Review: Telepath RPG: Servants of God

Recently, a one-man operation called Sinister Design (aka Craig Stern) released the newest version of his turn-based Eastern-medieval-steampunk-turn-based-strategy-'em-up, Telepath RPG: Servants of God. As I may or may not have mentioned back on the ol' Tumblr, I played a ton of Stern's earlier games over this past Christmas break. I found them to be very addicting, but that addictiveness was almost entirely the result of the turn-based battle system that is the heart of all of his games (except for the mostly forgettable and blessedly short Telepath RPG Chapter 1). It's a pretty unique system that involves movement points, tile-based movement, slowly regenerating mana (it might not be called "mana", but magic points...you know what I mean) and a neat flanking/sideswiping mechanic that rewards you for thinking a few moves ahead. Basically, it's one of those beautifully-designed systems that is incredibly simple to learn, but that reveals more and more facets and details the longer you play. I liked this system so much that after playing the original (and free) Telepath Psy Arena and Telepath RPG: Chapter 2, I shelled out fifteen bucks for Telepath Psy Arena 2, which was even more fun than its free predecessors thanks to a refined version of the combat engine and the fact that it did away with everything but the battle sequences: essentially, it's a single-player ladder-type tournament game in which you just fight a series of harder and harder battles, using money from each victory to recruit new characters and buy new levels for them, which serves to unlock new abilities and power-up old ones. It was insanely addicting, and yet the fact that I was so pleased to see a version of the game that "trimmed the fat" of story and exploration, and all that (things that weren't, to my mind, implemented that well in Chapter 2) made me hesitate before shelling out for Servants of God (which is essentially Chapter 3). Would adding RPG elements like dialogue, towns, subquests, and narrative make this iteration of Telepath a "real" RPG? Or would it just distract from the battle system's greatness? More importantly, would this one-man project be worth the rather jaw-dropping asking price of $25? Well, I'm one "dungeon" away from finishing the game now, and I'm still just as unsure of the answers to these questions as I was before I bought the game.

You see the quotes around "dungeon" up there? That's the first problem. There are no dungeons or other RPG-esque crawly-explorey places in this game at all*. You enter each new area via clicking around on a Baldur's Gate-type overworld map, and once you've entered, say, "Bandit Cave", you are merely ferried through a series of battles until you face the boss battle. There isn't even a pretense of having you wander through corridors for a bit between battles; rather, it's literally just a series of what could just as well have been Psy Arena's battles provided with a bit of "story" context thanks to you clicking on a map.

*Full disclosure: there are dungeons in Servants of God. They are, however, "bonus" areas that don't need to be completed to finish the game. On top of that, they are so crushingly, shockingly complex and the puzzles that must be solved to pass through them so devilishly clever that unless you are willing to spend quite literally hours on each one or resort to an online walkthrough (like I did), you're just going to want to skip these dungeons and just play the main storyline, which is, again, more or less a series of battles that occasionally require you to click on a map to return to your base and listen to a talking head explain who the next bad guy is after you've won 4 or 5 of them.

Oh yes, that reminds me of the towns. The towns, such as they are, are weird affairs, in which you wander around with WASD and click on people randomly until someone actually says something that moves your quest forward. Again, here, there are a lot of optional quests at work. Unfortunately, a lot of them depend on your ability to navigate conversation trees to achieve a desired outcome, and often more conversation options become available to you as your character goes up in level. The problem is, often if you choose wrong in these conversations once, it slams the door shut on you ever being able to resolve that quest, even if you unlock further conversation options later on. Often, the only indication I even had that I'd screwed up a quest by choosing poorly was hours of play too late, while scanning random sections of the walkthrough. Nearly every one of these NPC-related subquests are activated by such random circumstances (and then completed, again, by even more random circumstances) that you can easily play through the game while talking to everyone once and not even realize the opportunity to begin most of these quests as its presented to you. I hate RPGs where every subquest starts with someone saying "Hey, I'm Norman! I have a basement full of mutated plague rats and I'm looking for someone to get rid of them..." as much as the next guy, but there's subtle and then there's too-subtle.

My last complaint: outside of all of the interesting (though ultimately too abstruse and easily-missed) optional content, this game could easily be finished in five hours, if not less. This five hours would almost certainly require a lot of grinding at the game's few grinding-caves (which are quite literally places that you click on the map to get thrown immediately into a battle, and when you win, and thus win gold that you can then use to level up your characters, you are forced to exit back out to the map and just click the same location again to start another battle) because without finding and then playing through all of the bonus content you're certainly not going to be leveled highly enough to take out the final boss.

Now, a few positives. I really, actually like this game (I bet you're surprised, yes?) in many ways. Especially considering this is a one-man project, the music is fantastic, the setting is unique, the story and accompanying dialogue is actually rather imaginative and well-written, the voice acting is miles beyond most voice acting in AAA games, and as I mentioned before, if you like turn-based strategy, the battle system is tops. With all of that going for it, I really hate to break things down to "too little for too much", but that's ultimately how I feel: for $25 bucks, I get much less play time and variety than I got in Telepath Psy Arena 2 for almost half that price, and what I do get is sort of weirdly half-formed and really requires cheating (via a walkthrough) to find and experience the best parts of the game.

It might well sound to you at this point like I'm saying that I dislike this game because I'm not smart enough to find the bonus content. As a veteran of many different types of RPGs and lots of video games and other puzzle-related media, you're just going to have to take my word that Servants of God is exceptionally dense when it comes to these things. For example, the bonus crypt-dungeons are fun despite being a complete departure from the rest of the game (why not require the player to explore a bit in, you know, the actual game?), and by the time you get to the final one, you're presented with a labyrinth that would require a gargantuan effort to map (you'd have to invest at least twice the time it takes to play through the whole game to do this). The reward that you receive for completing said labyrinth (which I did, again, by cheating) is so minuscule that it makes absolutely no sense, considering the time the player must have (in theory) invested. As another example, last  night I played a subquest in which you purchase a scorpion pet from a trader for 5000 gold (a rather hefty sum) so that you can give it to a child whose rabid scorpion pet you were forced to kill earlier in the game. Once you complete this transaction, you have the choice of going on your way with a sense of a job well done (the "good" option) or extorting the child's mother for compensation (the "asshole" option). If you choose the asshole option, you get an orb that boosts your player's personality stat by four points. As I mentioned before, you raise levels in this game by buying upgrades. Well, simply going to your headquarters and paying to boost your player's personality by four points actually costs far less than 5000 gold. You see the problem. Not only are most of these quests extremely abstruse, they're also often ultimately useless, or even leave you worse off than you would have been had you not engaged in them in the first place.

In the end, Telepath RPG: Servants of God presents what is by far the best iteration of the series' excellent battle system, and in a way, as a fan of that battle system, it was worth paying to have the newest version of that system with the few tweaks that have been introduced since Psy Arena 2's release. However, the faults with the rest of the game made me wish that I'd just been given another ladder-type tournament game rather than an "RPG", the shortness of the main game makes it a bit of a rip-off for $25, and the combination of the sidequests' totally bizarre implementation and the fact that they are often the most interesting parts of the game is just frustrating. If you haven't played any of Sinister Design's games, definitely check out Psy Arena 2. If you like it as much as you probably will, you might want to throw some more money at Servants of God. But unless you've got a bigger games budget than I do, I wouldn't recommend it.