Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG

Encased is an RPG that sits somewhere between Shadowrun series, Fallout 1/2 (if you're old enough to remember them ;-) and Wasteland 2, both technically and by the feel it delivers. It's about as old school as it gets, with dated visuals, systems, dialogues and structure itself. Story is mediocre, NPC's are soulless, enemies are repetitive and the world itself is just artificial: not alive at all, not very well written, not original or surprising. It just... is, and that's a huge downside for an RPG. Music is almost non - existent (think Disco Elysium if you played that bummer) and voice acting, aside of narrator, is lacking a bit too. Combat is simplistic, you can't climb, crouch nor lie down, you're just standing and shooting. And sneaking is seriously overpowered, you can easily kill groups of enemies one by one thanks to it. To stop complaining, I like the lore of the game: megacorp, wings, relics, Dome, Maelstorm etc., it all feels good. Crafting and upgrading weapons is simple yet effective. The game itself, even though feeling old school, is modernised enough not to be tiresome. Character build, progression and level - up systems are all top notch, with attributes, skills, perks and combinations between them. No skill is weak or superflous and unlocking new abilities is pure fun. But the best part about this game is diverging paths you can take when solving quests, there are usually 3+ choices to solve any situation you encounter, and that is awesome. Overall, it's not a bad game, but very hard to rcommend by today's standards, because of the spot it occupies. Wasteland 3 is a vastly superior product to this one, yet it's already cheaper. Shadowrun seriers is very similar, and yet again it's already cheaper. If you really like retro style, old school Fallout - like game and you already played the previously mentioned titles - I would say play it, you might like it. For me, I would give it 6/10. At least it's better than Disco Elysium, I'll give it that ;-)

Story is original, voice acting is very nice and I already had a lot of fun. However, very frequent combat freezes (about every other fight) forcing a quickload to before the fight, frequent skill freezes (lockpicking, hacking and even looking through binoculars I found on some rooftop) is preverting me from liking this game. This is even after three hotfixes and some patches. It's a shame, this could have been a real gem with a lot of replayability...

Encased is heavily influenced by classic CRPGs like Fallout 1 & 2, and if the aim of the developers was to create a modernised successor, they have succeeded. The ruleset by which the game determines whether you succeed or fail is fairly stat-heavy, but transparent, which I appreciate. Unlike certain CRPGs, which give you a vague indication what something does or how a perk improves your character, Encased generally gives you full information. However, it's pretty easy to cheese one's way through the game by investing maximally into a particular ability, so if you don't like cheese, you'll need a degree of self-control to avoid exploiting it. Like some of its predecessors, the game has companions, but they're not well developed and don't have their own quest chains. It seems like a feature that was added to tick a box without being properly developed. I didn't bother with them on my second playthrough. As far as production values go, graphics and art style are not photorealistic, but are nonetheless of high quality, being fully 3D-modelled. For this type of game, they are more than adequate. NPCs are generally not voice acted, but there is a narrator who is. It works well enough, and for the small studio that developed the game, it's a sensible approach. The developers faced quite a lot of controversy and backlash for some decisions they made during Early Access, one of which was accepting funding from a major publisher. From the perspective of somebody who did not participate in Early Access, I believe the backlash was not justified and the developers have delivered a very good game.

Some reviews complain that it's trying too hard to be Fallout. If you really liked Fallout and wanted to get a bit more of that feel, this game doesn't suck. As a matter of fact, I like it a lot. This is a fairly open-sandbox game, and that includes the plot. I'm only about halfway through, but as I see it, instead of a defined narrative, there are competing factions and plots that you can participate in, and how you interact affects your reputation. Plot advancement is required to open up map areas, so it's not quite as open as Skyrim. I get frustrated when a game forces dialogue or actions that don't fit how I'm playing the character. This game sometimes butts up against that, but it's better than most. The writing is cheeky, sometimes too much so. The spelling and punctuation could use a professional polish. There are a few cases where it's hard to decipher who's talking because the proper punctuation wasn't used. Being able to link and unlink your characters means that you can preposition and draw your enemies into ambushes before it switches to turn-based, but there are a lot of enemies that can teleport or megajump, so prepositioning is only somewhat beneficial. Being able to shoot into melee with no penalty or risk of hitting your own characters is cheesy. I'm running the Windows version under Wine on Ubuntu 22.04 and it runs flawlessly.

I think its underappreciated and it really is a great game. I am a little surprised its not being talked about more or has more attention in general. As a gamer whos been mainly playing FPS type games and a newcomer to RPG I've not felt overwhelmed and i am finding the story/lore rather interesting. Encased is one of the few games in a while that has me thinking about it even when not playing and eager for free time to play which is not always easy to come by these days. Bought at full price, one of the few games that I've done that for and no regrets, really enjoying it.