Adventure Log: Shadowrun Returns trilogy (PC, 2013-15)
There’s a bit in one issue of Sandman where Lucien, the Librarian of Dream, is giving the reader a tour of his library – which contains every book ever written. He comments that he’s even got your books. What’s that? You haven’t written any books? Yes you have, here’s one: The Bestselling Romantic Spy Thriller I used to think about on the bus that would sell a billion copies and mean I’d never have to work again.
I never actually had that book. Everyone has a novel in them, but I’ve never found mine. (My romantic spy thriller did very well and I’m proud of it, but here I am, still working.) What I did absolutely have, for years and years, was the bestselling video game that I used to think about on the bus that would sell etc. etc.
And oh, that game! What a masterpiece it was. A party-based RPG, with a strong narrative, characters you could care about, a flexible build system so you could be the kind of PC you enjoy being, big dramatic set-piece battles, and – crucially – grid combat. No dull JRPG auto-fights where you hammer the boss with your strongest spells for eighty turns until he finally switches to his second form and becomes immune to poison; no irritating real-time-with-pause compromises where you queue up a bunch of brilliant manoeuvres, hit space, and watch your party completely fail to execute any of them. Real, proper, granular, transparent, beautiful grid combat. Tank holds the bottleneck while the mage charges something cataclysmic in cover and the rogue patiently circles to the higher ground, and you know when you’re in range because there’s a bunch of fucking squares on the floor that tell you so. Exquisite. Oh, this is my stop.
Then it turned out someone had actually made that game, and it was called Shadowrun Returns.
Okay: to be really specific, it was actually called Shadowrun: Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. The first game, plain ol’ Shadowrun Returns, is a dress rehearsal. A lot of the crucial bits are in place, but it lacks the scope and polish of the other two; it’s shorter, the plot is less interesting, there are no side-quests to speak of, and it’s missing a few specific features I really value (such as levelling up your party members). But the key point here is that every RPG I have played since these three games has left me saying ‘It was pretty good, but I wish it had been more like Shadowrun Returns’.
I got very lucky! I had no association at all with the Shadowrun setting before this; indeed, having never been a tabletop gamer in my youth, I was only very dimly conscious of its existence. Nor is it all that obviously my jam. I’m fond of cyberpunk, sure, but I hate elves and all those who elf in them, so getting your elves in my cyberpunk is not a peanut butter/chocolate situation so much as a broken glass/mashed potatoes one. (Show me an elf who isn’t really annoying! Trick question. You can’t.)
So, from a content perspective, Shadowrun Returns and I were by no means fated to meet. But with mechanics like this, you could have set the entire trilogy in the world of Barbie Horse Adventures and I’d still have played it. Here are just a few of the things it does right:
- Character building. To start with, the game lets you build your own character, so you’re not stuck playing some shounen schmoe with a penchant for friendship speeches. Then, as you progress, you’re topped up with regular helpings of stat points. I believe very strongly that stat-point systems should work towards interesting and personalised character design, rather than against it. I’ve played too many systems where, for example, if you’re playing a physical fighter, there is only ever any point in increasing your Strength; putting points in Intelligence or Proficiency (Gardening) is not only futile, since you’ll never get to use those statistics, but actively hampers your character, as now they’ll never be as strong as a ‘pure’ example of their class. In SR you get enough points that you can afford to focus on one core stat while still bumping up a couple of others on the side, so that my lightning-fast gunslinger, for example, ended up with insane Dexterity but also quite good Charisma. She wasn’t quite as good at talking to people as she was at shooting them, but it remained a viable backup plan.
(Increasing Charisma lets you give your character ‘etiquettes’, which are somewhere between areas of expertise and habits of speech, and which unlock new dialogue possibilities: if you have the Security etiquette and you’re talking to a guard, you can commiserate with her about the tedium of the job and swap a couple of war stories, so she’ll accidentally drop a hint about the location of the main server room. But you can pick up a first etiquette extremely cheap – so even if your orc street samurai is literally just a killing machine, with no proficiency in anything but swords and the swinging thereof, you can easily fill in a smidgen of backstory and apply a thin coat of texture by picking her etiquette. In which case you should, obviously, pick Academic. ‘Time to die, punk – although I appreciate that killing you with a sword, a fundamentally closural mode of discourse which seeks to limit and confine the available hermeneutics, itself ironically introduces apertures (in this case, wounds) into the literal ‘corpus’ of your body.’)
- Progression. As you go through the game you acquire party members, equip better weapons and armour, and accumulate cash – all those juicy, soothing RPG identifiers. But they’re all kept under tight control. You never get very many party members – four in Dragonfall, five in Hong Kong – so you can afford to spend time getting to know all of them without it feeling like a list of chores. New gear is drip-fed rather than sluiced in by bucket; if you use assault rifles, there are only half-a-dozen available in the whole game, so you never spend time scrolling down five pages of options, stewing over whether +5% armour penetration but -2% accuracy is a better deal than +10% burn chance but -3% libido. And you never end up drowning in money, so purchases matter; you won’t reach a point where you can just buy whatever you like (nor does the game have to include cash-sponge ultimate weapons costing the same as a small country, which I always think is a cheap way of avoiding late-game financial boredom). If you get back from a run, and find you’ve saved up enough money to buy that intensely desirable new armour you’ve been ogling for the last three missions, it feels great. You walk away from the shop feeling like a badass in cool new armour that you, a hard-working shadowrunner, earned with the sweat of your brow, not like you finally got the numerical value of $playerwealth to go higher than the numerical value of $armourcost.
(The characters, incidentally, are all great. Gobbet, the garbage baby orc shaman with her two pet rats, who when not summoning horrible arcane constructs basically lives in a dumpster and eats discarded kebabs, is one of my favourite RPG party members of all time. She’ll follow you into Hell, and then raid the Devil’s trash for chips.)
- Combat. Yes, it’s grid-based, and yes, that for me is the holy of holies. I regard it as axiomatic that any game in which you control multiple characters during combat either already is grid-based, or would be improved by being grid-based. But my favourite thing in SR is that combat always takes place on the same screen as exploration. If you’re poking around a disused warehouse and you get jumped, you don’t switch to a separate ‘battle screen’; the combat UI simply appears over the terrain you’re already on. This is great, because it means when you’re exploring a potentially dangerous area, the back of your mind starts working on what to do if shit kicks off. (That pillar’s going to make great cover if guards suddenly bust through the hatch over there…)
Battles can be optional, but are never random: there’s no identikit pockets of appropriately-levelled foes just kind of loitering on the way to your next objective because God forbid you should have to go too long without a fight. When you do draw your weapon, there’s a simple and non-fiddly cover system that strikes a good balance between plausibility and cool. Yes, your team-mates should always end the turn in as much cover as they can, but you can dash from place to place to get a better angle – gunfights are fluid and cinematic, rather than getting bogged down with everyone hiding behind crates and fruitlessly trading shots. Even melee attacks remain plausible, which is always hard to pull off in any setting with guns. Overall, getting into a fight feels scary and awesome, just the way it ought to (in a video game). When the evil CEO slaps the alarm button and five goons in body-armour come barrelling in through the doors behind him, you get a real sense of: okay, it’s on. Not just ‘oh Christ, more of these guys’.
Also, everything is gorgeous. Check it out:
Now That’s What I Call Cyberpunk. Look at all that detail! Every environment in the game is stuffed full of really deft little touches, and areas never feel repetitive – basic elements are slotted together and then garnished with unique chunks of set-dressing, so that although you’ll come to recognise motifs and architectural styles, you’re unlikely to feel that this street is just a clone of the previous street but with the dustbins in a different place. SR doesn’t lean too hard on the idea of cyberpunk being nothing but cold metal and grime, which I like; this is Cafe Cezve, a location from Dragonfall where you can sometimes pick up quests –
It’s a cafe. It has a piano, and plants, and stuff. It’s not just a big blue neon box where you jack into the Baristanet with your ‘trodes and download yourself a grande caffstim or stimcaff or whatever the fuck. Cyberpunk being about alienation and the subjugation of human identity by the remorseless grind of technocapitalism doesn’t actually mean the whole thing has to take place in a series of trash-strewn alleyways and no-one is ever allowed to laugh.
I think the thing I admire most about the SR trilogy is its efficiency. I’m (finally) playing through Dragon Age: Inquisition at the moment, and seeing for myself what a vast, overstuffed, exhausting, five-course-Christmas-dinner slog of a game it is. You can’t move without being deluged in options, because options mean freedom and freedom is good. Lots of party members, all of them mechanically and aesthetically customisable to your heart’s content! Heaps of largely interchangeable loot, or if you prefer you can make your own! Change every aspect of your castle’s decor! Wander in circles looking for bandits until you’ve completely forgotten what the story is or what you were meant to be doing! Conversely, SR gives you options, but never very many of them. Each mission is an individually wrapped chocolate: you go to the place, do the job, and then you leave and you never go back there again. You can take side missions, but there’s only ever a couple to pick from; you can level up your party members, but whenever you do, it’s a matter of choosing which of two skills you want them to have, and the other one is lost for good. There’s just enough choice for you to feel like you’re playing the game your way, and no more. The result in each case is a game which leaves you hungry for seconds, rather than bloated and slightly queasy.
Unfortunately for me, Harebrained Studios have declared themselves done with the series; having made an RPG that more or less attained my ideal of Platonic perfection, they’ve casually decided that was fun but they’d like to try something else. Obviously I respect and indeed applaud their artistic autonomy and their desire not to stagnate, but also, God damn it. I just want more; more tense, atmospheric little stories for my shadowrunner (on whom I dote to the extent that I made her a mixtape) to sneak and hack and lie and shoot her way through. I feel like my favourite TV show got cancelled. But Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, and I’ll always have Seattle, Berlin, and Hong Kong. There’s an official Shadowrun Returns level editor, which can theoretically be used to construct entire original campaigns; maybe one day, when I have a lot of time on my hands, I’ll settle down with it and I’ll make that bestselling romantic spy thriller, for nobody else but me. Shadowrun: Oxford. Now that would be a game.
[All three Shadowrun Returns games are available on GOG or Steam for between £10 and £15 a pop, and are often substantially discounted in sales. If you’ve read this and already know you want in, it’s absolutely worth starting with the first game: it has more rough edges than the other two, but it’s still a damn fine piece of work. If you’re just curious, I’d recommend trying Dragonfall, the second in the trilogy, which requires no knowledge at all of the previous game but improves on it in several respects.]
