Seems activity is on a seesaw and this goes up late to boot.

Not really anything to say about servers other than I started installing a Bitcoin wallet, then I saw that it required an order of 100 GB of storage. Sadly, my VPSes are not that wealthy in disk space so I had to postpone those plans.

I did get to play a game in the Easter weekend however, it’s been a long time since I could binge through a game like that and it felt great!
So I played Dex.

Dex is a cyberpunk open-world side-scrolling RPG with some brawler, action and stealth elements.
Before going in, it should be noted that I played the “enhanced” version. Meaning that many of the games famous bugs were long since fixed and the gameplay and UI was a bit more polished. Just goes to show that it doesn’t pay to be an early adopter!

The game does a fantastic job with its environments and atmosphere. The city is a dark and dangerous place, with lots of thugs in the dilapidated areas, and squeaky clean in the upper-class districts. The game makes a good job of creating the illusion of a 3D world in what is a 2D game, being a side-scroller implies a backwards and a forwards direction in left and right respectively, but you start in the middle so both directions are forwards in that sense, in addition the map branches out in more directions by using doors that lead deeper into the screen and leads to a new screen where left is back and right is deeper. There is also an up-down to it all with sewers and tall buildings to explore. In this way, the city is bigger and feels more more complex without feeling too complicated.

The environments are beautifully designed, colorful and feel quite real despite being clearly stylized. My main gripe here would be the pedestrians, there are quite many of them and as long as you don’t stick around for too long it is ok, but when you realize that the same two dogs are running from one end of the level to the other and back again over and over it looses its charm. You also never interact with them and they never react to anything you do or their environment, even if there is a gang shootout nearby!

The soundtrack is beautiful and fits the game perfectly, I like especially the creepiness and subtle danger that I feel from the sewer and chemical factory tracks. I also bought the soundtrack but sadly I cannot recommend it as a standalone product. This is one of those that work perfectly in the background of the game but not so much as something you can listen to while commuting.

The gameplay is a mixed bag. Most of your time in this game will be spent doing side-quests in the vein of Deus Ex or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, while platforming and exploring every nook and cranny of the city for quest items, XP and credits and talking to delightful and fully voice-acted NPCs along the way. This is a fantastic way to spend your time and is the biggest draw of the game.

XP leads to levels that grant skill points that you allocate into various attributes like hacking, combat skills, health and more. Higher level attributes cost more skill points, but higher character levels give more points on each levelup, staving off the feeling of grinding. The attribute benefits are not excessive, no attribute is mandatory or even feels like an auto-include, except perhaps the 1-drop lockpicking.

Credits allows you to buy weapons and ammo, it also allows you to install cybernetic implants. These implants typically modify your gameplay experience very slightly, but a few are near auto-includes. Improved jumping helps you get to more portions of the game but can also get you killed from falling damage, and the cybernetic eyes can let you spot enemies through walls, though sadly it is togglable and will therefore be forgotten about, you won’t be leaving it on because it tints everything blue. There are also areas that are dangerous without proper enhancements. Such as live sparking wires and toxic gases. These are extremely lethal unless you have the enhancement to completely nullify them. You are never required to pass such hazards to progress through the game, there is always another option, but there is a lot of goodies that you would miss out on. I keep wondering whether getting these enhancements paid off, which i suppose is a good thing because that means the did not pay off too much nor too little.

There is a conversation mechanic that resembles that of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in that you get three conversation options and if you pick the right one you convince the other person. Supposedly it rewards you for paying attention to *who* you are talking to and what they want and do not want to hear. But just as with DX:HR, it feels quite random, and unlike DX:HR you don’t get a personality-summary at the side that can help you make the right choice. I usually ended up “Solving” these conversation puzzles by trial and error, loading the game up to two times. This causes slight frustration and breaks immersion at a point where I’m the most invested. Fortunately, there are not many of these.

The game has a hacking mechanic that consists of your character telepathically accessing devices and enemies in the environment, while you do this the environment is paused. To hack something, simply move your avatar to the object and press the use key, then prepare to defend yourself from the horde of viruses in a twin-stick shooter minigame until the progress bar finishes. You can hack security devices to disable them or to turn them to your side and you can hack human enemies to stun them for a few seconds or until you hurt them. Hacking enemies like this becomes near mandatory in some places but it is never explained how you are able to hack people who do not have any implants (yes, I think i can assume that a lowlife thug in the anti-augmentation gang does not have any enhancements).

Combat is done either with a gun or with your fists. I played a fisticuffs character and refrained from buying a gun, thinking I would loot one anyway soon enough. Well, it took a while before the first few guns started dropping and with my selection of skills and enhancements I had pretty much locked myself into fist-fighting. From what I got to experience of the firearms however ammo might be a concern. You also need to draw your gun into a weaver style in order to aim and fire, in the meantime your enemies will come running towards you and will break your stance on each hit, thus it is easy to getting swarmed and beaten to a pulp in CC if you are not ready to switch to melee yourself. I used guns only to snipe enemies that were out of reach.
Close combat has a few kinks but is workable. There are only three buttons that matter. Punch, block and dodge. some attacks cant be blocked so you need to dodge, but the dodge always work so essentially don’t bother blocking. Most enemies telegraph their attacks with decent amounts of warning. Some others don’t really and can hurt you a lot with but a single hit. Sadly, with CC you often end up fighting 2-4 enemies at the same time, which (realistically) usually does not end well for you. Higher skill levels in melee unlocks more moves that are focused on controlling your foe, such as a low kick to trip them and a high kick to push them, preferably of a ledge.

There is a half baked stealth mechanic in the game. You are introduced to objects in the near background that you can use to hide behind. From here you can just wait for a patrol to walk by or a sentry to turn around. Sadly, this is the only way to avoid detection that does not involve total invisibility. If however you can sneak up on an enemy you can make a silent takedown-move on all but the biggest enemies. Besides gunshots, there is no noise to worry about, doing a superhero-landing behind an enemy still lets you do a takedown once you are back on your feet. There is also an enhancement that lets you use invisibility cloaks, these seem very expensive to rely on and I could not even get them to work (though I never tried in combat), I probably missed something. There is also a set of armor that you can find that makes your character cloak if she stands still for long enough, this cloak then lets you move around and do some non-combaty stuff without breaking, and it’s free!

Spoilers ahead!
The story is pretty decent except near the end. You are a nobody that is saved by a hacker named Raycast but you are now on the run from the authorities for reasons you don’t know, you meet allies that help you become self-reliant and from there the world opens up for you to do what you please. The story missions are quite few but can be quite interesting, if nothing else they introduce great characters and complex relationships between them. The story sadly starts to take a nose dive near the end. After having destroyed a Master Control Program Mark 2 you are in no subtle terms told that you can access the end-game and leave the open-world city. This brings you to an underwater lab facility where you learn that your character is one of several thousands of clones, some of which, like you, have been unknowingly planted into society. This lab idea is pretty cool and despite being very spaced out it feels plausible, here you discover who Raycast is and you are given a choice. To destroy all clones or to betray him and tell your enemies who Raycast is. There is also a third option that involves erasing all records of the clones so that they will go free. There is an interesting cyberpunk concept here with how Raycast describes that the clones are designed to be pliable and controllable and that is the end-goal of the villains to literally control the world. This is swiftly forgotten about and never mentioned again. Sadly, the third option of sparing the clones has no impact on the ending and is just a less grim version of Raycast’s option, but the game presents it as something completely separate.

No matter what choice you make you escape from the facility with a minisub and you are invited and escorted by the antagonists to the final boss. So, an underwater base, far-fetched but somewhat plausible, what is not plausible is the space-station city that you are brought to! It feels so far out there and does not really add anything, the ocean-lab already evoked the “they are more powerful that we thought” trope, a giant space station just shatters the suspension of disbelief at this point. You are now made to re-live moments that may or may not have happened off-screen to two of your NPC allies, but there does not seem to be a point to them. Is it to show that the villains knew what you were up to all along? Is it an attempt to make the story darker? Is it you dreaming nightmares about your friends getting into trouble? How does the antagonists know the parts they weren’t there for yet still remain unaware of other things like who Raycast is? How come decker is still alive when we saw him get killed? Has the entire campaign been staged by the Crow as a big test? If so, then to determine what? It feels incoherent and like something that was not quite complete but left in the game anyway. Then we get to speak to “The Crow”, and kudos to the game for subverting my expectations. The Crow is built up as being a mysterious and dangerous woman, but she is revealed to be old, dying and frail. She has been looking for a successor that can do what she could not, merge with Helios I mean Kether to become god. She babels at you for a bit then you dive into cyberspace to beat the original Master Control Program Mark 1 and then you get to select your ending.

And the endings mostly suck. If you betrayed Raycast, you can choose to take over the Complex, ruling earth from aboard the space-station-city, becoming the new Crow and spitting out some pretentious poetry that was also present before the start of the game. This would be an ok ending if only it was shown what becomes of the world, the clones, the friends that you betrayed and so on, but all we get are a few stills that repeatedly imply that you are in charge now.
The middle ending is available to both paths, you merge with Kether. You get an epilepsy inducing cutscene in blue and white showing stills of your character for a few seconds, then credits. Nothing said about whether it worked, whether you went insane as Hammond warned, nothing about what became of… everything. This is a concept that I am very interested in and we get nothing so I was quite disappointed.
The good ending is only accessible if you destroyed or freed the clones. You use this opportunity to destroy the Complex. The ending shows a still of your character moving through the crowd while a news reporter talks about unethical human experiments and repercussions for the companies involved, stating that the clones are among us, no one knows who they are but that they are people. This ending is the best of the three but is not quite there.

All in all, I had a great time with Dex. The combat before you are free to roam sucks, and so does the endings, but the exploration and sidequests was great fun, the world and characters are beautiful and interesting, I only wish there was more!