I'd heard a lot about this series over the years, yet never bothered actually exploring them at all until around late 2024. I must've either bought this on sale eons ago or gotten it for free from Amazon Prime, but either way, this game is a certified classic. The story, writing, characters, worldbuilding, lore, atmosphere -- it's all top-notch and masterfully executed here. The player is given a relatively high degree of autonomy in tackling the missions in a myriad of ways to progress forward. Exploration is actually usually rewarded with new lore, intelligence about enemy/NPC/group/etc movements/activities/musings, or gear, items, and esoteric charms that act as player ability upgrades similar to Deus Ex. Level design is consistently excellent, and the maps are both large and filled with detail rather than being sparse and copy-paste. The player can make numerous moralistic decisions throughout the game, and thankfully the players' intelligence isn't insulted much with how these systems usually turn out, where it's just some generic, naive binary system with little-to-no nuance involved. Of particular note is a certain item that allows you to gain personal insights about the majority of characters in the game, including the various 'random' NPCs throughout the levels. It is rare that a story and its world & characters grips me as tightly as this game did. I hadn't felt anything to that degree since the days of Mass Effect 1~3 in the early 2010s. Who knew a bespoke alternate industrial revolution-era world where the entire economy runs on whale oil could be so entrancing? The main game has a decent length, but this release bundles the DLC with it too, and you get even more gameplay features added with arguably better characterization and more cohesiveness in general with the whole thing. The only blemish I experienced was an annoying bug concerning a certain ability that required alt-tabbing to fix, which was annoying. A+ video game.
