Shadowrun Returns

[IamLEAM1983]

I already mentioned Shadowrun a few months back, when we were discussing our favourite pen-and-paper systems in the previous forum's chatrooms. You already know what I think of the setting in the broadest sense – which is that I freaking love it.

Think about Urban Fantasy for a bit, and think about we're doing in this board, right now. Most of the time, the genre seems to depend on strictly contemporary settings and factions and then slaps in magic and elves and goblins and whatnot. That's now Neil Gaiman tends to work, it's how the designers for Urban Arcana work, it's how White Wolf Studios works – the fact that they deal with vampires notwithstanding, of course. Few settings are ballsy enough to dig into what-if territory, or to embrace some of the wilder, more speculative aspects of contemporary design. That's where Cyberpunk comes in.

We've gone over Cyberpunk in our own attempt at poking it with sticks a few years back, and I kept feeling that we were mostly ticking boxes for the sake of adhering to the whole concept of it. Rampant privatization and corporate management, the dissolution of human rights in the face of the growing imperatives of Science, the re-definition of what it means to be human in a world where Humanity can have various degrees of synthetic bits and bobs – so on and so forth. Shadowrun is the only setting that plays both the Fantasy and Cyberpunk cards, and it does so with a very particular and unique brand of assurance.

The long and short of it is that 2013 is a fateful year in the universe's timeline. Old confluences of arcane forces awaken, places of mystical import deemed dead or dying suddenly reawaken after thousands of years of hibernation – and species deemed mythological or fictitious very quickly diverge from the standard genetic makeup of Humanity. In a single generation, the Awakening sees human couples give birth to elven children or trolls; if not orcs or dwarves. It isn't too long before those same beings recognize their difference and find members of their own species, which seats their genetic makeup in more standard ways. The following decades are severely marked with the return of magic and shamanic forces. Even as elven eco-terrorists swallow entire cities in their aggressively grown sylvan paradises, mages and wizards start to join the ranks of modern anarchist groups.

Fast forward to 2050, and scientific development has gone just as haywire as magic. With the planet's ecology and financial equilibrium thrown out of whack, various corporations have banded together to ensure their common survival. Megacorps now control everything from your entertainment center to the cops slurping coffee in their squad cars. Referral ID tags are everywhere, laptops and netbooks have given way to “decks” and cranial jacks, polymorphed dragons are ruling half of the planet's economy from atop their tower, and North America has split into a collection of massive coast-spanning conurbations like the Sprawl, which begins with Seattle and stretches all the way down to Los Angeles. In-between the coasts, you'll find the elven city-states and orc outposts, Indian reservations-turned arcane training grounds for shamen of various confessions, and the blasted remains of those cities who were hammered by the nuclear wars of the previous decades. Shadowrun Returns is the first RPG to place you in that universe since the SNES classic from 1993. Otherwise, we've largely had to contend with a misguided attempt to twist this rich universe's lore and backstory into FPS fodder. That was 2007's Shadowrun, developed by the ill-fated FASA Studio. Considering, this is a long, long time coming. Nobody cracks open the setting's sourcebooks to figure out which gun goes boom the loudest – Shadowrun is a lot like the World of Darkness in that it's rich with its own lore and backstory – and thoroughly suffused with the keys and essential tropes of the Cyberpunk genre.

Developed by the Kickstarter-backed Harebrained Schemes Studio, Shadowrun Returns feels both like a welcomed addition and a pleasant return to the gaming days of yore. What's presented to you is a collection of lovingly assembled and detailed pre-rendered isometric maps, with the player and computer characters being the only 3D models in the entire game. Mechanically, it feels like a cleaner and updated take on Fallout 1 and Fallout 2's mechanics. You'll freely click around the maps to move around between combat segments. When the lead starts flying, the game presents you with an XCOM-worthy grid that shows you the neighbouring cover spots and the exact limits of where you're allowed to move while still remaining in the firefight. As the whole thing is turn-based and gives you two action points per character, it's up to you to figure out when to move, when and who to shoot, when to reload and when to switch to your mêlée loadout to chuck a few grenades. After a few minutes, I felt like I was playing a cleaned-up and slightly streamlined take on Baldur's Gate. The whole thing might feel outdated if you're strictly a roleplayer of the Skyrim or Mass Effect persuasions, but they're actually revisited forms of mechanics that used to dominate the genre, a little over thirteen years ago.

Proving that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, Returns sticks to that formula right down to including absolutely no voice acting. The dialogues are plentiful and the personalities you'll bump into are richly detailed – but it'll all happen in the head-space, for wont of recorded voices being around to flesh them out. Again, some might find that archaic; but the fact is that RPGs spent decades operating in utter silence, weaving entire worlds together without audibly speaking a single word – pen-and-paper systems excluded. That might be rather jarring at first, but it makes you realize how the essentials of what makes a game great don't necessarily depend on voice acting.

Not that quality voice acting can't be appreciated – it's simply a case of everything not necessarily needing to be said or read aloud.

That mute tale is one of either noble revenge or callous contract-fulfillment, among a few other nuances. It all depends on how you want to play your Street Samurai, Decker, Mage or Shaman. It all starts with your character receiving a curiously posthumous video conference call after a few weeks spent teetering closer and closer to bankruptcy. One of your former Runner buddies, Sam Watts, had a “dead man's switch” device rigged to his heart. In the event of his heart stopping, a pre-emptively stored video conference message was arranged to be sent to you. Watts, wanting to know that his criminal and odd job-seeking self at least mattered to someone at least once, asks you to find his killer and make him pay. You can either accept out of the goodness of your heart, or because fifteen thousand nuyen buys you a heck of a lot of drinks – and the required soykaf to try and fight the resulting hangovers...

Like any RPG, Returns presents you with a variety of choices, regarding your central mission. They aren't legion; but still offer enough variety for a Decker and a Shaman to have to approach the same situation from varying angles. There's not a whole lot of sidequests and most of them are basically odd jobs that only take a few minutes to complete, but that linear setup still has enough granular nuances to encourage repeat playthroughs. What's more, there's no sizable barriers preventing you from playing a super-smart Troll Decker or an Elven Street Samurai who can actually take a beating, unlike his frailer cousins. If there's any serious problems to the game, there's the fact that it's unusually short for something released in this day and age. In the era of games netting you hundreds of hours of play time, a campaign that only requires up to twenty might feel a little short. Again, it's a case of trusted mechanics being maintained, as a twenty-hour stretch used to be considered a rather generous offering, before Bethesda killed productivity the world over.

Above all, however, the strength of Shadowrun Returns is in its moddability. A standard purchase nets you the Dead Man's Switch campaign, but a quick jaunt on the game's Steam Workshop reveals that there's already a campaign-assembling community taking shape around the game. Once you've fleshed out your character after the introductory campaign, you're free to download more runs and more shadows to visit – hopefully decently assembled by the community. Emphasis on hopefully, as some of the offerings I've seen were basically tryout maps or challenge arenas. Not everyone has the patience to script something as long as Dead Man's Switch, but there's already a few campaign creators that seem to have the hang of it, both tonally and mechanically. Time and good fortunes willing, Shadowrun Returns could very well have a bright future ahead of itself.

At twenty bucks a pop, I'd say this is a very secure investment.