Okay, so here's an attempt to improve the English to make things clearer (first) and shorter (if possible).

“So with schedule delays of no less than 15 years, we are happy to say that we've finally got our hands on a review copy of Nastria. What this exciting new 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 it ? Does it deserve all the effort and care put in it during its development hell ? Read more to find out.

The 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 improved to the point where wealthy people can buy themselves computers with neural interfaces, and corporations have grown so big and powerful that they are now considered governments in their own right. One day, a leak occurs: one of the top 5 corporations has researched and created some piece of techology, codenamed "artifact", that provides some extreme power, though the nature of this power is unknown. The player embodies a character who is linked to this leak 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, that is directly shown up in the main menu. Well, "creation" may not be the most appropriate word, because there 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 with lack of choice, especially considering how diverse they are : a lawyer, a janitor, an industrial spy, an engineer, a researcher, a policeman, a human resource manager, a politician, and... the mysterious character who caused the leak within the corporation. This last one must be unlocked by going sufficiently far 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 its profile ends. In our case, a lawyer's apartment, after his client has transmitted a weird help request on his comlink (=neural cellphone). The game plays like any old-school 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, we'll find a note on our desk describing a track to follow in our investigation, as a "tutorial quest". Experienced players will just rush for the key of the room anyway, knowing that this track is a dead-end.

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 police cars 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 the AI was actually responsible for most of the development hell, and we have no issue believing it : it works beautifully. For once, town centers are as crowded as one would expect them to be.

Moral doesn't limit your available options in this game, but you have to face the consequences of your action. 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 this point, we discovered a new side of this game. The only way to save in Nastria is to quit the game, kind of like in Diablo II. 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 from each other: the only way to erase a characters' progression, without playing 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 even be needed at some points of the game's main intrigue. One interesting thing, however, is that as the player will only be playing one character at a time, other characters will be played by the AI. The AI's way of acting is being partly based on hand-crafted character descriptions from the game's designer, and partly adjusted based on the player's actions. What this means for you 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. While the player plays a given character, 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.

Finally, playing with this review copy has 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 a Core 42 Dodeca CPU, 4 TB or RAM, and an Intel GPU are truly up to. It also illustrates of a current trend towards a come-back to 2D interfaces in platform and RPG games, which in our opinion it an interesting track because it means more focus on game design and less on photorealistic graphics and physics. Thanks you for reading !”