than reducing the cast of his stories over time, and that spirit allows you to feel part of something bigger here. It helps that Cyanide’s storytelling is surprisingly tight for a studio which, up til this point, hadn’t been known for narrative. Its dialogue is direct and upfront with its intrigue—a necessary frankness against the backdrop of a world dense with knotted histories. The lead performances, meanwhile, are dripping with theatrical, bassy resonance.
It helps that Cyanide’s storytelling is surprisingly tight for a studio which, up til this point, hadn’t been known for narrative.
Mind you, a lot of the other voice performances are quite rubbish—presumably recorded by a tiny cast, desperately looking within themselves for a fourth or fifth accent that could feasibly be ascribed to a peasant in Flea Bottom. And I’d be lying if I said the budget couldn’t be felt in other ways: the unremarkable streets of a King’s Landing that’s more Doncaster than Dubrovnik; the repeated visits to nondescript parts of Westeros; the fuzzy aesthetic tricks that developers often used to cover a multitude of fidelity sins during the Xbox 360 era.
But I’m quite fond of an element that was singled out for some of the strongest criticism in reviews of the time: the combat system.
Granted, I grew up on real-time-with-pause brawls. It came in the millennial starter pack with MSN Messenger and a now-defunct AOL email account, so I’m forgiving where others might be frustrated. But if you ask me, Cyanide squeezes real tension out of throwing you into scenarios where you’re sweaty and surrounded—desperately trying to tagteam stuns and knockdowns with some temporary companion who unhelpfully spent his youth perfecting archery before joining you shoulder-to-shoulder in a tight dungeon. I even quite like the bits where, as a shapeshifter, you take control of a dog to rip the throats out of unobservant guards, and follow scents to root out betrayal in the Night’s Watch.
Like a clutch of dragon eggs, Cyanide’s Game of Thrones is a bag of mixed blessings. Sometimes when I’m strolling through Castle Black, I hear that giveaway sign of an underbaked noughties RPG: a supposed old man, speaking with the voice of an overworked 30-year-old voice actor. And in those moments, I wonder whether I might eventually ditch this genre also-ran for good.
But then I remember that one positive quality of noughties RPG fandom was that we accepted imperfection when presented with peculiar mechanics and fascinating worlds. And that, when I look at the far more lavish spectacle fighter Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, launched last year, I see almost nothing of the spirit of George RR Martin. Stories set in Westeros should not be smooth and slick. They should shudder and clunk into place, slowly and then all at once, like the tectonic events they depict. And that is what CRPGs are for.
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