The Old City: Leviathan Review (PC)

Developer PostMod Softworks is the last on the list of studios working on an “exploration” game. I refuse to use the “walking simulator” syntagm to tag this game genre because there’s so much more than actually waling in these games.

The Old City: Leviathan is the first part of a larger story that PostMod has decided to allow PC gamers to experience. Following in the footsteps of already popular titles like Dear Esther, Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, PostMod’s game adheres to the same recipe but adds a few more ingredients into the mix that differentiate it from other titles in the genre.

One of these ingredients is excellent replayability. Although The Old City offers around five hours of gameplay, you will want to revisit the game to discover secret areas that you missed during your first playthrough.

With each new playthrough, you might find more bits of information that should reveal the mysteries behind the disappearance of a long-forgotten civilization.

You can complete the game in less than an hour if you just walk through the 11 chapters included in the first part, but that will certainly not reveal too much of the main story.

Story

The Old City starts the same way all these exploration games do. You are thrown into a mysterious world with no information whatsoever on what you should expect to happen.

The main goal is to walk through the chapters while discovering and collecting parts of a huge journal. The amount of text thrown at players is a bit overwhelming, but if you want to have any hope of understanding what happened with the inhabitants of The Old City, then you will need every bit of information.

I’ve been going through some of these blocks of text, which look like total non-sense to the average gamer, and I immediately understood one thing: the developer is putting the narrative experience above other gameplay features.

“The Old City wants to come up with major philosophical themes like life, death, reality, imagination, loneliness and negativity.”

I can understand that these themes should be part of video games, but I have found that The Old City is too subtle or vague about these leitmotifs to the point that for many players the ramblings of the narrator are nothing more than nonsensical gibberish.

The best way to describe it is by using the warning given by developers right at the start of the game, “You are about to inhabit a broken mind. Not everything you see or hear is trustworthy.”

You start in an underground room from larger complex with no apparent goal. The voice that sometime narrates part of the background story is supposed to be your own, hence the warning at the beginning of the game.

Each level that you will explore has an important piece of text that is supposed to reveal some information on the civilization that once inhabited The Old City. Solomon’s Notes are huge blocks of texts containing phrases that may not make any sense at first glance.

You’ll have to go through all these and the many pages of a lost journal that are lost inside the game’s level in order to shed some light on the mysteries surrounding The Old City.

Given that developers’ plan of releasing more sequels, it’s quite alright not to provide players with a definitive ending. However, I’ve often found myself at the end of the game as clueless as at the beginning.

Perhaps that’s my fault in part, but I also believe developer PostMod did not manage to provide players with the right pieces to complete the puzzle.

The only people in the game are dead people

Gameplay

The complexity of The Old City: Leviathan lies in its story, not in gameplay mechanics. Apart from the usual directional keys, you can only use the Space bar to jump and another key (E) that will help you interact with doors (for the most part).

With the exception of doors and Solomon’s Notes, the environment is not interactive, so the only thing players can do is look at the hints left on the walls in the forms of pictograms or short sentences.

There’s also running in the game, but I would consider it more of a fast walk rather than running. Clicking Shift while walking will get you a bit faster through the underground tunnels or outside scenery, but not by much.

Although the road from one chapter to another is not that long, I would recommend players to take their time and thoroughly explore every chapter for additional clues.

Due to the fact that the protagonist’s reality is a bit warped, you will re-visit some of the locations in the game, but they will look differently, and more often than not, in a strange way.

Graphics and Audio

While the visuals in The Old City: Leviathan aren’t as great as the jaw-dropping The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or Dear Esther, it still manages to deliver a similar atmosphere. The artwork is amazing, although sometime I wished the environments would be more alive even if I was exploring a deserted city in a post-apocalyptic setting.

I also enjoyed the voice acting and the atmospheric music, which puts players in a certain mood (certainly not in a positive one).

I have nothing but praises for The Old City’s visuals and audio, so if that’s what you’re looking for in an exploration game, then you won’t be disappointed if you decide to pick this one up.

Is this a map?

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion

The Old City: Leviathan is a great game for those who manage to understand it. If not for the huge blocks of text that offer as little and useful information as possible and for the more lively environments, I would have considered it an excellent exploration game.

I believe the game is way too demanding of the audience and even if that’s what the developer intended in the first place, the philosophical concepts it comes up with are less suitable for a game and more appropriate to be introduced in a book.

I dare not recommend The Old City: Leviathan to those who are not into the philosophical nature of life, but I strongly advise those who want to play something more than a game to not skip this one.

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