Saga of the North Wind

(Mild spoilers may follow - if concerned, simply read the TLDR.) I did not like the wispy, trailing sensation I got from playing through the story. For a game with such an onerous main plot, where you play a central role in the fate of your entire people under the volition of the gods, you meander far too much and far too distractedly on your journey to the plot's destination. An example: On your way to the game's pilgrimage site, which involves the traversement of a tedious marshland (this is not to be confused with the journey which came before, involving the traversement of a tedious highland), you can be captured by slavers. who bring you to a random city utterly unrelated to your quest, an event which the gods bewilderingly allow to happen despite their propensity for intervening in more trivial pursuits. You spend far too great a portion of the game in an arena where slaves are made to fight each other to the death, isolated from your oblivious tribespeople. Imagine the angst of playing through the storyline of an RPG, say, Skyrim, where one is to defeat a terrible dragon. And on your journey to its mountainous lair, you were abducted by slavers and hauled off to the bloodied sands of a coliseum halfway across the ocean - what a bewildering tangent! I am all for encumberments to the resolution of a quest, but only insofar as the villains are related to the quest itself, such that the fatal viccisitude would have been a trial to overcome, rather than a lengthy detour of misfortune devoid of your antagonist's malice, and empty of pertinence. And thus I was away from my tribe for a drastically long period of time, separated by oblivious enemies from oblivious allies and when the time came to return to them - I was forced to leave behind the slaves who were yet in the arena, their fates unresolved and unintervened. This riles against me because what the game has done was introduce an entirely new playing field of story and morality, separate from the main questline, and then with a panoramic flick of the wrist dismissed the entire saga as though it didn't matter! A few sentences of guilt, and the entire tale vanished, never again remembered as we resumed our marshland hegira. A tangent, and an empty one at that! The problem with all of this is the lack of a sense of interconnectivity, which is exarcebated by the lack of a way to establish emotional attachment. A plot where you are chosen by the gods, and are leading your people on a diaspora to a hallowed ground, should be one which encourages you to actually care about the people and the gods. Apart from your advisor or two (you are limited in your interactions, being forced to choose from a rigid rubric of socialisation) you do not interact personally with individual members of the tribe. They are not a tribe of individuals for whom you care deeply, they don't even have names! None of them are family or friends, none of them are capable of dialogue or recurring interaction, they are all simply colourless pieces of resource meeples for you to collect and gather, and perhaps inspire on occasion with flaccid speeches. I recall with amusement one of the scenes where you were forced, before a terrorist, to choose between two innocents who would be executed upon selection. You had to pick one over the other, and yet neither the damned nor the survivor in the aftermath of the damned would make any comment about your choice. I wanted to shake the survivor: "don't give me generic comments about our prison setting or how you in your infinite triteness want to be rid of it, I just murdered a person for you! Her decapitated head is right outside our cages staring! Talk to me, damn it, talk to me!" Without a core of humanisation, there is no basal site for the player to establish emotional connections, no skeletal structure of plot to support small branching side-quests, let alone the meandering and convoluted monstrosities which had led me off the map several times to engage in unrelated storylines which were fleeting in significance and yet felt like an eternity to play through due to their abysmal and narcotic tedium. [u]TLDR:[/u] The flaws of the game may be summarised thusly: You may collect and acquire members for your tribe, but will never speak to any of them. You may recruit members after a quest in which there is interaction, but once they're in your tribe, forget about ever seeing them again. They are now no more than a number on your screen as you trail from one scene into another, like an old-timey movie presenting a flickering series of images - between which the only connection is that you remain inexplicably the viewer. The game was a terribly lonely playthrough for me. None of the tribe struck me as alive, and even those few clip art people capable of dialogue had cardboard personalities, being incapable of memory and utterly imperceptive of the dramatic events which unfolded around them. Saga of the North Wind was a long meandering adventure, which [i]could[/i] have been a good thing, but unfortunately, there was no one there to talk about it.

I have just finished the game and I believe have only scratched the surface of the different paths to take to achieve the multiple endings. The beginning of the saga had some choices you could not change but from then on the choices are in your hands. I greatly enjoyed the variation of characters you can meet, befriend, betray, pursue relationships with and so on. I encountered one error towards the end of the game where I could ask a certain friend for aid but this person had died a few chapters beforehand so it threw the story off a bit. Besides all these things I recommend this for anyone interested in Slavic mythos and very well written story telling.

Ending depends on the choices you made, and some endings are unlocked only if you have the right stat, the problem is that what choices raise what stats is not clear at all, after so many plays I still cannot get the ending that I want. warning for those that hate this type of sea eternal ending, though this one is less extreme.

Although a bit short, this story carry the sense of adventure and leadership that i love in a game. 6/10

Nice! I never expected to actually finish this one! Although the "game" started kinda slow, at some point I became really hooked and just couldn't stop playing the game. So the game as a game is interesting. The story structure itself is okay, with no obvious problems. Most of the time the mechanics of the game work intuitively, with the stats page being a good hint. Oh, and one more thing: mixing the Slavic pantheon with a nomadic setting was... Unexpected. Slavic peoples and nomads from the Great Steppe were fighthing for literally for centuries.

I haven't played much, but I am uploading my playthrough to my youtube channel. If you'd like to check the game out as a taste before you buy, check out the first part here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0tRZbX0N5Q So far I think I will enjoy the game, as I usually enjoy all of the Choice of Games. I will post updates as I get to them.

Good story, though it kinda feels like there is more to it when you reach the end, but I only finished it once, so maybe if I made other choices I would get more satisfiyng end.

Unterschiedliche Enden, je nachdem wie man sich entscheidet. Aber du musst immer eins bevorzugen: Dein Tribe hat Vorrang vor allem anderen, selbst vor den Göttern :D. Nur er ist wichtig, auch wichtiger als dein eigenes Leben.

This has to be, by far one of my favorite Choice of Games stories that I've come across. The story building and details involved were thrilling. My one and only complaint is that I feel the ending was a bit rushed. I would still give this a 8.5 out of 10.

This little story is guud. Simple and wrap everything.