Consortium - How To Eat Your Cake @ RPS

I found a new article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun this weekend from Sin Vega who talks about how Consortium breaks the fourth wall for player interaction.

We can’t keep saying video games are a young medium. We’ve been saying it since I was your age (or since you were mine, if that fits better), and besides, the last few years have finally shown that there’s plenty of room for games that do more than idly amuse us. Consortium is one such game.

Unlike any RPG I can name, Consortium throws you in with no map, no introductory cutscenes or tutorial. When you start, you don’t choose a character, you sign a disclaimer. It’s disorientating and strange, and immediately different, dedicated fully to its central conceit; you the player are accessing a satellite, provided by the developer, iDGi, that allows you to control a man known as Bishop 6, on board an aircraft, in the year 2042.

It nails role playing as a person in a specific situation, to an extent no other game has. Paradoxically, it achieves this by telling you nothing.