Before I get into the actual review, I need to start off with a little PSA: This game is early access. It's not marked as such and, as far as I can tell, they don't actually call it that but this game is unfinished. Yes, you can play through the entire main story of the game but it feels like they simply haven't added large swathes of content. So this entire review is going to have a big asterisk of "maybe check back in in 6-to-12 months and see if it's actually done now".

First off: it's cool that this game draws so much from Roadside Picnic and Stalker. Outside of the actual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, I feel like they don't come up as influences for games very often so it's neat to see it. And it works really well with this type of Fallout-y game they're going for! And I like that the bolt-throwing mechanic to disable anomalies felt actually meaningful. In my (limited) time with the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, it seemed like throwing bolts was a neat thing to do but ultimately unnecessary because of the visual and audio cues the anomalies caused but in Encased the anomalies are essentially recharging landmines so you have to actually throw bolts at them to be able to move past them to get to objectives or loot or whatever.

One of my favorite parts of any Fallout game are the vaults. They're small dungeons, each with a wholly self-contained short story. So of course I was interested to see what Encased would have as a vault equivalent. Early on, there was a quest to check out four of these research bunkers and I found all four of them to be pretty disappointing. The stories they told weren't particularly interesting and the way they told them wasn't very clever or well done. And then that was it. There weren't any more in the rest of the game.

I need to talk about the main quest because about halfway through the game, that's all there is to do. The actual narrative of it is fine, I suppose. A bad thing happens, you're somehow magically linked to it and you use that link to save everyone or kill everyone. It's nothing special but I never get very attached to the main stories in this sort of game anyway, so your mileage may vary here. My main issue with this is in the actual functional design of the series of quests. You're an extremely important person and yet everyone treats you like a nobody and uses you as a gopher to run errands for them. It's just hours and hours of back-to-back fetch quests. Multiple stages of the story have you running to the various factions to convince them to cooperate on something and having to do favors for them all. Some of the favors include stuff as mundane as putting up some election posters for someone or polling random people about who they're voting for (despite the game never resolving this election plotline! it just fades away and hopes you forget that it ever mattered!). It makes actually advancing the plot feel like a grind when so much of it is Person A sends you to Person B who sends you to Person C who needs a favor and that favor is to kill some zombies or find a macguffin. As much as I don't particularly care for Fallout 1 and 2, I really think they have some exquisitely designed main narratives, especially in the way they reveal what the games are really about and get you into each stage of the story relatively seamlessly.

I gestured at this before but, after a certain point, this game gets empty. During the Prologue and Act 1, there's quite a few side quests available — at one point I had so many that I felt mildly overwhelmed when looking at my quest log because of how much stuff there was to do. But once the game got to Act 2, the side content dried up almost completely. The game finally lets you go visit some of the other factions and when you get to their home bases, you find these big maps full of a ton of NPCs and nothing to do outside of the main quest. You're telling me that The Phalanx (a mercenary band trying to take control of The Dome by force) doesn't have one single thing for me to do? No one in that huge base needs a single favor? To make it worse, there are a lot of locations and characters that have bits of narrative or unique interactions where a quest should be but then nothing is ever there. I constantly had this feeling that I had arrived at a place too early and the quest hadn't unlocked yet, but then I went back just before I finished the game and there still wasn't anything to do. And so that leaves you in the late game with pretty much nothing to do but the absolute grind of a main plot.

For me, the companions are always the most important part of this type of game. I always prefer the smaller-scale and more personal stories of unique characters instead of the bigger main story plot about saving the world or whatever. And in this particular aspect, this game is wildly disappointing. The companions don't have much to say, both in terms of how often they have new dialogue options but also when they actually do talk there's barely more than a sentence or two at a time. And then on top of that, I found the companions to be all varying degrees of dull. They didn't craft interesting characters to talk to! I talked to them anyway in a naive hope that they might suddenly say something compelling but it never happened and I eventually gave up.

On top of all that, they don't have companion quests. You know how normally a game with companions will have quests to resolve their character arc or a loyalty mission or something but these characters don't have any of that. They all have bits of story that point towards having a conflict to resolve with your help but none of them seem to actually do that. For example, the one companion I liked the most was Crump and he talks about how his abusive father is somewhere under the dome and how he wants to find him. But then it doesn't go anywhere. As far as I could tell, you simply can't find Crump's father. And after the finale, when the game lets you talk to the companions one last time, he says that now that everything is settled, he'll go do it himself. It's frustrating and hugely disappointing to me.

And speaking of frustrating and hugely disappointing, I need to talk about Fox. Fox is plural and the writers lean into every old, tired, shitty, trope about plurality that they can cram in. It extremely sucks! At one point, there's even a fortuneteller that hinted that Fox's companion quest (if it actually existed, of course) would be to "help" Fox out by "getting rid" of one personality so you can make her a "normal" person and it sucks! If that's really what they're going to go for, then that sucks and it's better that it's not actually a thing you do in the game. And if you're thinking "well I don't understand why this sucks" please do yourself a favor and read up on plurality some: https://morethanone.info/#

A few last stray thoughts that I just need to get out of my head:
-This game has a tiny bit of talk about the way society treats convicts unfairly even after they've served their sentences but it doesn't really go very far into it and mostly uses it as a tool to make it clear that one particular faction sucks more than the rest. It's like it gestures at having some good politics but then backs away before actually saying anything meaningful.
-This game has one of the most bewildering references I've ever seen where, in a defunct prison, there's a TV showing a cartoon rendition of an Abu Ghraib prisoner being tortured. Why would you put that in a game?? At all?? It's not some biting satire and it's definitely not funny so it just feels completely tasteless. What the fuck!
-Fallout, as a franchise, has an awful lot to say about racism and slavery (even if they try and obfuscate it behind applying it to Ghouls or synthetic people instead of "normal" people or whatever) and this game completely avoids that which is nice because I think the way the Fallouts talk about this stuff is pretty bad.
-It seems like they want to avoid the quest log guiding you too closely to where you need to go and what you need to do but sometimes it gives you a quest to go to the biggest city in the game and talk to Some Guy but gives absolutely no indication where in the city that guy actually is and so I had to run around to every room in the whole place until I found him and it was awful every time. Objective markers are not inherently bad, y'all, sometimes they just save you from doing extremely boring shit!!
-The AI pathing is genuinely terrible. I had multiple instances of my companions (and occasional escort quest NPCs!) walk directly into instant-death environmental hazards because they have absolutely zero sense of self-preservation. You can manually move each character around individually and doing so is very tedious and absolutely required in some locations.
-At first, I thought that the Fops faction (they're liked Fallout's raiders or bandits) were going to be their way of signalling that these are human-shaped goblins that you don't need to feel bad for killing. But then it said they'd be a valid faction for me to talk to and possibly ally with! But then when I got to talk to them it turns out they're just a bunch of crazy cannibals and they're actually just human-shaped goblins that I shouldn't feel bad about killing.

And finally, I want to include some thoughts about the finale but, because it has to be very spoiler-y, I'm going to run it through rot-13. If you don't know what that is, just copy and paste this gibberish into https://rot13.com/ to decode it.

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TL;DR: This is a definite recommend for anyone that loves apocalyptic settings and RPGs. Encased is a well written and immersive game that deserves a place up there with the great classic Isometric RPGs of old. It does have a few things that I felt it could have done better, but it did not hamper my overall enjoyment of the game and for the near 44 hours it took to complete a single playthrough, it was definitely worth buying! I'd even go so far as to call it a great entry-point for someone looking to play an Isometric RPG for the first time.

Encased is the first venture by indie company Dark Crystal Games and is an isometric styled RPG in the same vein as Fallout 1 and 2, and Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. This game is an absolute hidden gem. While it does have its small share of flaws, I found it to be very well put together and on a quality bar equal to (and greater than, depending on the companies in question) many AAA games.

Encased offers a variety of ways to earn experience for leveling up: you earn it from combat, completing quests, exploring maps, crafting, and opening loot containers/corpses with items inside of them. I found this to be one of the game's greatest strengths as it encourages the player to play how they want without punishing them for their preferred play style. Speaking of combat, combat is turn based and done through the use of Action Points which determines what specific and how many actions you can take within a round (as with most old school RPGs). The number of Action Points granted to each character is awarded based on their build/stats. I played on easy and didn't find the combat difficult (which was a problem I used to run into on some of the older RPGs).

I'm of the opinion that the character creator did a concise and excellent job explaining stats and how things were calculated, something that often struggles to keep my attention. However, if one is unsure of how builds work or doesn't feel like cobbling one together, there are a wide range of premade characters (I think it was around 20?) with interesting backstories to choose from.

On the note of backstories, you get to choose from a small list of factions - “Wings”- to be a part of at the start of the game which will open up some potential dialogue choices for you on down the line. That said, you are free to pursue your own interests and don't have to act in your factions interests at all. The factions are both one of the strongest and one of the most disappointing aspects of Encased.

The factions all have really great aesthetics, motives, and writing – they just feel right in the world – but I wish more was done with them. Granted, they are involved in the overall story, but it would have been neat if they'd had their own quests instead of just those that intersected with the main story and if you could have joined them. Not being able to join some of the factions is a huge missed opportunity, especially considering that all factions have a reputation bar that you can build up.

This leads me to my biggest gripe about the game; toward the end of the game you meet with each faction (assuming you didn't choose to wipe them out, you can do that to any of your choosing) and their representatives are gathered to ask you to do a certain thing for their specific factions. However, some of them won't actually ask you/tell you their plan unless you have specific stats. The faction I was trying to help had a requirement of 8 Charisma (among one other high one that I forgot) for them to tell me their plan which would have led to unlocking a new potential ending for me. This decision baffles me, because the only time you can set your Charisma is during character creation, and it makes the reputation bar kind of pointless? I had a few of the factions do this, actually. This is something that I strongly feel should have been tied to the reputation bar.

That having been said, I thought the writing was great, and that both the main quests and side quests were engaging and varied. One of the side quests involved going to a family dinner, that was fun. I think that's one of the things that made Encased so endearing to me, that it wasn't always about combat or going somewhere to kill/collect things, but that you got to sit down, talk to people, and have some brief normal moments in a not so normal world.

The companions are great fun. All of them were unique, felt like a part of the world, and had some interesting things to say about themselves. That said, I wish they had more dialogue options and passive dialogue, it felt like I went through all they had to say rather quickly. And yet... I wanted to have all of them in my party, but could only have two at a time so I ended up spending the entire game with the first two I met – so overall I'm of the belief that the companions were done well since I had a hard time choosing who to take with me.

As far as I know, companions aren't romanceable (the two I had certainly weren't). There aren't really romances, but there are rare opportunities for brief encounters here and there with certain NPCs.

There's also a crafting system. It was straightforward enough. I liked being able to make my own ammo, grenades, med-kits, and drugs.

My second and last gripe about the game has to do with the maps. I've seen a lot of people say that they felt the maps are empty, but I don't feel that's the case. I'm in the camp that believes the maps are too big. There's a lot of resources on each map and if the maps had been condensed a bit, then that feeling of emptiness wouldn't be there. It's a minor annoyance but since the combat is turn based and the maps are tiled, it costs AP to close the gap between allies and enemies so you might have enemies aggro'd on your playable character and your companions might be a ways off, so then you have to waste a round or two because you are using your AP to get in attack range; that would have been less of an annoyance if the maps were shorter. While the maps have a few different biomes (desert/swamp), I would have liked to have seen a couple more: snow, forest (of all dead trees), ash, salt, any of those would have been a welcome addition.

Now that I think about it, this could probably count as its own complaint, but the companion AI pathing is a mess, so every once in a while your companions will try to take the most complicated route to get somewhere on the map (when out of combat) when the maps being smaller could have circumvented this.

There is a lot of content. I did every quest and fully explored every map I came across, while dreading that the game was almost over, and it took me nearly 44 hours to complete it. I've no doubt that the game could be finished in half, maybe even a fourth the time if one were so inclined to do so, which makes the prospect of going back through it again appealing for me.

In closing: Yes, Encased does have a few things I feel it could have done better, but I found it a very memorable and enjoyable experience. I realize I went into a lot of detail with my complaints, but that's because I really love Encased, and I hope that Dark Crystal Games sees my review and takes my feedback into consideration because I'm looking forward to seeing them improve and what they might put out next!

This game is currently in the Humble Choice for January 2023, this is part of my coverage of the bundle. If you are interested in the game and it's before February 7th, 2023, consider picking up the game as part of the current monthly bundle.

Another fallout-style RPG.

Encased is a large RPG where players are exploring a massive dome that appeared in the 1970s. There’s a mix of sci-fi futuristic designs alongside the 70s style. There’s a lot of voice acting here as well, and most of it is good. The combat is the typical Tactical battle system that works well, and players are given a lot of freedom, including the ability to steal from people or get into a fight with whoever they want.

The first hour here was mostly tutorials. However, when I killed everyone in the initial lift when trying out the combat, the game just ignored my murder spree, when it could have explained it away with a clever moment. I saw at least one tutorial that was in Russian for no reason, and it does seem that the character you design matters quite a bit to the beginning of the story, but I’m pretty sure that the narrative dovetails together relatively fast.

Pick this up if you’ve already played a bunch of other Fallout-inspired games. This is interesting, but I think I’m going to play Wastelands 3 first. There are also dialogue-heavy games like Disco Elysium, that do this better. If you liked Atom RPG: Trudograd as well, this is worth your time, but these are long games. It’s still worth checking out if you like this style of game. Though I have heard from a couple of people that this game does get weaker in the second half.

If you enjoyed this review or want to know what I think of other games in the bundle, check out the full review on or subscribe to my Youtube channel: https://youtu.be/bxcCaC4dN1E