Dark Envoy

 This is getting out of hand; now there are more of them!

I'll admit it here today in front of all; I'm not the be-all end-all when it comes to coverage of the games industry. I know, I know. Some things pass me by. In fact, quite a lot of smalls games pass me by and on some very rare occasions a few big ones do too. I literally just got a Youtube Ad trailer for some high octane Asian-themed first person shooter romp and my heart grew cold as I had to stop and go: wait, is this a trailer for Shadow Warrior 4? Only to realise it was actually for 3, which is apparently out now. How in the heck did this game not even get a mention in during launch week, from anybody? I mean sure; it's abject insanity that the team went ahead and launched in proximity to Elden Ring, they might as well have taken the game's week one sales out back and shot it in the head, but that doesn't excuse my reticence. Truly I am the deepest failure and should feel eternally bad for my shortcomings. Even more so, now that I've heard of 'Dark Envoy' several years late.

Here's a game that might have been announced during the game awards, or maybe E3; I'm playing with 'supposed's and 'maybe's because I have literally no idea. Again, I'm totally late to the trigger here. All I know is that this is a tactical RPG with topdown realtime party-based combat, being made by an indie studio and it wasn't already automatically on my Wishlist. (Who the heck do I think I am?) So yes, this needs to be rectified, right now; because there's no way I'm going to miss a tactical RPG no matter how deeply questionable I find it's premise. (Yes, 'Midnight Suns', I'm still not sold on your marketing.) There's just too many hits in this genre and not enough of them for me to pass up something like Dark Envoy for even a second, so please join me in my exploration of what this indie developer called Event Horizon makes of the every promising 'Tactical RPG' genre.

First of all, I need to start by saying that Dark Envoy is not what I thought it was at all. In fact, judging from coverage I've seen from a few years back, the Steam page is either outdated or this game has had a huge shift in development at some unknown period in time. I say this because I had a bit of struggle figuring out whether or not this game was single player or multiplayer. That's right! According to the gameplay demo the team were showing off for IGN a couple of years back this tactical turn-based RPG has both competitive and cooperative multiplayer built into it that seems to play a little like multiplayer X-Com, to touch on a somewhat recent wound. But then the Steam page of today makes absolutely no mention of the competitive multiplayer aspect at all, beyond a bit about playing 'with a friend' through the single player. Which, rather tellingly, does not seem to mention anything about potential hostilities. (The page still has the appropriate multiplayer tags however, so we can lean towards positivity. )

Another interestingly atypical mechanic hurtling towards this genre is the idea of procedural generation in some of the dungeon designs so that they shift up each time that you enter them. Now usually, tacked on procedural generation is a wholly bad idea for narrative-based single player games because unless the lionshare of development goes into developing the generation technology so that it's smart enough to create strong developer-grade content, the result is usually rather awkward and forgettable generations. However when we're talking about the dungeons of a top-down real-time combat RPG, I can see the potential. Dungeons for games like these aren't typically puzzle based or designed to the nines, at their core they are really just rooms with enemies in them, but if the composition of the enemy changes, and if this game has a core rule system strong enough to create enemies are more engaging to fight than just being damage sponges of varying hitpoint thresholds, then this could become a supremely cool system for keeping the spirit of adventure feeling alive and dynamic. Bring your bombs just in case you encounter a swarm, fire and acid for trolls, haste potions for the big-guys not because you know what's coming, but because you need to be prepared for anything.

In setting we have your basic enough concept of a world torn between magic and mana-based tech, coming to blows for some reason or other and creating a dangerous world swept with ancient relics and plunder that make for tempting lures for your loot junky main characters. Yes, there do appear to be two main characters in this game, which could either be very promising or very blunting for progression of the personal narrative. (This game does seem eager to sell us on the strength of the story, so I hope it's the former) A lot of the time CRPGs forget that the narrative should touch the main characters as well, so that players feel like they have a place in the world they are effecting and thus are invested to their decisions, it's the special juice that makes a 'non linear narrative' worthwhile, and having another character beside your hero might make for a great opportunity for the player to bounce off someone regularly; or that second character could just be another soulless husk waiting to be inhabited with the soul of a second player; it's really all up to the direction the team want to take. I've seen this idea kind of sqandered with 'Divinity: Original Sin', and I'd love an example of this done right. 

I've been coming back to comparisons to Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons a lot during this little inspection because it's very clear there's a shade of Baldur's Gate in this game's DNA somewhere along the line. (Even if they don't personally credit DnD at any point on the Steam page.) Although a slight improvement upon the offerings of those game's combat systems is the ability to slow down active combat rather than just pause it. Now personally I'm super excited by this little feature not just because of the cinematic thrill of watching slow-motion fire balls sizzle through the air, but because I can't count the amount of times I've stacked a bunch of orders in stop mode only for my PC to go off doing something stupid and leaving me with the arduous duty of reissuing all orders from scratch. With the prospect of slow-down, I can see when my moron toon decides it needs to stand in the way of an enemy AOE before casting his heal. A small addition, but one I could see myself using literally all the time.

The only part of this that has me dubious rather than curious is the class system, which the marketing has been very quiet on. We know there are 4 base classes with 'specialisations', and I just wonder if that is going to prove deep enough to encourage repeat playthroughs. I mean, that could very much mean a base of Thief, Warrior, Mage and... Monk? I dunno. And perhaps all of these specialisations will breathe with character and diversity like their very own smaller classes within those chief confines; or maybe specialisations will be limp stat buffs leaning you one of two or three very narrow paths similar to what we see in Dragon Age games. There's a lot of pressure points in this pitch that could be the difference between an incredible experience and an average one, and figuring out which way we're leaning is about half the fun, I guess.

Event Horizon, the indie developers on the scene here, have at least one previous RPG under their belts that you can pick up right now called 'Tower of Time', which seems to be generally positively received. (I'd never heard of it before but it came out in 2018 before I fell in love with CRPGs so my lack of knowledge is no great surprise.) Which is to say they're an indie studio with a proven ability to deliver polished role playing products and if you think that's enough to give them the time of day then you know where to look them up. Personally, I'm a sucker for any game that so much as sneezes in the direction of the word 'Airships' so I'm sold hook-line-and-sinker for Dark Envoy; this is going in the wishlist to be closely watched alongside that steadily growing list of worrying heft. (I'm never going to play a non RPG again, am I?)