Retronator

Here are my first impressions of RIOT — Civil Unrest, which released in Early Access on Steam today. 

First some intro, if you don’t know the game. RIOT is the brainchild of
Leonard Menchiari, an Italian director/animator who ran an Indigogo campaign for the game back in 2013. He raised quite some dust, since the game approaches a politically charged topic of protests and police brutality. The story even got covered by The New York Times. 

The campaign subsequently went twice over its goal of $15,000; still, now being 5 years later, nobody can sustain development for that long on that budget. Not that it was ever imagined it would take so long. The game went through a redesign and code rewrite, and dropped into radio silence for years at a time. Somewhere along the way in 2015 it got picked up by the publisher Merge Games and, after another year of delays, they realized they better not give any new dates out, just a Duke Nukem style “when it’s done”. After yet another year of sparse communication, that day has finally come: we can now play RIOT!

Merge Games sent me a review copy and while I haven’t played a lot yet, some things are pretty clear. The good news is, RIOT is as special as imagined. Leonard brings on a great, minimal storytelling style and the presentation alone sends you shivers down your spine. The atmosphere is at the same time cinematic and very real—you can feel shit’s about to go down. If you’ve ever been in a real-life protest, you know it has a certain electricity in the air. Maybe it only works if you’ve felt it in real life, but the game certainly brought it back for me.

That being said, I understand why they released the game in Early Access—it still has many technical issues. I should say I did play a beta build on macOS though, which doesn’t seem to be publicly supported on the game’s store page yet, so the situation on Windows might be better. 

I’m running into constant problems with screen resolution and the graphics engine. Sometimes the game draws things too big so that the text gets out of bounds, sometimes too small, making letters practically illegible. The camera zoom is hard to control and gets stuck too close or too far away. I’ve had the graphics get completely corrupt, after which the game crashed on me. That kind of stuff—exactly why you’d be in EA. Once fixed, these problems will have zero negative impact on the game.

You’ll also need a decent gaming rig. I’m guessing the game is executing some kind of fluid simulation to represent the push-pull between the rioters and the police, which doesn’t seem to be the most computationally trivial thing. I do like the idea of it, as it shows they put some real thought into how to simulate the complex dynamics of such situations. It could also be the graphics’ fault. In any case, they have some optimizing left to do.

Gameplay experience is one of Early Access as well. The learning curve is not as crazy as early Minecraft/Dwarf Fortress, although you are indeed supposed to learn the details through the built-in wiki. Onboarding could profit much from a tutorial with certain actions explained through gameplay. If you just experiment without reading about all the options, you’re often left scratching your head why something worked or didn’t. On the other hand, I like that it doesn’t feel like exact science—group behavior seems exactly as unpredictable as you’d imagine it being in a real riot, while still giving you meaningful control of the situation.

My recommendation for most players is to wait a bit with purchasing the game. If you’re a backer, by all means go explore it, assuming you can keep your expectations contained and not give the team a hard time for releasing alpha-level of polish after 5 years. When the technical issues are resolved after the backers and enthusiasts give it a go, it should be a better time to jump in for everyone.

I am optimistic that once the rough edges are smoothed out, the game’s powerful emotional impact will find its way to permeate to the surface untained. If you want to support the game in advance, by all means go buy it on Steam right now. It promises that rare breeze of fresh air that expands what kind of stories games can tell.