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| A suitably ambiguous title... |
Let me tell you a secret - I'm an old man. Okay, maybe that's a little fatalistic and partly an exaggeration. However, I am old enough to have been alive during the infancy of the modern style of
immersive sim, though I didn't play them until 2002-2003 and I never actually played the original
System Shock. There is something that resonates within me for games that create a world and let you explore and inhabit it, just as I love exploring the nooks and crannies of open world games - looking for the next beautiful or wondrous sight or hidden easter egg or quirky story.
The last ten years has been (what some have been reffering to as) a renaissance in the genre of immersive sim and while the initial installments were well-received and sold well, the latter half of the decaed saw lower overall sales numbers, leading
many people to
wonder if the immersive sim was in trouble:
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)
- Dishonored (2012)
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015)
- Dishonored 2 (2016)
- Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)
- Hitman (2016)
- Prey (2017)
- Hitman 2 (2018)
- The Occupation (2019)
Incidentally, I'm writing an analysis of why this might be but that's going to take a while.
I played White Paper Games' previous release,
Ether One, and loved that - though it was quite buggy, even after a few patches. I didn't directly pay for that game as I got it through PS+ and since I quit PS+ I never managed to actually get to the final ending. It's clear that the developers have improved the engine and their knowledge of the systems they are releasing on and, quite frankly, despite its much more complex design, The Occupation is in a much better state after patching than Ether One was.
If you skip the story section, the spoilers are pretty limited here since I'm actually going to focus mostly on the mechanics but... just in case: BEWARE - here be spoilers!
