Mini - Review, Consortium

It isn’t often that you’re framed within the confines of your computer, within the fact that the game you’re playing is just a game, and that the events that you perform can be done over and over with different consequences happening each time. Consortium is exactly that game, taking a good look at what it means to be a game in 2014, or rather what it means to be playing an alternative dimensional, multi-fractural event via satellite, or at least that’s what the game sets it up as.

It’s unassuming and confident in what it is. A Canadian developed, Kickstarter funded, choice smorgasbord, with funny dialogue options, and somewhat poor shooting sections. But you know what?

It didn’t patronise me, it didn’t turn snarky at all, it went through all the various computations no matter what zany ideas I had planned. It held mystery, it held game lore, it held interesting dialogue that made me want to look up half forgotten films and crime pulp fiction.

And it achieved what the Stanley Parable achieved, a twisting turning plot that pushed you from one set of events to another, made you question your role, your ethical choices in this fictious world, and time and time again would prove to be self-aware, and fun.

To run through the game’s plot quickly (which is not at all recommended), you take control (literally) of Bishop 6 on a high tech plane, in one of many multi-verses and... interact with the crew. At a glance that's the entire premise of the game. Except as you start playing and mucking about it isn’t, you find out that you're imposing your will onto Bishop 6 as some sort of foreign entity, that there’s a spy on board the plane,  a conspiracy (maybe),  terrorist jets flying dangerously close to your port hole and pages upon pages of information to flesh out the world. In short a lot of content in a tiny area (think Gone Home but with people!).

Talking to characters feels like a dangerous game as topics get closer and closer to the fourth wall until they eventually break through. And when it does… the game keeps going. It’s as though the developers had thought of how you could possibly break the game, over and over, and then decided to account for all the possibilities they could think of. The result? A fresh game with every play through.

It’s fun, it’s crazy, it challenges the way you think about playing games- the closest thing I can think of would be The Last Express in terms of the closed system that exists while playing a narrative based game.

It gives that freedom to play in a different way and rewards you for it, giving out more and more in-game lore till you stumble across a different mystery. And unlike Stanley Parable it doesn’t try to make you feel bad for trying different things – at least in the way the dialogue is delivered. I’d love to say more about Consortium, but the game is meant to be explored. Giving too much away ruins the experience (at least from my perspective of just hearing that it’s a good game, and then discovering a whole lot more).

There’s only two ways that you could really fault the game, the clunky combat sections, which while interesting aren’t really fun (though they do provide for some different choices/results in the narrative), and the short length of the game. Both of these faults are completely understandable in terms of focusing on the positives. The combat can be seen as not a major part of the game (it’s nothing spectacular), but allows for the player to experience things differently, but also gives a sort of "fail state" to what would otherwise be a safe game. The length of the game is due to the width of content available - understanding everything that occurs within the game requires a lot of replays, as events will occur at the same time (two important conversations at once, much like The Last Express). While if the player's goal is simply to get to the end of the game the narrative will definitely not be long enough, however if the player (like me) is interested in exploring the world and characters and unresolved story arcs then there's definitely enough content to explore and "Work through" (good ol ergodic literature). Case in point, you can spend hours seeking out data entries.  

If anything an apt comparison would be The Last Express, although not as dynamic as Consortium, The Last Express manages to incorporate an adaptive AI that would move around the train carriages, taking into account the player’s actions and location to incorporate it into the plot – making different play throughs interesting to say the least. It’s interesting, as well, to compare to The Stanley Parable as well, since the themes of choice and metagame/metanarrative constructions is explored within that game as well. Except in a not as much a fun way, you're constantly butting your head against the fourth wall, as opposed to it being integrated into the plot (as it is done in Consortium)

In this comparison it seems easy to place The Stanley Parable as snarky and self-righteous in the way that it presents itself, waving  philosophical waxing all over the audience in a disparaging manner. Although both games wish to point to the set nature of plots and the limits of video games, it felt for me that The Stanley Parable went further to alienate audiences (or rather me) with its arrogance, irritating with it's pompous the voice acting, and slowly but surely ending with players eventually stopping their play. Which may or may not be a satisfactory ending depending on the player. 

So yeah, a pretty fun game, that I'll try to compare more with The Last Express, and other games that seem to take in their stride the constraints of videogames (I'm looking at you Outcast).