Geneforge 1: Mutagen

released on Feb 24, 2021

A remaster of Geneforge

Geneforge 1: Mutagen is a unique, truly open-ended fantasy adventure in a strange, new world. It offers unmatched freedom in how you play. Use magic or your deadly pets to crush your enemies. Or, use trickery, diplomacy, and stealth to win the game without ever attacking a foe. Choose between a host of rival factions or just destroy everything. Defeat the final boss, or switch sides and join him. Fight alone with blades, missiles, or magic, or create your own army of custom-made mutant monsters. Geneforge is an epic fantasy adventure with over eighty zones to explore and 50+ hours of gameplay. Choose from dozens of skills, abilities, and pets to reach a vast array of different endings. The coming rebellion will scorch your continent. Who will win? It will be up to you.


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I've never played a Spiderweb game before, so it benefits from experiencing for the first time many of the things I assume make up the Jeff Vogel formula. It has impeccable writing, an astonishing sense of place and ambience, and a very rewarding gameplay loop. And it does all that with no music, very simple sound effects, and very few unique pieces of textures and art. It does fall apart in the last third of the game, though. There are a few areas that don't bring anything new in terms of story or quest design, or that they're just plain annoying (environment attacking you, constant creatures spawning, etc.). All in all, I think it's worth experiencing until the end because of the multiple possibilities the game offers.

Hier ist sicherlich nicht alles schlecht.
Die Texte sind nett geschrieben, auch der Plot wirkt erstmal interessant.
Aber das Spiel besteht zum Großteil aus Kämpfen und nicht Dialogen und Welterkundung.
Und die sind wirklich schrecklich.
Rundenbasiert, man kann sich Monster beschwören und die machen für einen dann die Arbeit.
Aber nicht die gesamte Arbeit, man muss leider jede Attacke selbst auswählen. Dann die lange Animation ansehen und dann fällt der Gegner um. Kriegen tut man dafür 0,1% Erfahrung. 0,1%.. das ist so traurig wie WoW.
Das macht wirklich keinen Sinn.
Wer zu viel Zeit hat, kann hier vllt mehr Spaß haben, aber ich sehe keinen Grund das Spiel noch einmal zu starten.

This is a remake of Spiderweb's 2001 cult classic Geneforge. I'd always wanted to play the game growing up, but that was a time when we were still wary of purchasing games online. I ended up playing through the free demo a few times, but never got ahold of the actual game.

The setting still feels fresh 20 years later. You're playing as an initiate "shaper" -- a magical sect with the power to create life. While travelling to your training, your ship is destroyed. You wash up on an island that has been declared barred by the shapers, on pain of death to anyone who goes there. The island, however, isn't empty. Lifeforms created by shapers prior to their barring of the island have formed their own societies on the island in the absence of their creators. Some want to be treated as equals, some want to return to being obedient, and others want revenge for being used and abandoned. Of course, the mystery of why the island was originally barred is the driving force behind the story.

You have access to the standard variety of RPG spells and weapons, but, as a shaper, you can also create lifeforms to fight for you. This is the games main mechanical differentiator. There are about 10 different types of creatures you can create and upgrade, with up to 7 joining you in combat at a time. There's a good variety of melee, ranged, magic, buffing, cursing, etc. abilities available to the creatures, so the customization is on point.

There are a couple of big issues that led to me dropping the game 30 hours in, unfortunately. The biggest being that there are simply too much meaningless combat. There is something like 80 zones to explore, and a substantial portion of those have you fighting wave after wave of enemies, for very little reward. The combat is fairly bog-standard CRPG turn based affair, so this wears thin rather quickly.

Much of the game wasn't really updated to 2021 standards. For example, the interface is still clunky with tiny little tiles in combat, leading to surprisingly easy mislicks. Battle information and ability descriptions aren't readily available. Geneforge's version of lockpicks, "Living Tools", are not widely available, leading to the old "open a chest and reload if you don't care about the contents", even if you are raising your mechanics skill to limit the amount you need to use. These issues are largely minor or even trivial issues, but they are amplified by the amount of time you have to spend dealing with them.

All in all, there's a lot of charm and a strong core of exploration and narrative. I would have absolutely loved Geneforge if I'd been able to play the full game back in 2001, when I had more time and patience for endless combat in games. As it is now, I'm going to move on to something that's a bit more of a focused experience. I'll probably read about the last 1/3 of the game, though. The lore is worth it, but the game just wasn't fun on the whole.

I liked Geneforge 1: Mutagen better than either of the Queen's Wish series, though there still isn't much here that sticks with me.

The major problems here are that the gameplay is just too repetitive and samey and the whole of the game itself goes on for too long without enough to say or introduce. Similar problems to Queen's Wish. This seems like a Spiderweb constant to me.
Being an individual character that summons minions does work better than the party based approach in Queen's Wish. I played as an Agent, which basically just becomes a mage by the end of the game, blasting everything down without too much of an issue. I used summons for the first part of the game, but their power and value fell away by the end and I just stopped summoning them (which is probably intended with the character I built).
Things feel very random in this game, unfortunately, with arbitrary stuns or slows having a massive impact on a fight going from intensely difficult to completely trivial. This does cut both ways, but every combat sort of resolves into who can stun who first. Not much of interest here by the end.
I will say that some of the summons and some of the spells are interesting and have some positional gameplay, but the aforementioned stun meta sort of removes most of that anyway.
Exploration is sort of novel, with each zone you travel through having some specific task you can do to make it "safer," allowing fast travel through it. As you progress you are making a network of conquered areas across the island that, while extremely meta, feels like you are having an impact on this island and your place in it.

Narratively there are also a lot of parallels here with Queen's Wish, with three factions you are dealing with as you smash your way across this island. Each of them has a different philosophy and you are sort of picking which of them to support (or just doing your own thing). I didn't find this super compelling and the actual divisions between the factions feel pretty contrived. This feels more like Shin Megami Tensei than Bioware, which is novel for a western RPG.
There is maybe something being said about slavery and the responsibility of a creator to their creations, but things feel incidental because none of it is really tied to my goal (getting off the island) or the overall problem here (the Geneforge).
Geneforge suffers for having a lot of very similar characters, similar groups, and similar situations that make it seem like there are valuable interactions to be had, but really don't matter and sort of blur together by the end.
Just like Queen's Wish, if half of this game's content were removed it would simply be a better, cleaner, and more engrossing experience.

The game is visually just fine. It needs reactivity more than it needs fidelity though this remaster does improve things slightly in both respects.

Geneforge didn't surprise me and didn't really impress me, but I think this more straightforward RPG quest is a better fit for these Spiderweb games and I had a good enough time with it.
It brought me along much better than either Queen's Wish did, though I was definitely done with it before the end.

Near-Seamless to the original and improves significantly in many ways.

Fun! Interesting lore. First time playing a game like this. Would recommend