Moebius: Empire Rising Review (PC)

Moebius: Empire Rising is the first independent adventure game from famed Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen, and as such the bar is set pretty high right off the bat.

The game was made by Pinkerton Road Studio and Phoenix Online Studios, after undergoing a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and it is a fine example of what indie studios can pull off with a little bit of help.

Moebius: Empire Rising puts you in the shoes of a resoundingly named Malachi Rector, an antiques appraiser with an extensive knowledge of history, eidetic memory and acute sense of observation that allow him to deliver astute verdicts on the authenticity of various pieces of history.

The action starts off pretty innocuous, with you returning home after a short hospital stretch that followed an altercation with the goons of a dissatisfied customer. Once home, your assistant prompts you to find some manner of security and informs you that you have been summoned by a mysterious gentleman belonging to a mysterious organization.

You go about your business and evidently stumble upon some trouble, but also upon an unlikely ally, an ex-military backpacker who, after certain developments, becomes your bodyguard and then proves to be an intricate part of the entire plot.

This is where things start to get interesting and complicated, and you'll soon find yourself in the midst of an international conspiracy and some pretty campy things will start happening. It sounds Dan Brownish, but it's not as bad. Well, only sometimes.

The main problem with the game is that Moebius: Empire Rising starts off great, but then begins to wane a bit and lose focus, and it resorts to various unconvincing tropes in order to progress the story.

The truth is that adventure games have to make a sacrifice in that respect, because of their innate nature. You have to go through the motions, select the right things in order to make the story go forward, outwit everyone and find solutions to various problems, and all that in a very timely manner.

That requires a bit of cutting corners and forcible end results, as you can't afford to dedicate a couple of years of your life to learning cryptography in order to decode a real code in a video game, so you have to find the right surrogate, which is always a tricky balancing act.

As well, you only have a couple of hours to meet the limited number of people on the cast, and they have to fall into certain categories and stay true to their nature unless the plot dictates that it's time to start the almighty deus ex machina.

It is with that kind of suspension of disbelief that you must embark on an adventure game in order to properly enjoy it, and with that said, Moebius: Empire Rising could very well fall prey to a hasty critique of its flaws.

"Interesting data points" is what I call those pictures too

It was clearly the correct choice, the game must be bugged

There is a certain cheesy aspect to all adventure games, especially more dramatic ones that involve exciting plots concerning espionage and mystery. That is because you can't make a game that kills you every ten seconds for running your mouth, which would most likely be the outcome in a more realistic scenario, and the reason should be obvious enough.

As such, you have to play the role of a certain kind of superhero. In this case, it's the classic braniac stereotype, self-absorbed, lacking any kind of empathy and generally behaving like a rock star in the most idiotic way possible, as imagined by less gifted individuals on TV for ages.

Positing that you are intelligent and believe that people's feelings and egos do not factor into the equation of your life, you are still able to realize that they do count in the equations of their lives. Therefore, you act accordingly and get a gun and shoot someone in the face the moment they start acting like you know they would, invoking self-defense as an excuse for your behavior in front of the world you know you can't live outside of because, you know, you're supposed to be intelligent and all that.

But this critique can be made of any type of smart fella ever portrayed on TV, oblivious to such obvious mechanisms and functioning more like a billboard for illustrating tropes than a real human being that is able to adapt.

Consequently, Moebius: Empire Rising's protagonist is the long-lost brother of Bones, the famous forensic anthropologist who worships at the altar of logic and belittles the petty social norms most of society swears by. As such, he devotes his life to cold hard facts in order to compensate for the emotional matters he cannot come to terms with.

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He is brash and unapologetic, quickly to add insult to injury in situations in which the victims of his behavior fail to realize why they shouldn't manifest the way they do, brazenly asserting the extensive knowledge he possesses in his area of expertise.

Only unlike Bones, he is not mystified when the situation calls for it and does not allow religious mumbo-jumbo and esoteric nonsense to disturb his otherwise cold and hard approach to life.

He gradually begins to open up and warms up to the audience through his actions, as instead of just disappearing from the face of the earth in order to enjoy his wealth when presented with a situation that is out of his control and may end up badly, he embarks on a journey that turns him into a veritable hero and redeems his seemingly cold-hearted demeanor.

On the subject of the game's plot, it presents an interesting point of view that is anchored in pulp fiction more than hard science. Nevertheless, that's the nature of Jane Jensen's writing in general, as it also was in Gabriel Knight, and of adventure games and novels in general, because swashbuckling is much more exciting than the actual methodical snoozefests that accompany such events in real life.

The actual gameplay is pretty good, there are also hints that give you a general idea of what you're supposed to do and you can highlight every object you can interact with on the screen, so there are no worries that some important item will escape your scrutiny because of getting mixed up with the scenery.

Another breath of fresh air is that everything is nailed down and you can't just pick up every item you come across hoping it'll prove useful further down the road. The innate nature of adventure games is to turn their players into hoarders, but, thankfully, here you will only be able to pick up objects when you find a context in which they will prove useful.

Granted, that makes for a lot of back and forth sometimes, as you have to backtrack in order to gather all the components to pull off a MacGyver, but it comes off making much more sense than just casually packing your whole house in a backpack on the offshoot chance that something may come in handy later.

As with any conspiracy theory fiction, you also have the opportunity to learn a great deal about history, and the bits in which Malachi demonstrates his astuteness are a nice flavorful touch, as are the visual analysis mini-games.

The game does present a fair share of challenges, but most of them are very straightforward and the odds that you'll get stuck are negligible. Fans of puzzles will be disappointed here, no doubt, but the engaging and generally interesting storyline will make up for it.

The interface prevents you from playing Whack-a-Mole

But you can always role-play some soap operas. Mentiroso!

The interactions between the game's handful of characters are a bit on the shallow side, and there also are some suggestions that the game does not state outright but instead opts to merely imply, and that could have been better served by a more straightforward disclosure.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion