Wednesday, January 25, 2023

Kian and Enu

Debates about Kian in Dreamfall Chapters are very heated.  I'm not going to retread old ground, except to say that if you're going to have a game where you can make choices to affect relationships with different characters, why not choose his sexual preference too?
I thought maybe kissing Anna would allow a different option, but no, he's definitely gay.  I wasn't fond of Anna, and thought she couldn't be trusted because she's a magical, but a Google search explained this doesn't change anything.
Magicals are like elves.  They can be thousands of years old and look like kids.  That makes the relationships in this game a little confusing.
I'm saying this because I thought Kian had a definite chance with the youthful Enu.  She DID seem smitten with him.  
By the same token, I didn't understand the scene where he had to choose whether or not to torture the Azadi.  I couldn't tell for sure if the magical was a kid or thousands of years old until Kian's friends chastised him for going easy on the guy.  I wondered if the 100 year old nymph (I assumed, anyway) actually liked the Azadi soldier.  You don't get that much information on their relationship, other than what others say about it, which makes it morally ambiguous.  You surprise them in the act, so of course it looks bad.
This reminds me of another morally ambiguous choice in the Rockstar Games Batman game.  With everything in silhouette, you were given several different options that didn't look great, all of them looking like you'd kill the guy.  I saw a picture of a chair with something sticking out of it, then stared in shock as Batman slams the guy down on a rusty piece of rebar.  How was I supposed to know that's what he was going to do?
Also, while on the topic of choice and interactivity, the tower at the end of the game has all these computers all over the place, on every scaffold, but you never can do anything with them.  It seems like a waste of rendering, programming and memory space not to have some kind of interactivity with them.  All kinds of characters show up on the platforms around the computers.  Certainly someone could stand at one and call to the other guy to input the virus, or you could have a timer in which you have to type in the numbers real fast.  Maybe all of this had to do with deadlines.

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