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.
V ernyyl yvxr gur trareny vqrn bs gur svanyr. Lbh svtug lbhe jnl onpx guebhtu Pbapbeq Fgngvba (nxn gur ghgbevny nern), ergenpvat lbhe svefg fgrcf va gur tnzr onpx guebhtu gb gur pragre bs gur Znryfgebz juvpu whfg unccraf gb or jurer lbh tbg bss gur ryringbe nsgre punenpgre perngvba. Nybat gur jnl, lbh unir n pbhcyr rapbhagref gb svtug guebhtu naq jvgu rnpu rapbhagre n srj ACPf sebz gur inevbhf snpgvbaf jvyy qebc va naq, qrcraqvat ba lbhe erchgngvba jvgu gurve nffbpvngrq snpgvba, gurl jvyy rvgure uryc lbh svtug, nggnpx lbh, be yrnir lbh nybar gb svtug gur erny rarzvrf ol lbhefrys. Gur vqrn urer vf svar naq tbbq ohg gurer'f gjb znwbe ceboyrzf jvgu vg. Gur svefg vf gung guvf nern vf fvzcyl abg qrfvtarq gb unir gurfr pbzong rapbhagref. Lbh unir gb jbex guebhtu znal bar gvyr jvqr pubxrcbvagf gb trg gb rnpu svtug naq gur ACPf nofbyhgryl ybir gb trg va gung bar gvyr naq fgnaq gurer, pbzcyrgryl oybpxvat lbh bhg bs gur svtug. Vg znxrf rnpu svtug gnxr zhpu, zhpu ybatre guna vg arrqf gb naq vf zber sehfgengvat naq naablvat gung vg unf nal evtug gb or. Gur frpbaq vffhr vf gung gur snpgvba flfgrz unf nofbyhgryl ab sevpgvba gb vg fb jura V ebyyrq guebhtu, rirel fvatyr snpgvba jnf sevraqyl gb zr naq "urycrq" va gur svtugf. Gurer'f arire n gvzr jura qbvat n dhrfg jvyy vapernfr erchgngvba jvgu bar snpgvba naq qrpernfr vg jvgu nabgure, ab znggre ubj zhpu gur snpgvbaf ungr rnpu bgure. Lbh'q guvax Cunynak be Arj Pbzzvggrr zvtug ungr vg jura V uryc Gur Sbcf ohg nccneragyl gurl pbzcyrgryl qb abg pner! Vg znxrf gur jubyr guvat srry jrveq naq gbb ivqrb tnzr-l jura n ybg bs jung guvf tnzr tbrf sbe vf eryngviryl fvzhyngvbavfg-l. Naq gura gur npghny svany fgrcf bs gur svanyr ner pbby. Gur Zrngtevaqre rapbhagre vf ebgr ohg fgvyy sha gb frr. Vg vf jrveq gung nsgre lbh qrny jvgu gur Znryfgebz vg qhzcf lbh onpx bhgfvqr Pbapbeq fb lbh pna gnyx gb nyy gur snpgvba yrnqref bar ynfg gvzr naq svaq bhg whfg ubj qvfnccbvagrq va lbh zbfg (be nyy) bs gurz ner. Vg qbrfa'g ernyyl unir nal chapu gb vg naq vg gnxrf sberire sbe jung vf bayl bar be gjb fragraprf cre crefba lbh gnyx gb. Vg fubhyq'ir whfg fxvccrq evtug gb gur raq fyvqrfubj vafgrnq bs znxvat zr jnyx nebhaq sbe na rkgen gra be svsgrra zvahgrf.
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.
V ernyyl yvxr gur trareny vqrn bs gur svanyr. Lbh svtug lbhe jnl onpx guebhtu Pbapbeq Fgngvba (nxn gur ghgbevny nern), ergenpvat lbhe svefg fgrcf va gur tnzr onpx guebhtu gb gur pragre bs gur Znryfgebz juvpu whfg unccraf gb or jurer lbh tbg bss gur ryringbe nsgre punenpgre perngvba. Nybat gur jnl, lbh unir n pbhcyr rapbhagref gb svtug guebhtu naq jvgu rnpu rapbhagre n srj ACPf sebz gur inevbhf snpgvbaf jvyy qebc va naq, qrcraqvat ba lbhe erchgngvba jvgu gurve nffbpvngrq snpgvba, gurl jvyy rvgure uryc lbh svtug, nggnpx lbh, be yrnir lbh nybar gb svtug gur erny rarzvrf ol lbhefrys. Gur vqrn urer vf svar naq tbbq ohg gurer'f gjb znwbe ceboyrzf jvgu vg. Gur svefg vf gung guvf nern vf fvzcyl abg qrfvtarq gb unir gurfr pbzong rapbhagref. Lbh unir gb jbex guebhtu znal bar gvyr jvqr pubxrcbvagf gb trg gb rnpu svtug naq gur ACPf nofbyhgryl ybir gb trg va gung bar gvyr naq fgnaq gurer, pbzcyrgryl oybpxvat lbh bhg bs gur svtug. Vg znxrf rnpu svtug gnxr zhpu, zhpu ybatre guna vg arrqf gb naq vf zber sehfgengvat naq naablvat gung vg unf nal evtug gb or. Gur frpbaq vffhr vf gung gur snpgvba flfgrz unf nofbyhgryl ab sevpgvba gb vg fb jura V ebyyrq guebhtu, rirel fvatyr snpgvba jnf sevraqyl gb zr naq "urycrq" va gur svtugf. Gurer'f arire n gvzr jura qbvat n dhrfg jvyy vapernfr erchgngvba jvgu bar snpgvba naq qrpernfr vg jvgu nabgure, ab znggre ubj zhpu gur snpgvbaf ungr rnpu bgure. Lbh'q guvax Cunynak be Arj Pbzzvggrr zvtug ungr vg jura V uryc Gur Sbcf ohg nccneragyl gurl pbzcyrgryl qb abg pner! Vg znxrf gur jubyr guvat srry jrveq naq gbb ivqrb tnzr-l jura n ybg bs jung guvf tnzr tbrf sbe vf eryngviryl fvzhyngvbavfg-l. Naq gura gur npghny svany fgrcf bs gur svanyr ner pbby. Gur Zrngtevaqre rapbhagre vf ebgr ohg fgvyy sha gb frr. Vg vf jrveq gung nsgre lbh qrny jvgu gur Znryfgebz vg qhzcf lbh onpx bhgfvqr Pbapbeq fb lbh pna gnyx gb nyy gur snpgvba yrnqref bar ynfg gvzr naq svaq bhg whfg ubj qvfnccbvagrq va lbh zbfg (be nyy) bs gurz ner. Vg qbrfa'g ernyyl unir nal chapu gb vg naq vg gnxrf sberire sbe jung vf bayl bar be gjb fragraprf cre crefba lbh gnyx gb. Vg fubhyq'ir whfg fxvccrq evtug gb gur raq fyvqrfubj vafgrnq bs znxvat zr jnyx nebhaq sbe na rkgen gra be svsgrra zvahgrf.