Game Review: Shadowrun Dragonfall
6) There are some telltale signs that the team that made this game was lean and mean.
Small glitches, the occasional crash, a few moments where the quality subtly bends down below that line where you can see through the movie-magic of it all. I can’t speak for the average, needy consumer, but I found those moments of awareness that the game was made by actual people to be refreshing. I don’t want my games to be so highly processed that I feel like a team of corporate robot focus groups made them. In grad school we called this particular attribute of art “facture”, or the signs of human manufacture. These small mistakes, scuffs and smudges connect you more closely with the author. Here, they creep up on you occasionally and it’s actually kind of nice, whereas in most corporate games those signs of facture are relentlessly hunted down and scrubbed out.
7) The cast of characters is memorable.
They’re all pretty good. They’re not the best characters ever, but they’re unique, they’re given backstory, and as of the Director’s Cut version, they’re each given a unique mission where you get to know them better. You’ve got your introverted, mysterious goth girl who it turns out was involved in some kind of Satan-worshipping polygamous cult. You’ve got your brusque soldier who hates you at first but over time comes to not like you but sure respects you, god damn it. You’ve got your older guy who had a life before this and more down-to-earth, relatable problems — his nephew’s getting mixed up with the wrong crowd. And of course a ragtag bunch of ‘shadowrunners’ (basically anarchist mercenary special ops groups — it’s why the game’s called “Shadowrun”), is not complete without a ‘fixer’, the guy with the connections who goes out and gets the missions for you.
