So after having the schedule being delayed again and again for no less than 15 years, we are happy to say that we've finally got our hands on a review copy of Nastria. What these exciting news mean is that you and me will finally know the answer to that question we've been asking for all these years: is this Adventure/RPG game worth all the effort and care that have put in it during its development hell ? Read more to find out.

The sci-fi scenario of Nastria takes place in a not-so-distant future, maybe a few decades of technical evolution beyond us. Energy sources have become cleaner, chirurgy and nanofabrication have seen impressive progresses to the point where the few who can afford it may have computers communicate directly with their brain through a neural interface, and corporations have grown so much bigger that they are now considered governments in their own right. One day, a leak occurs from one of the top 5 corporations that it has researched and created a technological "artifact" of extreme power. The player controls a character who is linked to this link in one way or the other, and its actions will determine the evolution of this initial intrigue.

Like many RPGs, the game begins with a character creation screen. Well, in fact "creation" may not be an appropriate word, because the player simply picks a character he wants to play in a list of FBI-ish "psychological profiles". There are plenty of profiles there, though, so players probably won't be frustrated, especially considering how diverse they are : a lawyer, a janitor, an industrial spy, an engineer, a researcher, a policeman, a human resource manager, and... the mysterious character who caused the leak within the corporation (this last one must be unlocked by going sufficiently far in the scenery with other characters, though, to avoid unnecessary early plot spoilers).

Once a character is selected, the game starts immediately at the step where the "Past Actions" part of the profile ends. In our case, a lawyer's apartment, after his client has transmitted a weird help message on his comlink (=neural cellphone). The game plays like any isometric 2D RPG with scripted dialogues, and people who are used to playing such games (Baldur's gate, Fallout 2...) should quickly pick up the controls. If we have a look around in our room (which is necessary anyway as we need the key in our jacket's pocket to open its door), we'll find a sample track to follow in our investigation, which will prove to be a dead-end, as a "tutorial quest", while experienced players will just rush for the key anyway, knowing that there's nothing interesting in this room.

On the outside, differing experiences among reviewers playing the same character has led us to notice that although a set of “big” quests and events (including obviously the main intrigue's ones) are scripted by hand, smaller events, like winos begging for cash or policemen moving around, are actually randomly generated. People move around, chat with each other, have a probability of spreading rumors this way... All in all, the universe sounds very lively, especially since the author has managed to avoid classical AI short-sighted thinking like having AIs “run into the player” for some time before they decide to go another way or ask him to move. It is rumored that this IA was actually responsible for most of the development hell, and we have no issue believing it : it works beautifully. And for once, town centers are as crowded as one would expect them to be.

After a great day chatting with a rapist which we helped avoiding jail that gave us some clues about the current events, running away from the police after having tried to steal money from a tramp to pay the bus, hiding in a smelly trash and washing our clothes, we thought that it was time to save, at which point we discovered a new side of this game. The only way to save in Nastria is to quit the game, like in Diablo II, but coming back at the place where you used to be when you load your save later (save for some exceptions, see below). When you choose the “Save&Quit” options in the menu, you go back to the main character selection screen, from which it is possible to run another character if you want to or just to quit the game. It is worth pointing out that saves are not independent: the only way to erase a characters' progression, without tampering with save editors at least, is to erase all characters' progression, resetting the game to its initial state.

With all this in mind, one will quickly guess that characters can interact with each other. Indeed, they can, and this will be needed at several points of the game. One interesting thing, however, is that the player will only be able to play one character at a time, while other characters will be played by the AI, their way of acting being partly based on a hand-crafted IA from the game's designer and partly based on the player's actions. What this means is that if the player wants his characters to cooperate with each other, he'll have to convince most of them, which can prove to be pretty tricky in some cases. This side of the game have led Nastria's authors to call it “The world's first Massively Monoplayer Offline Role-Playing Game”. It also means that if the player has left his characters in a safe place when saving, they may move around, buy themselves food, sleep, etc, and can be met in these situations. When the player plays other characters, unplayed characters don't remain static. For players who are not fond of this and prefer saves to always be loaded in a predictable way, it is possible to deactivate this behavior in the game's settings.

To conclude, playing this review copy finally allowed us to check the validity of some rumors, although giving too much details is hard without spoiling: yes, a technological equivalent of magic will be present in the game. Yes, it will be manipulated using a sort of programming language. Yes, it is possible to do absolutely awesome things with it, though you will be at first quite heavily limited by your knowlege of the language and the limited endurance of your character. We'll stop there now before spoiling too much.

All in all, Nastria was a very enjoyable game to play, and we would recommend it to all RPG fans as an example of what someting as basic as a Core 42 Dodeca PC CPU (which is the recommended configuration, yes you have read it right !) is truly up to, and as an illustration of a current trend towards a come-back to 2D interfaces in platform and RPG games which is in our opinion very welcome. Thanks you for reading !