Impartial – Review
According to psychologists, the average adult makes about 35000 choices every day… about one every two seconds. The vast majority are unconscious micro-choices, like blinking your eyes, with around 2000 of them being deliberate decisions. So what’s a handful more then? Impartial is the kind of game that is all about making conscious decisions and living with the consequences of your choices. Or at least, it should be. Did we make the right choice by giving the game a shot?
Story
In Impartial’s version of Victorian London, superheroes exist. You’d think that’s a good thing, as the city’s crime rate is through the roof, but the police don’t like it when vigilantes get in their way. The tension between both sides rises after the King passes away, and the ruling bodies have no choice but to appoint a mediator between the bobbies and the caped crimefighters. You are that mediator, responsible for the final say in how conflicts are handled. It’s up to you to decide the best course of action, but the ugly truth is that you can’t save everyone.
The writing is supposed to be Impartial’s biggest draw, and for the vast majority of the game it is. The dilemmas the game serves up often don’t have a clear-cut solution. An early example has you choose between rescuing a large supply of food intended to relieve a starving population or the crew that was sent to recover it but got in trouble. The game also tests your own moral compass by offering you bribes or having one side of a conflict directly threaten you. With so much of Impartial happening in a grey area, there are theoretically plenty of opportunities for twists and turns, but this is where the game starts to falter. There are only two endings, and many of your choices end up feeling insignificant. The writing is also uneven, with bizarre phrasing and awkward pacing. It’s a shame, because the concept is great, but the game never fully lives up to what it promises.
Graphics
Most of the individual components that make up Impartial’s visuals are outright fantastic. The character portraits are rendered in a style that resembles charcoal drawings, whereas your desk and the objects that litter it are depicted in a more traditional hand-drawn illustrative manner. The game’s drab, almost black-and-white colour scheme matches the bleak setting to a tee. What Impartial’s visuals are lacking is consistency. The different art styles don’t fit together very well, and the barebones UI doesn’t even attempt to tie everything together. One very particular irk was that parts of the in-game text sometimes overlapped with illustrations, making them almost illegible.
Fonts are all over the place, and buttons are the most barebones, standard rectangles. At least the game isn’t too demanding, so performance is flawless.
Sound
The opening cutscene of Impartial actually had us excited for a minute, because it was narrated. Our enthusiasm was quickly quelled, as the vast majority of the game turned out not to feature any voice acting. We understand that voice acting is a luxury, as hiring actors can be expensive, but this is the kind of game that really would have benefited from being fully voiced. For the most part, Impartial’s soundscape is filled with monotonous piano music, with the occasional sound effect thrown in for good measure. The result is underwhelming, unfortunately.
Gameplay
While there are plenty of visual novel variants out there, in essence they all boil down to the same core mechanic: you read a story and make choices that alter the outcome of the story. Impartial takes this idea and pushes it to its logical extreme. We won’t be going into spoiler territory about its overarching story, which is about revolution and the power vacuum that appeared after the death of the king here. Instead, we’ll focus on the core gameplay, which revolves around your day job as a mediator. Each day starts at your desk, where you read letters, often containing relevant information, answer phone calls, and mess around with trinkets and silly little activities like solving a word puzzle. Once you’re done with desk activities, you move on to the meat of the game. You’re presented with a series of dilemmas, with superhero Legman and the police commissioner each presenting their own solution to the problem. Make the choice that aligns with what you think is best, and you get to see the outcome. At the end of each week, you receive pay based on the outcome of your choices. Easy, right?
The challenge comes from making the right call. Legman’s options are typically more cautious, whereas the commissioner’s more blunt approach may break a few eggs (or legs) but his calls align with the needs of the many over the needs of the few. Your choices may have deadly effects, so choose wisely… or just opt for taking a bribe from a wealthy citizen instead of saving the orphanage. Not that there’s any real point to taking bribes, mind you. There is no real money management system in the game. You can spend your earnings on additional desk trinkets or even on prostitutes (no, really, it’s Victorian London after all), but ultimately, money doesn’t have an actual effect on gameplay. It’s yet another missed opportunity, because there’s no real incentive to actually accept bribes, which undermines their point. Impartial isn’t a very long game, coming in at around two hours for a single playthrough. There is some replay value to it, but we’d rather have seen a more fleshed-out version of the game that introduces more variables and consequences. While the RRP of €8.15 isn’t high, relatively speaking, you’re not getting enough here to really justify that price.
Conclusion
The foundation is here, but the execution isn’t. There are plenty of great ideas in Impartial, but they never reach their full potential. The game is all about making choices, but their outcomes feel inconsequential, and as much fun as it can be to mess about with desktop trinkets, we felt like a mechanic where money actually has meaningful use was missing. Add to this that the audiovisual presentation is uneven, and you end up with a game that is little more than a curiosity.
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