Charming little diorama puzzle adventure game. Pretty short at 2 and a half hours more or less but there's a lot of extra arcade modes and beating your high score and all that. It gives off a cartoony vibe, not only in a general art style sense, but in resembling a children's cartoon in setting and plot. It's pretty compelling.

The actual puzzles aren't the hardest, and sometimes the game kinda fumbles trying to add variety but overall I found it rather relaxing. I think the greatest decision they made is to not require rotating pieces, cause that always makes these games' puzzles absolutely crash to a halt as all enjoyment and pace is replaced with trying to rotate everything.

I have just finished my first playthrough of this, which still feels like reviewing a normal game youve only played half of. I certainly made it to the credits but Consortium is a game that is dense as opposed to long.

I should probably start with describing what kind of game Consortium is, which is rather challenging to do. Its a sort of Immersive Sim? Its more of a conversational RPG mystery with some token combat elements. It reminds me a bit of Warren Spector's Idea for the "One City Block RPG" in a good way, if perhaps its doesnt quite reach the the level of a Deus Ex game.

I had to laugh listening to a contemporary review of Consortium comparing it to Mass Effect of all things and yeah okay its certainly more akin to ME than Tetris but its still kind of far of. You are essentially a security guard for a Corporation running a fleet of big spaceship like Planes on a futuristic earth (well, actually you are a player playing the role of those things but the meta stuff gets kind of hard to explain). Numerous intrigues ensue and your choices in dialogue and actions affect the course of the unfolding mystery.

Whilst Deus Ex but in a Ship is a good starting point I honestly kept thinking about the Forgotten City for most of it. Its a conversational adventure where you are a stranger from a different time period trying to get to the bottom of a mystery, there is a pretty tacked on combat element, you can tell people about your special situation and they areact accordingly and it gets really meta towards the end. Sure its not a timeloop cause you can quicksave (and yeah thats even explained in context) but it works like one in pretty much every other way.

Ill really have to replay to see just how much it diverges based on choices (and to catch the damned traitor cause I didnt have a clue) but I was really engaged for most of it. It helps that its short and constantly developing, if perhaps some dialogue/situations could get slightly repetitive. Overall though, if you liked the Forgotten City and Immersive sims, you could do a lot worse than Consortium

Edit : Yep, it really does diverge a lot. Its the advantage of narrowing the scope that you can make things all the more impactful

Post Script November 2023
Welp, a few months ago Consortium got delisted from Steam. Id still be upset if it were due to some licensing issue or the dev going bankrupt or something, but no, its cause they are remaking the game for Unreal Engine 5! Ffs. The game's whole charm comes from being a janky source engine oddity, and now all those edges are going to be sanded off to make the game be like every other goddamned game of its ilk released today. Even if I respected that exercise, how dare they try to erase the original? Fuck you. Also weren't you supposed to be working on the abandoned sequel : the tower? What a joke. Anyways fuck the devs, if you want to play consortium just torrent it or get a steam key for the OG

When I was like 14 I bought this at a low price from the game retailer Game. I thought it was okay at the time but then I got a call that I had missed the deadline to return the game.

Very confused I asked what the hell they were talking about I bought it outright. Turns out no, they had just rented it out to me and not made this clear at any point in the transaction. Anyways I got my account suspended for that but Game sucks anyways so it wasn't a huge loss and I havent bought a game there since.

I had never played Fallout 3. My entry into the Fallout Franchise was Fallout New Vegas. And if you know anything about the discourse surrounding these games, the general consensus is that New Vegas took Fallout 3 and improved on everything that F3 lacked, including the classic RPG chops that Obsidian is known for but Bethesda has never really excelled at.

And I really didnt want that to be the case. Obviously it will always be somewhat unfair to compare a game to the one that came after on the same engine, being able to skip one of the most time consuming aspects of Game development. I really wanted to be able to say that whilst lesser, F3 had its own strengths and the world is big enough for both but good god did that end up not being the case.

Fallout 3 is just Oblivion with Guns, as they say. The long, dull, overlong opening that did not really even make me sympathise for any characters or a struggle or anything was pretty bad but on a first playthrough is even slightly tolerable. The character writing and quest designs seem so dull. The combat is awful, even worse than New Vegas and far too easy. This would be fine usually, the combat in New Vegas kinda sucks too but it had the good core of story and role playing to keep it interesting. I cant speak to the Super Mutants, they are all hostile to me, maybe they explain later if they have some sort of leader like the Master or Tabitha commanding them to shoot humans on sight but I will never know.

Time and time again all Fallout 3 seems interested is combat, combat combat combat. By the time I was 4 hours in in New Vegas I had helped repel a gang from a town, helped a rebelled prison and then double crossed them to ingratiate myself to one of the major factions, learned a lot about the man who shot me, flirted with a Gay quartermaster, gotten my first companion in the form of an alcoholic merchant, had some combat yes, in the form of the various expertly designed and placed gang ambushes and met Caesar's legion in Nipton, and their atrocities.

By contrast 4 Hours in in Fallout 3 I went through a long dull intro, reached Megaton, disarmed a NUCLEAR BOMB with 25 explosives skill, raided a super market filled with raiders for a wasteland guide (that quest was at least semi interesting), did a dull quest about some fire ants and spent fully 25 minutes trying to find the entrance to the stupid chevy chase district (oh silly me, of course you had to use a specific metro station) and everything else was just shooting at everyone and everything.

More than anything, Fallout 3 is far too wasteland-y for its own good. This is a world where the bombs dropped centuries ago, people should already be in the process of having rebuilt SOMETHING. Where are the farms? I didnt see any. "The water is irradiated, no crops would grow" then they'd all be dead mate, there would not realistically be enough blamco mac and cheese lying around for hundreds of years. Even beyond the incoherence of the world building its just DULL, a world filled with raiders, orcs, monsters etc without interesting settlements beyond a handful is a boring world. Its a world filled not with characters but target practice. And again, the combat sucks, so its not even compelling on the level that a Stalker Game would be (which even that had better RPing).

Ill admit I did not get very far, maybe this game has good things to offer but whatever they are, they're certainly not apparent in 4 hours of playtime, and I have much better things to get on with. What a slog.

Edit: Also worth mentioning the Bethesda brand Random Encounters TM. Unlike finely crafted combat encounters designed to be interesting and challenging you just suddenly get hit with a random encounter of three cows or radroaches or whatever, utter Filler

Edit 2 : In Columbo Voice : "Oh and just one more thing", this game has really insulting sound effects/melodies. Like when you leave the vault after the intro thats good enough on its own, but they dont trust you to feel that on your own so they add a cringe inducing little (I think its called leitmotif or something like that? might be the wrong term) jingle so you feel awe. A bunch more obvious, tell-you-how-you-feel sounds that insult your intelligence