Inquisitor Retrospective

When it comes to the reception that a game receives from the community of gamers and game journalists when it releases, a lot of factors go into it. Some of the more noticeable or important factors that will shape opinions of the game are things like -

Was the game released in a playable, bug-free state?

Was it released on time?

What did the game look and feel like?

Was it original?

What did *insert large game reviewing company name* think of it?

Believe it or not, these various factors all play into your perception of how good a game is, either consciously or subconsciously, whether you are aware of it or not.

Over time, some games ‘get hot’ and are carried along by the wave of momentum and hype. Other games, which may have very well had some good ideas, get left behind and forgotten about. Maybe the game got a poor review from a big game review site. Maybe it released in a state that resulted in a lot of gamers having a buggy experience, with graphical glitches and the like. Maybe the game was too difficult or didn’t give the greatest first impression to certain gamers. There are many reasons why a game can get left behind and forgotten, and today I will be talking about an RPG that seems to have been left behind recently. That game is Inquisitor.

On paper, a lot of what I would consider ‘old-school’, isometric RPG fans should be on board with Inquisitor. It is, after all, a game that graphically resembles something like Baldur’s Gate or Arcanum, with an isometric perspective and detailed, hand-drawn backgrounds and graphics. Game-play wise, it mixes some elements from a lot of old-school RPGs as well. You can have party members join you and fight alongside you in real-time combat, and you can pause the game at any point, although it is, admittedly, a bit clunky. There is a lot of dialog and text, lots of loot with well-written descriptions, history and lore, a la a Baldur’s Gate game. There is plenty of exploration, various NPCs to talk to, chests to unlock and traps to mistakenly walk into and get insta-killed, having to re-load your last save. There are evil monsters, dark motives and a strong narrative that carry the game along. All of these features are present and here in full force, tied together with a somewhat unforgiving and high degree of difficulty. Yet somehow, the game hasn’t seemed to click with a large amount of gamers.

The ones that it did click for will tell you what a fantastic experience it can be.

Even with all the RPG elements intact, the game still received a lukewarm reception with critics. In all honesty, though, the game really didn’t get many reviews at all! If you browse Metacritic, a site that most gamers are familiar with for its game reviews, you will only find 5 ‘official’ reviews from game critics, totaling an average score of 64. The score is high enough to not be considered terrible, but low enough that a lot of gamers wouldn’t get excited or very interested in a game scoring that mediocre number. For whatever reason, it seemed the stars were aligned for this game to not shine on a large scale, or resonate with a large amount of gamers to be considered a big success, hence the descriptive titles of ‘niche’, ‘hardcore’ and ‘old-school’ applied to the game by players who did check it out.

In any event, the game sort of went unheard from, reserved for people who dig a bit below the surface and search for the gems that others have seemed to miss. Thankfully, the stars also aligned at a time that I would stumble upon this game in the Steam store, and the rest is history!

Now let’s talk about what I consider the greatest strengths to this somewhat obscure title. In short, Inquisitor delivers a fantastic, palpable and, most importantly for this specific game - believable atmosphere, game world and lore. The world that the game takes place in is much like our own world we inhabit, existing as it did hundreds of years ago, in a primitive time where religion and superstition ruled all, with a bit of the Christian or Catholic mythology being quite literal and real in this world. There is a very strong religious tone to the game, complete with heretics and inquisitors, priests populating cathedrals, witches, famine, plagues, and all that fun stuff that you've come to expect from the Bible and similar sources. The mythology is detailed and includes everything we’ve come to known about this well-known topic, and some creative things that will sound familiar to you if you haven’t been living under a rock in modern societies that accommodate religion. You will find enough ‘reality’ here to make you feel at home in this world, and enough of the occult, weird and terrifying that you will be quite happy you do not actually live in this terrible world.

For example, witches and heretics are being hunted by the inquisitors, tortured and burned at the stake. Demons, angels, witches, pagans, Satan, God…all of these mythological ideas-incarnate take turns and star in leading roles in this dark, medieval drama. You will find some truly chilling encounters that make the game so different than anything you will have experienced in RPGs to this point. Demons will inhabit the bodies of normal people, only making themselves known when the time is right and their thirst for blood gets too strong to ignore. Horrible murders will be committed and it will be up to you to unravel the mysteries of this archetypical world. If you can suspend your disbelief for just a moment, you will find that this world has an eerie reality to it that may play a trick or two on your own belief systems if you let it. It’s truly a dreadful, yet familiar world to explore, that will immerse you all the more deeply.

Another strong and key ingredient to the alchemical RPG concoction here is the mystery-solving aspect you will encounter with the quest design. To begin the game, you are sent to a backwater town in the north of the Realm to investigate a murder, and the game quickly draws you in with a world where people lie, there are ulterior motives, and Satan’s minions are running amok, with Satan himself "banging on heaven’s door", as one of the citizens of the town will tell you. The last years for the Realm have been terrifying, with plagues, famines, and even fire raining from the skies. Many of the inhabitants are superstitious like you would expect a medieval person would be, and most seem to believe that the end of the world is coming, and all the strange happenings lately are pointing exactly to that outcome. The game’s many twists, turns, unexpected events and sense of dread and terror all make this a chillingly fun game to experience for the first time.

Mixed in with the people’s superstitions and strange beliefs, will almost always be some kernels of truth, but it’s up to you, the player, to figure out which pieces to believe and which to dismiss as fantasy. As with any good RPG, there are plenty of ‘real’ legends to follow through on and discover, but in terms of believing what NPCs are telling you, well, you’re going to have to do some deep investigative work to figure out what is fact and what is fiction. Each character in the game will have different ideas for you to explore, different motives, different theories on what’s going on, and you will piece together the puzzle yourself. The beauty of this system is that, when you talk to NPCs about different characters and mysteries you’ve encountered, they almost always have some small bit of dialog that makes you think about the situation in a different light. You may think you’re on the right path, only to have an NPC throw you a curveball that gets you thinking of another possible outcome. You will definitely have a lot of “A-ha!” moments, as well as some, “Wow, that’s cool!” moments just by talking to the various villagers and NPCs you encounter, as you gather clues and solve the mysteries presented to you in a Sherlock Holmes-type of way. The rabbit hole goes very deep here and the system is very well-developed and cared for.

It should be noted here, that if you are at all interested in playing this game, you must be prepared for a lot of dialog and text. I’m talking tons, but thankfully, everything is well-written, nicely delivered and translated well enough that you are never really taken out of the experience. In fact, the large amount of text will truly draw you in if you let it. Soon you will be feeling like you are really exploring this dark universe, and you will spend hours just talking and gathering clues with the citizens of the town as you explore this classic RPG adventure through the use of text. If you don’t like to read and solve mysteries without voice acting, hand-holding or large, intruding quest markers, then you may not want to play Inquisitor. You will get none of those so-called “modern conveniences” here, hence the titles of ‘hardcore’, ‘niche’, ‘old-school’ and the like.

These are the strongest aspects, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other quality aspects to round out the RPG experience. For one, there are plenty of stats and skills to ponder over when leveling up. There are 5 core attributes that shape your character, as well as a myriad of skills that each of the 3 classes implement to further customize the builds. There is a robust magic system, with plenty of healing, protective, buffing and direct damage attacks that will come in useful should you choose to go down the path of the magically-inclined. There are thief skills as well, and the game features everything in the stats and abilities categories that you have come to expect with an RPG cut from the pen-and-paper cloth. The game is also hard, but not too hard, as long as you explore the ‘right’ areas for your level. If you wander into some deadly region, you will get owned by Satan’s minions themselves or some other terrifying beasts of legend and lore, as you should have come to expect from an RPG like Inquisitor.

If you play a game for things other than combat, you will find a lot to love here. That’s not saying the combat is bad, but it’s just a small piece of the puzzle. It is very fun to kill things in the game, but it’s not the biggest highlight of the experience. Your most memorable moments will be solving the mysteries that you are presented with, riding along on the slowly-building, spiraling story, and basking in the glory of a hellish, demonic world full of fear, terror and evil! If any of that sounds interesting to you, I would highly suggest giving Inquisitor a shot. Turn the lights down low, put your headphones on and play at night to get the full effect. If you like any sort of old-school, isometric RPGs, then you should have already checked out the game by now. If you enjoy religious mythology with angels, demons, heretics and all things evil, you will find a whole world to immerse yourself in here. Open the gates of hell and jump on in, embracing the ancient evil that this game offers for your perusal.

Give Inquisitor a shot today and you may be very glad that you did. Just make sure to put on your reading glasses first.