Encased Preview - Post-Apocalyptic Old School!

There’s an old saying: “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” but it says nothing about improvement. Which is exactly what the folks at Dark Crystal Games have been doing with Encased. The classic RPG formula you’ll remember from games like Icewind Dale and Fallout gets a makeover that elevates this game from a simple love letter to a bygone era into something definitely worth your time.

Here’s the setup: it’s the 1970s and humanity has stumbled upon “the Dome” – a mysterious zone packed with alien technology, mysterious ruins, and deadly anomalies. The Chronus Corporation is running the show and you, as a new employee, will be sent out to explore this strange and very dangerous world. So much for traditional corporate orientation.

Encased gets right into its world building and does a very good job of setting the stage. You’re in an elevator with fellow employees as you descend down to a station where you’ll learn the basics and get your first assignment. Talking to the other people in the elevator, you absorb a good bit of info about the world, particularly the “wings” Chronus divides itself into.

You’ll choose a wing before starting the game and they’re color coded, dividing the different fields of expertise the corporation needs in the Dome. There’s the black wing (security), the blue wing (engineers), the white wing (science and executives), and orange wing (convicts). Turns out there’s a kind of work-release program offering criminals a chance to work off their sentence – only catch is they may have to tangle with an anomaly or a monster in the course of their duties.

The wings all have different personalities (I chose black wing) and depending on which one you pick, you’ll interact differently with members of other wings. White Wing are typically snooty for corporate types, Black Wing are all hard-ass ex-military folks, and Blue Wing are the friendly, if a bit nerdy, engineers who keep everything running. Orange Wing is a nice mix of criminals and poor shmoes trying to work off their debt to society.

Arriving at the station, you immediately get the feel of something like Bioshock except you aren’t in a broken down dystopia for Ayn Rand fans and scuba diving enthusiasts. Corporate propaganda spews out of TVs, there are Chronus acolytes wandering around handing out pamphlets, and the posters on the walls show smiling employees whose teeth are just a bit too white. Much like Bioshock’s Rapture there’s a conscious effort to sell you on the place.

“The Dome” after all is a product – the promise of a better world thanks to science and technology. I wasn’t alive in the ‘70s, but there certainly was a notion amidst the disco music and snowstorms of cocaine that space travel and high-tech appliances would take humanity to new heights. At least they were half right. The space race was great and all, but played out against the backdrop of a nuclear arms race between the two major superpowers of the world that really made apocalypse a possibility. Not exactly a peaceful time in history.

Once I’ve cleared registration, gotten some training on anomalies, and loaded up on gear I go and meet with the station’s director. This is where things start to pick up. There’s a giant swirling anomaly outside but that’s the least of your concerns. Another local station has gone dark and the people sent to investigate haven’t come back. The director asks you to go and see what’s going on.

This is where the classic RPG mechanics and storytelling kick in. Back when the original Fallout’s graphics were the latest and greatest in gaming, you had to work within your limitations. It wasn’t like now, where you can have massive multiplayer games where people can fly starships across huge expanses of virtual space. This was back when you could count the number of pixels on your character with the naked eye.

So, with a mysterious quest to kick things off I hitch a ride towards the troubled station. The Dome borrows inspiration from S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and it’s legendarily iconic “zone” which means travelling around is always going to be complicated. It isn’t long before our transportation breaks down and we have to scrounge around for a solution. This is yet again where good, sensible, time-tested techniques from gaming’s past are put into play.

Our vehicle stalls out by an old diner called “Roadside Picnic” (a reference to the novel that inspired S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). Poking around, you meet some transients in the middle of a psychedelic trip and gleam from them that what you need is likely in the basement. Another NPC warns us, however, that there’s something down there besides the answer to our busted vehicle problem.

Classic RPGs were always about options, about digging around, combing through each room and area to scrounge together the clues you need to move forward and any spare items that may come in handy later.

There’s an inarguable effectiveness to this approach because just by kicking open a locker door I was able to find an RPK light machine gun that I might have otherwise missed. Whereas modern games have everything you’ll need dumped directly in your path, Encased recalls a time when there wasn’t so much handholding because devs back then hadn’t even concieved that approach yet.

The trip to the basement results in a battle with a grotesquely mutated Chronus employee (guessing the company health plan doesn’t cover that) and I recover an artifact that will get our vehicle back up and running. Upon emerging, however, a group of drifting Chronus deserters shake me down for whatever treasure I’ve plumbed from the basement’s depths.

You can negotiate with them or just start shooting – it’s entirely up to you. But after just having fought a tough battle with a guy that looked like a big, angry, melted candle, I thought better of starting yet another gun fight and negotiated my way out of the confrontation. Reunited with my driver, we pressed on to the stricken facility.

I won’t let on what comes next because I want you to be surprised. What you won’t be surprised by is just how well Encased throws you into scenarios and challenges you to think your way out yourself. You’ll need to explore, level up, manage resources, and navigate dialog to make it through alive, and it all feels like a step above an old game painted over with shinier graphics.

Interview with Viacheslav Kozikhin, Creative Director

Encased is out now in Early Access. To learn more about the game and it’s road to full release, we chatted with Viacheslav Kozikhin, Creative Director at Dark Crystal Games. You can find our conversation below:

Alexander Eriksen: Clearly, the original Fallout is a huge inspiration for you guys. What steps did you take to pay homage to such a legendary game while updating it so that it feels good to modern players?

Viacheslav Kozikhin, Dark Crystal Games: We see Fallout as a story about the changing world, and in that sense, Encased can be considered the absolute spiritual successor to Fallout. We also tried to retain the general sense of exploration of the game world that was in all classic Fallouts: a leisurely, thoughtful exploration of the history of each settlement, curious little details scattered here and there, numerous references to iconic works of pop culture. At the same time, we did not seek to copy the atmosphere of Fallout – we are simply convinced that the techniques used in it are the best way to tell such a story.

As for the second part of your question, about how to make the modern successor to Fallout comfortable for players, it's more about pacing, usability and ergonomics. We tried and made a convenient and beautiful interface and added maximum variety and dynamics to the game.

You're also not shy about drawing inspiration from STALKER and the book it's based on, Roadside Picnic. Were there any other big influences for you?

Oh, yeah, a bunch. All fiction that explores travel to unexplored lands and encountering something unknown, mysterious, alien, dangerous. And also the processes of transformation and dehumanization that occur when people are locked up like spiders in a jar and pitted against each other. This includes Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Stephen King's Under the Dome, and various works by the Strugatskys (not only Roadside Picnic – in some instances you can catch the vibes of the comedy Monday Begins on Saturday). Our screenwriter also wants to point out the classic parts of Mad Max and Waterworld, as well as the novel West of Eden among his sources of inspiration.

What's your take on modern retro games? We've seen a number of games like Disco Elysium recapture some of the spotlight from big AAA games in favor of more in-depth experiences. What goes into making a game you hope will stand up against huge studios with massive budgets?

Pressures involved with large games can sometimes lead to a lack of experimentation. They are impressive, expensive, and very calibrated projects. We feel much freer in our experiments with storytelling, characters, mechanics, and other game elements. Disco Elysium is a good example of how an unusual experimental game can achieve success and recognition.

Tell us more about the Dome, where is it exactly in the world? And how long will it take players who want to see all of it to explore?

One of the reasons the game takes place in the 1970s is the level of technology. Yes, science has come a long way, but the planet is still partly terra incognita. This is the time of recent discoveries, when the Earth was not yet enveloped in a dense chain of satellites that photograph and scan every square inch of the surface. The dome appeared in one of the many deserts, or perhaps it has always been there, and for many years mankind did not notice it literally under their noses.

There's an impressive amount of narration in the game. How much voice work did you record and with how many different actors?

The game will be available with Russian and English voice-overs. We fully voiced the main story and some additional parts. All-in-all, we’re looking at tens of thousands of lines of dialogues and hundreds of thousands of words which were worked on by about fifty actors. We’re especially proud of our Russian voice-over, which was recorded by the actors who worked on the Russian versions of such games as The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.

How long will the game be? And are there multiple endings to encourage replays? What about multiplayer? Any plans to make this a co-op experience r la Divinity: Original Sin 2?

Playthroughs show that the game is about 30 hours long if you do the main story and participate in side adventures – like doing side quests or participating in random encounters. So, for the completionist, it will be even more than that. Some people in Early Access have already played 60+ hours – so on the content front, it's a hefty RPG that can entertain you for multiple evenings.

What, in your opinion, makes a good RPG?

A good RPG gives interesting choices and evokes emotions: sometimes you get pissed off by a difficult battle, sometimes you empathize with your companion, sometimes you admire the quest or laugh at the jokes in the dialogues. RPGs also have to be lively and flexible, and the game world has to endure all the attempts to break it. We achieved that you can play through the main story and side-quests in any way and with any build. This can be a usually balanced playthrough, an adventure as a low intelligence character, a playthrough as a character who doesn't talk to anyone at all, a character who kills everything and everyone in their way, or a humanist peacemaker.