Finished Dread Delusion
It's an indie fantasy RPG, set in a world of floating islands in the sky after a cataclysmic event destroyed terra firma. Now, as far as weird fantasy goes, this is just about the equivalent of "it was a cold and stormy night." The player assumes the role of a nameless convict given the mission to apprehend a mercenary leader by the inquisition of an organization called the Apostate Union. Dread Delusion, you see, is set in the aftermath of a war where said Union overthrew the gods and the priest class ruling in their name. Now all worship is banned, a ban enforced by the ironically named Inquisition. Dread Delusion has you travel the three nations of its airbound archipelago to put together a team that can track down the aforementioned mercenary leader and stop her plan to, presumably, destroy the world.
There is a central philosophical question that acts as the thematic throughline for the story, which is, effectively, "Does man need gods or do gods need man?" Within the archipelago, which, we learn, is only a small part of a greater word, are three nations with three different philosophies. Hallowshire is suffering a famine after dethroning its fertility god that demanded human sacrifices and is now under the administration of the Inquisition. The Endless Realms are a nation of undead who've lost the ability to die and worship a deity called "The Ferryman" in the hope that he'll finally grant them death. And the Clockwork Kingdom is an early 20th Century Russia coded realm governed by an omnipotent but malfunctioning machine called the Clock King, and has quite easily the most interesting plot line in the game.
Double D is a game not by any means devoid of interesting ideas and imagery. Gothic cities of the undead. Squirming larval gods born from crystals. Magic that works by manipulating the language of the universe. There is a sincere effort there to reimagine the tropes of classic fantasy, albeit one that never quite pulls the floor out under it the way something like Wooden Ocean does, if you allow me the deep cut. Nor does it come up with a mythology and a system of metaphysics quite as cerebral as Morrowind, its most obvious inspiration. Which isn't to say that there isn't also quite a bit of the stuff you do expect. There is the technologically advanced precursor civilization (for a moment in the beginning I was afraid the game was gonna do the "It's actually future earth" thing Metaphor ReFantazio did, but it is better than that) and a plot that effectively revolves around stopping the villain from activating a doomsday device. It doesn't entirely avoid cliches but I'm willing to give credit where it's due.
There is a respectable literacy to the moment to moment writing and a surrealist quality to some of the art direction that elevate the game above just being diminutive Morrowind. And whenever I felt that I was starting to grow bored of it, there was something legitimately clever or imaginative to win back my interest.
There is not much I can say about the gameplay, apart from "It's very quaint that it's pretending it has any." Dread Delusion is, in essence, a game about walking back and forth and talking to people. There is combat, if you want to be technical and call walking around an enemy and occasionally pressing the left mouse button that. There are skill checks, although unless you really want to specialize to the point of just not spending some skill points, you'll be proficient in just about everything by the end. Dread Delusion is not so much an RPG as that it's a walking simulator with RPG aesthetics. But it's a rather good walking simulator.
Despite everything, there is a decent sense of exploration and discovery. It's world isn't very big, but its dense and uses its verticality well so that you won't just be able to walk everywhere in a straight line. Which does, however, make some of the backtracking pretty irritating, because it doesn't really have a fast travel system, or that many convenient shortcuts. I think its art direction is also mostly pretty appealing. The environments aren't super detailed but every zone has a distinct atmosphere that's conveyed well.
Double D isn't a great game, it doesn't measure up to something like Pathologic 1 or Planescape Torment when it comes to janky artsy fantasy RPG's. However, I will say, if it had come out in the era its visual style and gameplay call back to, it surely would have reached a certain cult status in its own right. There are plenty of aspects to DD that I find commendable and genuinely weird and creative. I can only reiterate, it definitely peaks during the Clockwork Kingdom arc. As a whole, it's flawed but unique and I felt my time with it was worth it.