As a fan of Lovecraftian fiction, I took great pleasure in reviewing two of the latest adaptations recently, Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu and Frogware’s Sinking City. CRPGs are basically my bread and butter over at The Indian Noob and I try not to miss out on any new releases. Thus, I’ve been waiting for Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones for quite some time; Cultic Games’ new RPG that supposedly combines otherworldly cosmic horror with deep RPG mechanics. You don’t get to play supernatural RPGs every day and the fact that its Lovecraftian horror makes it even better. With our sci-fi aficionado Sailesh Singh riding shotgun, I ventured into the bizarre world of Stygian to pass the final judgment.
Story & Setting
Stygian is a love letter to the works of Lovecraft and those who followed. To my surprise, it takes more inspirations from Dream Cycle, The Shadow Out of Time and The Haunter of the Dark than Call of Cthulhu or Shadow Over Innsmouth, which is quite refreshing. Nevertheless, everything you expect from pulp and weird fiction is present in its full glory, and then some. A town in the verge of ruination? Check. Its denizens slowly turning insane thanks to cosmic entities and indescribable horrors? Check. Helplessness, hopelessness and a lot of unanswered questions? You bet.
The story takes place in the fictional New England town of Arkham, now removed from our reality due to an event known only as ‘The Black Day.’ Beneath a sunless sky and alien stars, Arkham is now home to otherworldly monstrosities, doomsday cults and knowledge beyond human comprehension. In this mad world of forlorn hope, you are in search of a mysterious entity known as The Dismal Man. ‘Find me beyond Arkham, after the Black Day’ – these words from a time long gone are what drive you. All that remain are questions, questions you’re hoping only the Dismal Man can answer. This perilous quest will take you from a dark, dirty hotel room to the ravaged streets of Arkham and beyond. Sanity will be tested, choices must be made and sacrifices are mandatory.
Stygian is not only a passion project dedicated to Lovecraft but to RPGs of yesteryear as well. As such, it follows the narrative-driven gameplay of Planescape: Torment to the soul. Combat and exploration, to an extent, take a back seat to walls of well-written text that tries to unravel the history of a world gone mad as well as bizarre character caricatures. Cultic games have succeeded in creating an anti-utopia soaked in evil and one that doesn’t shy away from portraying Lovecraft’s world uncensored. The culture and society of the 1920’s New England are portrayed expertly through detailed writing and world-building. While drenched in surrealism, the well-written main story and side quests deal with realistic themes such as intolerance, depression, hate, violence, mental strain and eventually, suicide; with a lot of care and detail.
The same attention to detail is given to carving out the NPCs of Stygian. An undead soldier doomed to relive the horrors of war over and over again, a reclusive leper paying the price for his thirst for knowledge, vengeful spirits, mobsters feeding off the misery of the downtrodden and cultists seeking to justify their lust for blood in ancient tomes and religious blasphemy populate the city of Arkham. The hapless and dangerous residents of this anti-utopia come to life as if you’re reading an edition of Weird Tales.
Above all, I have to give praise to Stygian for the importance given to ‘role-playing’. The game goes out of its way to ensure that your role-playing experience is not hampered. No matter who you play as – good, bad, or everything in between – there’s a place for you in Stygian (well, not a lot for messiah characters). It truly lets you role-play a mad character in a world going mad. I haven’t seen many games give equal importance to evil playthroughs like Stygian has since New Vegas. It may not have the same level of freedom due to the story-driven nature, but there will be plenty of instances where the player will be able to shape events in accordance with their character’s nature. It’s a messed up world, after all.
As much as I give praise to the story and setting, it does falter a bit towards the end. Don’t expect full closure when Stygian wraps up at around 15 hours of playtime. Since I don’t like spoiling things, let’s just say that it leaves a lot open for future installments, something that can come across as anti-climactic. But then again, when has anyone found all answers at the end of a Lovecraft story?
Gameplay & Mechanics
Stygian is an old-school CRPG through and through. This is evident from the rich character creation screens that let you choose the gender, age, archetypes (such as academic, aristocrat, criminal, explorer, detective and so on), individual archetype backgrounds, their beliefs (such as humanist, materialist or nihilist), 6 attributes, 12 skills, lots of perks that affect the 20 visible stats for your role-playing pleasure. Almost all of these affect your gameplay in some form or another, such as offering positive and negative effects, opening up new dialogue options, passing skill checks and using special items. It’s also surprising how balanced these stats are. There is no real ‘dumb stat’ as it’s common in other RPGs. Yet, Stygian is fair with its skill checks and it’s even noob-friendly. My recent tendency to abandon min-maxing stats in RPGs paid off as there’s almost always an ‘alternate option’ to do things in Stygian. Role-playing has never felt better.
Staying Sane in an Insane World
The main goal of Stygian is trying to stay sane and healthy while chasing the Dismal Man. This is where classic Lovecraft game tropes come in. You have a sanity meter (which also doubles as the mana pool) to manage. Witnessing horrifying events both in and out of combat drains the replenishable meter. You can attain several mental disorders like Schizophrenia and Paranoia through the course of the game. There’s also a need to keep your party well fed and rested to avoid negative stats. One big addition to this survival aspect is the Angst system. The mental strain of seeing otherworldly events and the pressure of combat acts as a negative XP bar. The more angst levels you earn, the more negative perks you get. This is an interesting mechanic to watch out for as there are no effective ways to reduce Angst penalties in the game. The guys at Cultic games are really taking this insanity stuff seriously.
Exploration and Side Quests
There aren’t a lot of side quests in Stygian. But the ones that are there are well crafted with multiple ways to reach a solution, as well as tying into the main story in an organic manner. There are choices to be made and consequences to suffer. Sadly, the exploration aspect of the game is a bit lacking. You’ll spend most of your time going back and forth across 3 small districts of Arkham and will not get to explore most of the surrounding maps until very late into the story. It’s as if the entirety of Planescape: Torment was to take place inside Sigil exclusively. When you do explore other maps, you’ll find them to be rather limited. It feels as if the exploration aspect of the game had been cut short due to time/budget constraints.
The Combat
The least impressive aspect of Stygian is the combat system. Not that it’s bad or terribly unbalanced. Like I mentioned earlier, Stygian is very much inspired by Planescape: Torment and carries the same combat-related problems with it. The real problem lies in how slow, unsatisfying and basic the combat really is. Stygian uses a generic turn-based combat system that’s easy to pick up but hardly becomes fun or tactical. It gives you a fair amount of melee, ranged and magical options to take down foes. Yet most of the time, the combat boils down to ‘spamming hard-hitting attacks’ to eat away enemy HP than tactically using cover, buffs and debuffs.
Like Torment before, a lot of the combat encounters can be avoided by dialogue options, stealth and by running away like a chicken. In fact, Stygian de-emphasises combat as you’ll get more and more Angst whenever you’re in a fight. You also get the same amount of XP for escaping combat encounters as killing all foes. Still, that’s not an excuse, since I feel that combat is as important as any other mechanic in an RPG (even though Torment is still my favourite game of all time)
The combat in Stygian takes place in separate maps preceded by a relatively slow loading screen. Personally I’m not a big fan of these and prefer the combat take place in real-time maps. The load time, combined with the slow pace of the combat and sub-par animations ruin the flow of the game. There’s also quite a bit of Darkest Dungeon-ish RNG rolls for everything from combat sequence to status afflictions, something you wish wasn’t in this capacity near the end of the game. There also needs to be some quality of life improvements like displaying enemy HP, hit chance, better use of the cover system, buffing the effect of some of the spells, and an option to increase combat speed.
Bugs & QoL Improvements
There are some bugs in the pre-release version of the game, as RPG custom demands. I ran into a game-breaking bug 15 hrs in that forced me to restart the game from scratch. There is also the occasional problem of getting stuck in combat, missing combat sounds, unable to select items etc. The developers have promised that most of these will be fixed in the day 1 update but I’m just writing what I experienced.
Then there’s the need for some much-needed quality of life changes like making the UI more snappy, inventory more responsive, adding item filters, inventory tool-tips, increasing map scroll speed, faster movement between the maps, more key bindings and selecting items on the ground more precisely. I also don’t get why you can’t quick-save like other RPGs yet there’s an option to ‘Quick-save and Exit’.
Length & Price
I’m not one to usually judge a game based on its length. However, people who are used to 30hr+ CRPGs may have a hard time adjusting to the 12-15 hr length of Stygian. Don’t get me wrong, it’s highly replayable and I’m all for quality over quantity. But Stygian does leave you wanting for more when all is said and done.
There’s also the matter of price. While I’ll gladly pay $29.99 (with an extra 15% discount at launch) for Stygian, that might not be the ideal price a lot of players might be used to, for such a title. It will be a hard sell at such a busy time of the year and especially when similar RPGs like ATOM goes for $ 14.99.
Visuals & Performance
Stygian is a gorgeous looking game. There’s no doubt about that. The 2D environment sporting hand-drawn illustrative graphic style is clearly the winner that elevates the alien and brooding atmosphere to new levels. There’s so much detail in the sprite work as well as the architecture of Arkham that deserves applause. The use of vibrant and psychedelic colours at several junctures is just fantastic. Do note that there’s a certain section in the game that is quite hard on the eyes and deserves a seizure and epilepsy warning. I do wish there were more variety to the animations, especially during combat. Also, can we have new loading screens like the current one Cultic?
Aside from enabling Vsync and changing the overall quality of Stygian, there’s not much in terms of visual customization. The game ran at an abnormally high fps with Vsync off. I did experience sudden fps spikes during certain sections where there was a fast change in the sprite animations. It might be an Nvidia driver issue for all I know.
Music & Sound
Like all the Lovecraftian games before, Stygian handles the fitting music exceptionally well. The main theme alone is enough to tun your blood into ice. Absolutely no complaints here. Voice acting is absent except for the opening cinematics but that’s to be expected from an indie title such as this one. As for general sound design, it could be better. Stygian has a habit of playing the wrong sound effects during combat. Why my character was moaning like a doggo when whacked by a machete, no one knows. The weapon and spell sounds are underwhelming and could use some ‘oomph’.
VERDICT
Stygian: Regin of the Old Ones is hands down one of the best Lovecraftian video game adaptations out there. It’s also a good RPG that’s just short of excellence due to the average combat, relatively short length and somewhat limited exploration. A dark, brooding setting, narrative-driven gameplay, satisfying role-playing options and plenty of choices await those who buy Stygian. If the current price seems a bit too steep, don’t forget to add it to your must-play list and pick it up down the line.
3 comments