The Telepath RPG series is comprised of story-heavy western-style RPGs with tactics-based battle systems. There are currently three games in the series (though two of them can really be counted as part of the same game), as well as two spin-off games focused on gameplay over plot. Another entry to the main series is currently in development, as well. This review will focus on Telepath RPG Chapter 1 & Chapter 2, the first two games in the series.

Chapter 1 is the black sheep of the series. The graphics are kind of terrible, the controls are wonky, and it uses a generic turn-based RPG system instead of the complicated tactical battle system that characterizes later games. In the words of the developer, it “kind of sucks” overall. It’s still decent for a free Flash game, though, and serves as a starting point for the series. Basically, you’re a psychic studying at a special academy for psychics, and you learn that your brother has been captured by shadowlings, weird creatures composed of negative psychic energy who hate humans. They look like this:

Being the plucky hero, you team up with a few of your friends at the academy and rescue your brother. On the way back, you find a strange bracelet-like object. No one knows what it does, but when you take it back to your dorm room, you find a shadowling waiting for you. It informs you that the object is a slave bracelet, and coerces you into agreeing to serve him for seven years.

That’s all you really need to know about Chapter 1. Onward to Chapter 2, which is much better.

The worldbuilding is spectacular, first off. You start the game in Somnus, the shadowling capital, and it remains your base of operations for virtually the entire game. There are a wide variety of shadowlings to talk to, all of which you can prod for interesting information about shadowling society. I actually found it very interesting to have the capital of the “evil” nation – what would normally be the final dungeon in these kinds of games – be your home base. You get to see the shadowlings as real people instead of faceless monsters. The inhabitants of Somnus have surprisingly varied views on the shadowling-human war and on humans themselves. The setup creates a great opportunity to humanize the “evil” race that normally only exists to be mowed down without a thought by the heroes.

But even aside from that, the exploration of psychic powers as a narrative mechanic is incredibly well-done. Your character will frequently analyze the surface thoughts of everyone they meet at the start of a conversation, and you almost always have an opportunity to scan for deeper information as well. You can even comprehend languages you can’t read just by reading the thought impressions of those who have been there before you. Interactions really explore what it feels like to have psychic powers – and you can interact with virtually everything.

That actually brings up something I find very intriguing about the game. In most RPGs, probably because of D&D, warriors are the “default” class, maybe because they’re simpler. Spellcasters are special, unique, and rarely as common as plain fighters. That’s so boring, though! Spellcasters are just so much more interesting to play as, because they have so much more functionality and can do so many more things.

In this game, though? The paradigm is completely reversed. Psychics are the default class and make up most of your party members, with warriors being rare and unique. Non-fighter characters don’t even have a “strength” stat! It makes actual physical attacks feel like a novelty, separate from the normal arsenal of psychic powers you’ve grown used to – exactly the opposite of most RPGs. As someone who loves playing as spellcasters and finds warriors boring, this is very refreshing.

Which brings us to the gameplay. The game is a tactical RPG, though a relatively simple one. You don’t have to fuss with equipment or consumable items like in most RPGs, it’s just pure stats and abilities. The battlefield is pretty small, too – restricted to the size of the screen. Every character has a health value and “psy points”. Psy points are consumed when using psychic powers, but they can be slowly regenerated if a character skips their turn. Physical attacks are special in that they do not cost psy points. Strategy mainly revolves around getting in a position to “backstab” your enemies – if attacked from behind, characters take extra damage.

Your characters have a fairly wide array of abilities – from the beginning, you’re given a shadowling strike team composed of a healer, a solid attacker, and an “assassin” with special abilities that allow him to move around the battlefield more easily. Later on, you can get a ranged attacker, two warrior-types, two golems (one a slow tank and one a ranged attacker), two human psychics, and a “spriggat”. They’re demonic-looking creatures oppressed by the shadowlings – the recruitable one is mostly just there for novelty.

Battles are…okay, I guess. The game does do a good job at throwing new enemies and abilities at you frequently, so it helps to be able to think on your feet. Your characters are limited to only four abilities, though, which are almost all just variants on “attack” or “heal”, so your options are somewhat limited. There were times when I felt my only choice was to level grind – I couldn’t overcome the enemy’s numbers through a good strategy. Battles are also pretty long, as I’ve come to expect from tactical RPGs, but not as bad as some examples I could name.

The level up mechanic takes an interesting route. You don’t accrue experience points – instead, you pay a trainer to improve your stats directly, point by point. It’s an interesting idea – fusing currency and experience – but it is slightly undercut by the fact there isn’t a whole lot to spend money on besides training. I do like the point-build system, though – it’s intuitive and allows for a great deal of customization.

I do think the game kind of pulls a fast one on you when it comes to character creation, though. Your protagonist has four stats, and the stat allocation screen makes it look like they’re equal, but they aren’t in the slightest. Two are generic combat stats – offense and defense – but two are special stats with a myriad of applications. They’re basically intelligence and charisma, and they’re incredibly important. Increasing charisma increases the total amount of characters you can place on your team, which is vital as the game ramps up the difficulty. Increasing intelligence also decreases the cost it takes to train the protagonist, which is also attractive, naturally. Most importantly, though, they unlock new options and dialogue branches in conversations. A lot of quests can’t even be completed (at least not optimally) unless you’re above a certain stat threshold. However, you can only increase these stats when you “level up”, which occurs once every 3 training sessions you put your character through. The smartest thing to do is to max out these stats and leave your protagonist a weakling at the beginning, but this isn’t apparent from the get-go.

I don’t want to rail on the gameplay too much, though, because it’s clearly not the game’s selling point, and most of the issues I have with it are corrected in the next installment anyway.

The narrative is excellent. There aren’t that many real plot twists, but the writing was good enough to lure me along anyway. The characters are amazingly well-written. You can talk to them at your headquarters at any time, and every so often, as the story progresses, you can engage them in new character development scenes and learn more about them. I was honestly pretty surprised at some of the backstory and personality revelations about many of the characters. The whole time, though, everything is eerily contrasted against the fact that you’re fighting for an evil empire.

Overall, I think the story has some positive messages too. Monarchy is bad, for one. The shadowling queen is a horrific tyrant, and so powerful that some consider her to be a deity. Not all of the shadowlings are happy about this – many have grown tired of the endless warfare that only benefits their superiors. There’s also the bucking of prejudice and factionalism, shown through the humanizing of the “evil” side in the first place.

Perhaps one critique I will make is that your choices don’t impact much. Everything is structured in elaborate dialogue trees, but most of the choices are just for flavor. There are rarely any significantly story-changing decisions, or chekhov’s guns that come back to bite or help you. There is one major choice at the end that basically determines whether you want to be evil or not, changing the final mission and ending. It feels pretty forced – I saw no logical reason to take the evil route, in-character or otherwise. I think that even the most amoral sociopath would not want to throw their lot in with the faction that enslaved them. It reads as some kind of…childish emo teen fantasy of being edgy and rebellious or something? Maybe that was the point, though.

Also, feminism! Kind of a mixed bag, but overall pretty positive, I think. The developer has become very feminist recently, writing a lot of blog posts on the subject. However, even back in his earliest games, I think it’s very clear that he knows how to write good female characters. (In fact, I’d even make the bold claim that he does a better job in this game than in its sequel, but more on that later.) To start with, the protagonist’s gender is never explicitly stated, allowing everyone to use them as an effective avatar without having to explicitly go through a character creation/gender selection screen. Female characters are, sadly, a bit sparse – only three major ones in total, only two of which are recruitable and one of which is the main villain. Those three characters are very well-done, though. Two of your recruitable allies are your old friends from the academy. The male one is a fighter and the female one is a healer, which is annoying, but I actually think the female one is better-written. The guy is pretty generic and dull, but the girl is not the swooning love interest with no personality you may expect from RPG healers. She’s inquisitive and perceptive, taking the logical route to solve her problems, and is not afraid to criticize the protagonist to their face. Though she’s a support character in battle, she’s clearly smart enough to stand on her own, and proves a crucial ally. In the ending montage, she also becomes the next dean of the psychic academy, therefore becoming the leader of a major faction in the world’s politics.

The second character is a bit less interesting. She’s a mercenary who got screwed over by her company and was left in a pit to die, but manages to escape. She’s a pretty static character, but she manages to actually be a good warrior character, instead of the narrative jumping through hoops to point out that she’s a woman therefore we must go into a deep explanation about her ~feelings~ and stupid things like that. She’s introduced as a shrewd, no-nonsense mercenary, and stays that way the entire game.

The shadowling queen is an interesting one, though. Yes, she’s presented as pretty objectively evil…but is that always a bad thing? Sociopathic monsters can be just as effective as sympathetic villains. Why can’t we have women in both roles? And she is a truly terrifying force capable of ruling an entire kingdom through sheer power. Stories will occasionally have the evil sorceress character, but it always seems like they have to play second fiddle to the men. Their powers aren’t as great, or they have to get their power through deceit and trickery, or something equally ridiculous. That is most definitely not the case here. No one’s pulling her strings; everything she’s accomplished, she did on her own merits.

As a monstrous, terrifying villain, she is extremely effective. She is kept behind the gates of the impenetrable shadowling palace throughout most of the game, controlling everything from afar, so you don’t see her directly for a long time When it came time for the final mission and I was approaching her, I was honestly nervous and frightened. And she does not disappoint. Her attacks are unlike anything seen prior, and she will utterly destroy you if you come unprepared.

I suppose something else also bears mentioning, because virtually everyone who’s played the game has commented on it: the art style. Most RPGs have a sort of “3/4 view” where the environment has a top-down view, but characters and objects are seen in profile. This game uses a full bird’s-eye view for everything, so you’ll be looking at the tops of characters’ heads a lot. It’s a bit weird, but the developer has moved on to using the more traditional viewpoint in his latest game, so I don’t feel the need to harp on it.

In sum, Telepath RPG is a good game and a great story – and it’s free! I do recommend it quite highly – it is definitely rough around the edges, but it is an enjoyable experience nonetheless. In fact, there were some elements I enjoyed in this entry that were lost in Servants of God and do not seem like they will be picked up again in Telepath Tactics, the latest game in the series. More on that next time.

 

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