Roads to Safe Places

Since I'm house sitting, I have the fortune to peruse my brother's steam library, and this game was among them. There will be spoilers in this post, so if you don't want to read about the ending, please don't read this.

To sum up- the gameplay is repetetive and annoying, and the story - all you need to know about the priorities of this game with regards to story and fully fleshed, three-dimensional characters can be gauged pretty much by looking at our heroes: 



I mean, seriously. What does this tell us about the intended target demographic and how they view women? Yeah. Necessary? I think not.

To get it out of the way - I'm not the best gamer in the world, but there are several things that bugged me. This game wants you to explore, yet there are several areas in which it is not clear whether you're supposed to go right or left to follow the main plot, and if you go with the main plot by accident but wanted to explore, you cannot go back and miss out. If you want your players to go exploring, this seems very counter-productive.

I did not have that many issues with the AI, but support spells your AI comrade can cast on you which are followed by an unskippable short reaction sequence are a pain in fights in which you can't afford to stand on the spot for a couple of seconds, getting poked in the butt by swords or arrows while you bask in the powerful effects of the spell cast on you. I probably shouldn't even have bought and equipped that one, but it seemed like a good idea. Not so much.

The rooms - boy, are there many of them. Sadly, they are all so similar it's hard to tell them apart, which makes the dungeon and mine parts especially unnecessarily tedious. The same goes for the progression of enemies in those rooms is also boring and predictable. They also fights aren't difficult, but unnecessarily long IMO and would probably be more straining if you wouldn't find as many healing potions which keep you going indefinitely.

Having said this, let's take a closer look at our characters. Here, we have our male main character Caddoc: 

This white dude is obviously a weathered melee fighter. A very muscly manly man. With a big, big sword. Obviously, he is human, and most of him is dressed. A tragic mistake in his youth left his family dead and he is afraid of insects. He also has the dream that starts the plot and wants to find out what is the cause of this nightmare.

Then, there's our female character E'Lara: 

This scantily clad hot white elf-lady is the survivor of a genocide. Her people were killed by minotaurs, who are enemies in this game, too. Other than that, we don't know why she is here. Or why she goes on this quest with the guy above. Or why she apparently believes that about ten belts, thigh-highs and some gloves are going to see her safely through a battle-laden quest. She's not human, and check out those exotic tattoos!

Those boots are a theme in the game, because the lady who appeared in our lead male's dream girl Seraphina has some, too: 

This lady wants our heroes to go on a quest for her, first to find a stone which she asks them to recover for her. They do, and of course, our impulsive elf MUST touch it and cause dramaz! E'Lara blames herself and is blamed repeatedly for touching the stone.

With regards to the weird and thoroughly unpractical and uncomfortable clothing choices the female main characters in this game have chosen (Caddoc also wears less than the male charactes in game, but the percentage of skin he shows as compared to NPCs is absolutely nothing against the difference between these two and your standard female NPC, who are dressed in ankle-lenths skirts and long-sleeved blouses), with E'Lara saying that she thinks this lady's choice of clothes is "slutty", Caddoc telling her that she's one to talk and E'Lara defends her own clothing style. This conversation bugs me because while it does mention the way the women are dressed it doesn't really seem to want to make the players think about this too much.

During the game, our heroes find out that a big bad has recruited an army of mutated creatures fired up by some sort of demonic liquid which makes male characters kill their women, even though their female partners believe that their partners would never do that. This happens to a queen, a female dragon, Seraphina up there. Well. Depending whether or not your heroes drink this substance in the game, there are three different endings: 

1.) Caddoc drinks the liquid. He kills E'Lara, who thinks, "I'm sorry, Old Man. I should have never touched that stone."
2.) E'Lara drinks the liquid. She kills Caddoc, who thinks, "I always said you'd be the death of me."
3.) Neither drink the liquid. They kill Seraphina and walk on into the sunset.

So to sum up: female characters are to blame or blame themselves, dead or not. Good to know.

Yeah. Good job, game.