The black void wraps its indistinguishable tendrils around you, coddling you in an abyss of morality. A glimmer of colour appears. It’sཧ a wheel with various ideologies marking the slices. You’re asked how you would handle a caravan lost on the road and whether you’d dit💟ch your friends to survive - you’re asked deeply personal hypotheticals that are abhorrent to think about but getting through this quiz washes away the endless depths to reveal a picturesque yet barren Australia, reeling from whatever unleashed its dystopia. You’ve decided who you are. This is Broken Roads.
I ended up shaping my character into a nihilistic Machiavellian, a scheming survivor with no loyalties, no ties, and entirely devoid of empathy. Most people tend to be heroic in RPGs, opting to be the legend that brings everyone back from the bri𒆙nk, but my go-to is usually a little bleaker. Broken Roads facilitates this playstyle, but gets more morbid than I expected alarmingly fast. In many ways, that calls back to how unsettling the original two could become, games that developer Drop Bear Bytes&rsqu🦩o; co-founder Craig Ritchie touted as inspiration. This inspiration is clear from its top-down isometric camera to the apocalyptic makeshift civilizations, but where it shines through most is the game’s morality system.
In the first Fallout, . While the scene is a gut-wrencher, it doesn’t hold a candle to Broken Roads’ opening. As I sit here in the coffee shop beside🧜 EGX London 2021, almost two hours from playing it, it’s still on my mind, curdling in my thoughts. You stumble on a woman crying over a corpse. Your party slowly meanders forward, leaving a guard behind as a precaution. She’s inconsolable. The nihilist path opened new dialogue, letting me be blunt and unsympathetic - get over it, he’s dead, there’s nothing you can do. But then you spot a child cowering behind a fence - the man’s son. He shot his own father. He too is panicked and frantic but, instead of talking him down, I rush him to try and 🔯disarm the gun he’s decided to point at me. In the scuffle, he ends up shooting himself.
It’s an incredibly twisted scene that highlights the lows of humanity, the ruthlessness of this post-apocalyptic world, and yet I could’v🍸e circumvented it completely if I decided not to be an arse. It’s a morbid moment because that’s the path I paved for myself, not because the developer wanted to go for shock value within the first hour. Should I have been more heroic? Is this really what I want to keep happening in my playthrough? I don’t know, but it’s a level of choice emphasized by dialogue that is rare to find in RPGs. We’re so used to arbitrary and linear paths that Broken Roads’ seamless approach in its narrative progression is amplified tenfold, immersing you in this Australian cacotopia.
While 168澳洲幸运5开奖🐽网:Fallout has become more and moreꦡ action-oriented, an FPS in an open-world first and foremost, Broken Roads calls back to these older top-down dialogue-based adventures with the bulk of the prologue being about conversing with strangers. Your very first task is to talk 💎to everyone in the rusted, cobbled-together town, and the lookou⭕t asks you to check out the fences to make sure they’re secure - I didn’t. In many ways, it’s also akin to Disco Elysium.
You’re not forced into anything, but people around you will notice if you forgo quests - something that’s refreshing when worlds move at your pace in most games, bound to your momentum rather than flowing naturally with or without you. Just take Skyrim - leave Alduin to his devices while you saunter off to do side quests and it doesn’t matter. There are merits 🧔to that approach - it’s more approachable and lets players adventure at their own pace - but the world feels more alive in Broken Roads, which is perfect for a modernized approach to older RPGs.
But to circle back to conversation - it feels authentically Australian. Not only is it wonderfully written, it integrates slang in a way that isn’t jarring or out of place. You’ll hear people get called “wozzas” or “scavvies” while structures are said to be “in pretty good nick” - the island at the end of the world doesn’t just look like Australia, it feels like it. That’s great for a game that uses the backdrop’s familiarity to highlight how far civiꦡlization has fallen.
Broken Roads is incredibly promising. The passion from the developers shone through in this very narrow and focused demo, but everything from start to finish was tight-knit with detail and care for the lit𒁃tle things. If the final game can keep that momentum from start to finish, Broken Roads is in with a chance of joining some of the RPG greats.