Last time, I looked at the first entry into the Telepath RPG series. This is the next game in the series, Servants of God. It’s clear that this is where the developer started seriously pursuing game design as a career. It’s bigger, more professional-looking, and it has a price tag.
I remember being so hyped about this game when it first came out, and it is certainly a solid piece of work, but it’s not without its flaws. I think it definitely shows the lessons the developer learned from his earlier games and is an overall improvement, but it’s actually remarkably different from the first Telepath RPG in a number of ways.
The changes are by no means bad, but they are…different. For someone who was expecting more of what they enjoyed about the first game, it can be a little disorienting. Still, I suppose that’s good design philosophy – willingness to try new things instead of rehashing the same old stuff.
The worldbuilding is still excellent, but it takes a very different approach. The story is much more grounded in realism, as opposed to exploring the fantastic. Instead of starting in the city of a fantasy race, the game takes place in a human city and revolves mostly around ordinary humans. The premise of the story is that the city your character lives in, Ravinale, used to be a stable democratic society, but a religious cult slowly grew to power and staged a coup. Now the country lives under the yoke of an oppressive theocracy that believes psychic powers are evil.
In case the real-life parallels weren’t noticeable enough, the religious cult is monotheistic: their god’s name is “Yahwah”. To further hammer it in, Ravinale has a distinctly middle-eastern vibe and appearance to it.
The developer refuses to take an explicit stand on religion in general, even down to refusing to disclose his religious beliefs. It seems to me that he’s definitely in favor of secularism, even if he isn’t against religion itself. The theocracy is portrayed very well – their beliefs are internally consistent and make logical sense from a certain twisted angle. They can be reasoned with – you can actually defeat the final boss by crushing him in a theological debate. However, it’s also made clear that, however pure they believe their motives to be, they are definitely going to far. I’m not sure entirely how far this commentary extends to real life – the developer is obviously criticizing extreme theocracies such as the Taliban, but is he also criticizing religious craziness in the United States by showing people the logical extreme of such philosophies? Ravinale itself is weirdly similar to the United States – their government structure is almost identical, for instance. I’m not sure if that’s just creator provincialism or if it is supposed to be a deliberate comparison.
I wonder how much of that is flavored by my personal beliefs, though? I and the rest of my family are staunch atheists, so of course I view secularism as a good thing, and I always took the “skeptic” dialogue options in the game itself. But I wonder how a more religious person would feel about this? There are certainly dialogue options that allow for a more religious viewpoint, but the overall message still comes down very strongly as “No matter what you believe, theocracy is going too far.”
As you can probably tell, the narrative goes deep into philosophical territory. There’s a lot of discussion about death, power, politics, freedom, etc. The psychic powers angle is actually a bit subdued compared to last game – it’s still there, but it’s rather dwarfed by the overall plot itself.
The writing is stellar. The previous game had novel-like descriptions of events to fill in for the limited art style. Here, the developer takes that idea and runs with it. Descriptions are lengthy, vibrant affairs filled with imagery and metaphor. The transient nature of literary description is captured in a way few other video games have tried.
There’s much more room for interaction, too. The entire world feels much bigger. Ravinale is more than twice the size of Somnus, filled with tons of people and sidequests to explore even before you start the first mission. Somewhat paradoxically, it is also more dangerous – you can easily get killed by exploring the seedier parts of town, provoking the guards, or just generally drawing attention to yourself.
However, though it obviously tries to capture that “wide, expansive city” feeling that is the cornerstone of story-based western RPGs, I couldn’t help but feel that something was missing. It’s still a joy to explore every nook and cranny of the city, but I already know most of it. It’s a human city, full of normal humans doing normal human things. Somnus was truly alien, filled with weird creatures that had cultural standards completely different than my own. I was not only exploring a different location but a completely different world, with its own people and culture. Everything felt significant in some way as I tried to learn to ropes of this strange new place that slowly became home. Ravinale just feels too…ordinary, in contrast. There are people hawking their wares in the marketplace, there are thieves and assassins in seedy bars that you should probably stay away from, there’s a library. There is a sense of adventure and exploration to it, but there’s no culture shock beyond seeing the effects of an oppressive theocracy, which are…really quite subdued, actually.
I wonder, what was life like with commonplace psychic powers before the religious nuts took over? Maybe there was class strife, with the nobility being the only ones who could afford to hone their abilities while the lower classes had to make do with parlor tricks, if they had any abilities at all? Did widespread telepathy create a stronger sense of community, and are people happy or sad to see it outlawed? Is there merit to the priests’ claims that telepathy and mind-reading are dangerous? The game’s premise has such a perfect setup for creating a world that is like ours, yet different in a number of ways. However, these questions are never answered – we only see the city in its mundane form, after everything supernatural has been stripped away. I’ve always loved to look at a story that explores what effect widespread supernatural powers would have on society, yet for some reason authors keep failing to deliver. There is still exploration of psychic powers beyond just their use as a plot device, though, so that’s a step in the right direction.
Interactivity is definitely expanded upon in comparison to the previous game, though. In my last review I said that, while there was a lot of choice, there wasn’t a whole lot of consequence. That’s not the case here. Even the littlest things you do early on can come back to bite you, and most sidequests have a myriad number of endings. There is one event in particular that is very memorable, and which I believe is meant to punish players who try to be cartoonishly evil by showing them the real consequences. I certainly felt horrible after testing it out to see what would happen. It must have taken a long time to write all the branches and iterations, and I congratulate the developer for his effort there.
However, I feel like the game might be tilting a bit too far towards the “punishing” aspect of this. There are a lot of things you can do that will make you want to kick yourself later, but there aren’t a lot of options that promote long-term gain. It is also very easy to permanently lock yourself out of rewards for certain sidequests, be they items or even characters, though usually only if you do something very obviously stupid.
On the topic of interactivity, let’s move on to the gameplay. It’s pretty much a straight improvement on the original model. Battlefields are bigger, allies have a larger repertoire of attacks, training is a bit more streamlined. Character creation is still almost exactly the same, though, with, once again, no indication that two stats are vastly more important than the others.
Battles are also much more user-friendly and professional. Telepath RPG 2 would frequently throw long chains of battles at you with no gap or warning in between. You couldn’t save or adjust your team in between these battles, so they were often grueling sessions that had to be restarted from the beginning if you screwed up. Missions in Servants of God are still long chains of battles, but the game always pauses in between each one, giving you the opportunity to save and customize your team. You’ll usually get lots of opportunities to revive dead teammates, too.
Oh yes, that’s another thing. Character death follows a similar format to the last game, but revival is a bit different. You don’t have a nigh-omnipotent god-psychic on your side this time, but you do have a ghosty spirit thing with similar abilities. You recruit her early on, and then you can ask her to revive people at any time. You don’t have to throw gold at her, but you do have to provide her with “soul charges”, which you can gain by having her use a special ability in battle. It’s never explained what these are or why they’re necessary for revival. Maybe your happyfun resistance movement is powered by eating people’s literal souls, maybe that’s just a fanciful term. Who can say?
Like the resurrection last game, this isn’t explored as much as it could be, though it doesn’t exist in a complete vacuum. The characters discuss it during some strategical planning, one noting that they can afford to take some casualties, another saying that it’s still risky. Also, apparently it needs the main character to work, because he’s a special snowflake or something? Who knows, the game’s weirdly vague about some of the specifics.
Your main character is a special snowflake, though. Character advancement has been expanded – there are a ton of new abilities the protagonist can learn. Even the doubled normal repertoire of abilities isn’t enough to handle them all, so you have to swap out abilities from a larger pool outside of combat. It takes a long time to get there, though. In the previous game, the main character had already had some combat training, and so has a full skillset. In this one, though, you play as a pampered young aristocrat’s son who only knows the basic attack and healing abilities. By the end of the game, though, he can do pretty much anything. Buffs, high-level healing, incredibly powerful area-of-effect attacks…the only problem you’ll have is that he can only do one thing at a time! I do think the developer may have gone a bit overboard with this, since the protagonist is easily capable of matching or even eclipsing specialists in other fields, something that took a lot of effort in TRPG2, if it could be done at all. There are also quite a few abilities that only he can use, but which might work better in the hands of other characters – the buff abilities, for instance. They’re really useful because they increase your offensive abilities for the rest of the battle, but I don’t have time for that when I need to blast this enemy mob with Dark Vortex before they swarm me. Giving some of the buffs to other characters would have gone a long way towards making them more tactically viable.
But there is one major objection I have to the gameplay. Remember I praised Telepath RPG 2 to the high heavens for inverting the normal ratio of fighters to spellcasters in RPG? That’s pretty much gone. Every character is mentioned to have some degree of psychic powers (except one, who has no special abilities at all), but you’d barely know it from their combat roles. Your initial crew only has one character with explicit psychic abilities – everyone else just uses boring regular weapons. They do get special abilities later on, but they’re pretty generic fighter-type skills. The closest we get is some flavor text mentioning that their special maneuvers would be physically impossible without some telekinesis. You do get more psychics later on, but it just doesn’t provide the same feeling that TRPG2 did. Spellcasters are back to being more of a gimmick thing, with fighters forming the core backbone of your group. (They also all get late-game attacks that are nothing but “deal more damage”. No one else gets these “super” attacks, so it’s kind of hard to play catch-up with them.) Unfortunately, the developer does not seem inclined to change this paradigm any time soon, if the class list for Telepath Tactics is any indication.
Still, I will admit that the wider variety of character types introduced does provide for some more tactical depth. You get ranged attackers and a new support class designed to generate mana points for your psychics, who go through that stuff like popcorn. Your main healer also has no offensive abilities, making him more specialized. Still, though, they all feel a bit like sideshows compared to Mr. I Can Do Everything.
Overall, it actually feels like the gameplay is moving more towards class-based specialists (and this is even more obvious in the previews for Telepath Tactics). In TRPG2, your characters had clearly defined roles, but they were still adaptable and generalistic. Here, they’re hyperspecialized. Your healer can’t even attack, for crying out loud. I’m not sure which approach I like better, to be honest – each design philosophy conveys a very different style. I actually feel the generalist approach makes the characters more “personable”, in a weird way – with a smaller, shared pool of more versatile abilities, they feel less like game constructs that can only be pegged into one role. I’m probably not explaining this very well, but maybe you know what I’m talking about? Or maybe I’m just crazy.
Also, feminism. Paradoxically, it appears that when deliberately trying to write female characters, the developer portrays them worse than when he was just writing off the cuff. For instance, you may have noticed that I have explicitly referred to the protagonist with male pronouns throughout this review, instead of constructing awkward sentences dancing around his gender like I did last time. I think you know where this is going.
You may notice something in this picture: “Your character is a male.” This is the very first thing the player sees when starting a new game. Literally the first thing. And right from the get-go, the prospective player is told that their avatar is going to be a guy.
There wasn’t anything like this in TRPG2. (Although, just as an aside, the protagonist from that game has a cameo here, and it turns out he was actually a guy all along. So much for ambiguous gender!) I can see why a purely ambiguous gender might not be an option like it was last time – the story’s a lot more complex, so dodging pronouns is a bit trickier. But why couldn’t there just be a gender select option? What’s so important about a random senator’s child being a guy in a world that appears not to have much in the way of gender discrimination?
I have the sinking feeling it’s because the developer decided to throw in a romance plotline, which brings up another problem I have. I do hate romance plotlines, but this one is pretty subdued and completely optional. That’s not this issue – the issue is the way your love interest is portrayed. For at least half the game, Rahel’s a faux action girl whose abilities are talked up a lot, but not really shown. She used to be the leader of the resistance movement, but when her boyfriend died, she had an emotional breakdown and appointed her second-in-command (a guy) to be leader, and he remains leader throughout the entire game.
Rahel’s talked up as being a star tactician, but all this really amounts to in-game is her criticizing the decision to make the main character into the group’s tactician. The writing does come out ahead of most similar examples by having most of her objections and advice actually have merit to them, and you can choose to agree with her instead of being a condescending jerk like most protagonists do in such situations. The basic trope still carries some unfortunate connotations, though. And it gets worse.
One of the early missions involves her having to confront her past. This leads to her having a nervous breakdown. You then have the option to go comfort her. If you do this, then at the end of the game (mercifully not on-screen, just in the epilogue summary) she’ll fall in love with you. Yay.
She doesn’t really have any involvement in the plot after that scene. It’s just…eeeehh. It feels a bit too much like her character revolves around being the love interest. She starts off being prickly so you can melt her heart of ice. She becomes vulnerable so you can protect her, but she doesn’t really do anything to help you beyond giving some optional tactical advice that you can brush off. Oh, and she does give you a hint to a puzzle in an option dungeon if you don’t piss her off. But that’s really it. For someone who’s supposed to be a star leader and tactician, she seems to have really poor social skills and emotional control. Anya may have been a healer, but she had a much more assertive personality than this – she pledged to free you at any cost, later said hey have you considered that maybe the shadowling queen isn’t that nice, and finally flat-out deserts you if you decide to turn evil.
Perhaps it would have helped to have other female characters. Rahel is literally the only one with character development. She does have a lot of development, but it’s not enough to make up for the others being incredibly static. You do see a few independent, assertive personalities, but they never really go anywhere. And one of those assertive personalities is a comic relief character obsessed with her beauty. Oh, and also, the main character’s parents. One remains faithful to the old religion, and retains their seat in the Senate when democracy is reinstated. The other, for no real reason, starts believing in Yahwah, which causes them to lose their seat and become disgraced at the end of the game. Guess which one is the mother, and guess which is the father. I suppose it is interesting to see the protagonist’s parents expressing a crisis of faith to serve as a background to the religious issues, but did it really have to play out that way?
There also aren’t any female villains like there were last time – the religious crazies are all guys. This makes a degree of sense when the developer is trying to criticize fundamentalist regimes, which are usually quite misogynistic, but we see no evidence that this cult is oppressive against women at all.
I don’t know, am I being too harsh? The developer’s heart is clearly in the right place if he’s writing articles like this one. It seems to me like he fell into the trap of writing “strong female characters” that are anything but (a theory that is further evidenced by this). He seemed to do a better job when he didn’t make a big to-do about it – I honestly liked Anya and Helena more than Rahel, even if they were simpler.
In closing: in case you can’t tell because this review is extremely critical, I cannot recommend this game enough. $25 is a bit of a high price tag for a random indie RPG, but if you can afford it, it is more than worth it. The writing is stellar, the interactivity is well-done, and the gameplay is engaging, even if it can drag on a bit. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. If you like story-focused games at all, you will almost certainly like this one, especially if you liked Telepath RPG 2.