![]() ![]() ![]() Most characters are staggeringly self-centred several heavy topics are handled with zero sensitivity Silver is incessantly snarky irrespective of the situation and the emotive animations and lip-syncing feel so dated – yet somehow it manages to come across as hilarious rather than terrible, well most of the time. My disdain for most of the factions was thanks to some truly awful writing – which I hope was intentional – coupled with enthusiastic voice work. Most factions are gleefully bloodthirsty and deeply unlikeable, so decision-making is never straightforward and the outcomes are rarely predictable. Your surviving crew have their allegiances split, so they’re not reliable allies either. The Ratkin are the most sympathetic, having been enslaved by the Naboru, but the dominant faction is simply fighting for supremacy and would do the same to the others if given the chance. The Naboru Keepers are arrogant and elitist tech-hoarding scholars, trying to manipulate events from the shadows for undisclosed “masters”. The Naboru Empire are technophobic slavers, only interested in protecting their medieval hierarchy and keeping the nobility intact. Your spaceship AI seems a little too fond of putting the mission to recover an artefact known as the “cradle” above the lives of the crew. The planet of Wardenia was a terraforming project, every faction is a colonizer of some sort, and none of them get a free pass. To The Last Oricru’s credit, picking a side is tough. Is there no one nice on this damned planet? There are moments when you have to serve the interests of a faction leader to progress, but you can frequently ignore them outright and squabble with everyone for long stretches, or even fall during certain boss battles to shift the balance. That’s just a simple example as The Last Oricru lets you push back and forth throughout your playthrough, introduces power struggles within each faction, and slowly reveals the original mission of the human crew and their spaceship AI. ![]() In one playthrough, you might be sneaking into a fortress through the sewers to overthrow its defenders in another, you’ll be helping the desperate defenders retake their city by clearing the streets and defeating an enemy champion. ![]() On the upside – though you might not realise it at the time – the tutorial already offers up several decisions that can shift your relationship with the two major factions and, in turn, significantly change the end of the tutorial and the start of the next chapter. It’s also an interesting premise squandered by a bland tutorial that involves little more than slogging through too much dialogue, running back and forth across a tiny map, engaging in some floaty combat, and even engaging with a rudimentary stealth system never used again. It’s a luxury that makes them perfect pawns for the major factions and sub-factions competing to control Wardenia. After waking up in a cryopod and being lethally stabbed in the crotch – which could just have been an animation alignment issue – he’s revived in a monastery, dubbed “Silver” by the leader of “The Keepers”, and soon discovers that he – along with three other human survivors of a spaceship crash – are functionally immortal thanks to their snazzy belts that revive them upon death. The Last Oricru’s opening is as confusing as the protagonist’s inconsistent personality. Could someone just tell me what’s going on? As such, I found The Last Oricru – a non-linear, choice-driven RPG from developer GoldKnights – packed with neat narrative ideas that reveal their depth over time, but the gameplay and presentation are rough, and first impressions are awful. I’ll preface this review by admitting I’m a lifelong fan of janky mid-tier games – especially RPGs from developers like Cyanide Studio and Spiders – willing to trade production values for complex systems or divergent narratives. ![]()
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