In the grungy overly-dark cybertech worlds of fiction, a man with a special eye must sneak around and steal tech stuff to do other stuff and comply with the daemon in his head… to some people that might be fascinating, but Seven’s storytelling turned me off right off the bat. The cutscenes and exposition bordered on too much for someone like me who just wanted to check out an hour of the game and see what it was like.
When I finally did get into the game, what did I get? Some neat top-down traversal mechanics, and then a stealth mission. I don’t like stealth missions. I’m not patient, I don’t like timing things, and I’m not good at any of it. I covered this when I played MGSV.
Yet, despite several failures, Seven pulled me in enough to get me through that mission. I leapt through the air and landed on foes, bungled my way past some guards, hacked a camera, and then was ambushed by a giant spider. By the end of the mission, I had some grudging admiration for the game. It had managed to make a stealth mission tolerable for me.
As the plot of the game developed, I kept seeing glimmers of brilliance. A man killed another man in front of me, and I struck him down out of a sense of justice. Later, a quest-giver asking for revenge realized that I’d already fulfilled his wishes. I was shocked. Additionally, once I reached the first ‘quest town’ of the game, I was struck by the world-building and atmosphere of the place, the music and visuals only adding to a very unique and fun-to-explore locale.
As the game opened up, I soon found myself at a loss of what to do. While I could enter the menus and select an active quest, I did not parse any indicators on the map or in-game to tell me where to go or how to approach the many quests I picked up. It didn’t help that I was still uninterested in the story that was being told and very ill-informed of my place in it.
Seven ended up making the most of a game that I didn’t think I would like. I liked the approach to stealth, a genre I usually hate, and it seemed like each time I turned around I found something to admire. Unfortunately, ‘admiring’ a game is not enough to get me to finish it. I would recommend it to people who like top-down stealth-favoring rpgs in dystopian cybertech worlds.
Verdict: Played 1 hour.
Kyle Adams 