Game Spotlight: The Order: 1886

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t much interested in The Order: 1886 until the reviews started rolling out that suggested this was a bad game. Specifically, many reviews said that this game wasn’t enough of a game to begin with and that is why it got such low scores.

Suddenly, I was interested and The Order: 1886 jumped to the top of my list of games to play. Of course, just as all the reviews have said, it didn’t take all that long to finish. It is, indeed, a short game, but the thing that I didn’t like about The Order: 1886 doesn’t fall in line with what many criticise it for.

It’s a beautifully made game, everything looks stunning at every turn. The cutscenes completely overshadow the short segments of gameplay, yes, and there are lots of moments that rely on button prompts and QTEs, but despite its lack of gameplay segments, it plays well and I did enjoy myself. From a purely gameplay perspective, I can understand all the criticisms this game has received… but I still (stubbornly) don’t agree with a lot of what has been said about this game.

For me, The Order 1886 is a great “interactive movie” or at least an attempt at being a great interactive movie. The transition from cutscene to gameplay back to cutscene is done really well and, as stated before, this game looks so damn good. The motion capture work that went into creating all the scenes are so well done, especially the work that went into animating the faces. There were many times when I looked at the characters on-screen and felt like they were real people set in a stylised motion picture.

As I played this game/interactive movie, I became more and more interested in watching the storyline play out and watching the actors… act. I started to find that I was REALLY enjoying the movie… er… game. So much so that I was motivated even more to play through the gameplay portions to further the story. Mind you, I wasn’t rushing through, as I’ve already said, the gameplay is still really good and it works. I got to a point where I wanted more and more of the story and happily played through the gameplay parts to get more of that story… which is what truly disappointed me about The Order: 1886.

What I’m trying to say is that my biggest complaint isn’t that there’s not enough game in this game… it’s that there’s not enough story in this game. It feels like it finished 2/3 through the storyline and came to an abrupt halt.

Two possibilities come to mind with The Order: 1886’s end. The first is that Ready at Dawn may be trying to get us to pay for DLC which will finish the story they started, in which case, shame on them. Or they’re trying to get us to buy into a series of games in this new IP… in which case, they made a VERY obvious miscalculation.

I really liked this game… interactive movie, whatever. I get that some people find it boring, but I quite enjoyed the acting, the setting, the way things played out. It’s just too bad that there isn’t enough of it to enjoy… at least, not enough to give me closure to the story that was started.

So, I’ll end this short entry with one last thing. The big question everyone is asking is whether these kinds of games deserve to exist.

I think they do deserve to exist because it adds to the many kinds of games we play. I honestly don’t get where this notion that this kind of game existing is suddenly going to transform the entire video game landscape into ONLY interactive movie type games. It’s just one of the MANY different kinds of games that exist and are released every week across a variety of platforms.

I’m glad that Ready at Dawn created The Order: 1886, it’s a good game that could have been a great game, had it not concluded its story so abruptly 2/3 of the way through. I want a sequel because I do like what they’ve tried to accomplish and I want them to give it another go.

Oh, and Ready at Dawn, next time when you want to make a game that focuses more on the cinematic nature of the presentation, at least make it a game that allows the player to make choices that branch the game in different directions… make your next attempt an ACTUAL interactive movie.