Your first step into Encased involves you choosing a Wing to belong to. This guide is meant to give new players a bit of background knowledge and as a reference for veteran players.
This game wears its Interplay Fallout inspirations on its sleeve so many terms and terminology are carried over. If you're looking for a new RPG to play, one where you can really push the boundaries of how you experience games, you won't go too wrong with Encased.Welcome to the world of Encased. It's not perfect in any sense, but in a competitive genre, Encased also has plenty of unique positives that will make you want to keep playing. This is a game that can provide tens of hours of fun, even more if you start playing around with its character creation and RPG systems. It's a very polarising difference.īut, all things considered, Dark Crystal has built a capable and entertaining RPG with Encased. There are core locations that are packed with lore and quests to pick up, but there's just as many, if not more, locations that fail to provide any reason to visit them in any sense. Some feel pointless to visit and explore. And then there's the locations on top of that.
They might include finding a body in the desert, or having a venomous snake landing on your shoulder, but neither make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Traveling between locations you can get random events, which are quite often irrelevant. It feels very Fallout-y, and immersive, but there are times where the exploration can be a little lacking. This can be a little disappointing when this happens, which is actually rather frequently.ĭark Crystal has done a great job of making the world visually impressive. You might have the chance to jump on a table in the middle of conversation, beating your chest like a gorilla, because why not? But, it'll probably just spark a small conversation that'll lead back to a core set of dialogue, which itself will funnel you into a specific outcome.
I will say that I found a lot of the dialogue options do very little. Encased is designed at its core to promote freedom of options, you can even just sack off the main storyline and kill vital characters wheely-neely. This then stretched into combat, as Bonnie loved to get into the nitty-gritty, bashing skulls in with a wrench, whereas my Grey Wing character preferred firearms and keeping combat at a distance. Bonnie's dialogue was borderline incoherent, with the majority of conversation options being pure insanity (I once dissipated a combat encounter by performing the Dance of Negotiation, and low and behold, it worked!), whereas my Grey Wing character was the complete opposite, giving me dialogue that revolved around smart, logical decisions. Whether the dialogue and narrative is conveyed to you via speech or through simple text, you get a very vivid picture of your motivations and the world around you, and it is without a shadow of a doubt one of the best parts of Encased. To ensure that the story feels engaging and exciting to follow, Dark Crystal has created an incredibly descriptive tale that does well highlighting and providing depth to this mysterious world. The storyline and narrative is a major driving force for Encased, and will take you all around the Dome, meeting all manners of different characters, and facing a deep range of enemy types. You start the game, journeying into the Dome as part of one of these wings, and soon after getting boots on the ground, you find yourself wrapped up in a bizarre story where it is your duty to unravel the mysteries found in the sandy, desert landscape. To understand what this artefact is, a company known as the CRONUS Corporation has set up shop in the Dome, with various wings of the company assigned to complete different jobs (for example the White Wing members are scientists, and Blue Wing members are mechanics and technicians). The game takes place in an alternative 1970's, where a mysterious artefact known as The Dome has been discovered in a remote desert. But, before I dive into the intricacies and my thoughts on that, let's start with a synopsis of what Encased actually is.