The most unusual chapter deals with your kidnapping by militants. Your hired car is stopped and seized and your guide and several other journalists are also taken hostage. While kidnapped, you converse with your fellow victims as well as with your captors. You also need to stay alive. Executions are scheduled at intervals and which one of you dies first depends on what your captors think of each of you. This hothouse atmosphere leads to challenging situations. Do you and the other abductees turn on each other when it's time for another beheading, or do you stick together? Potentially, you can stave off death by manipulating the opinions of those around you so that someone else is chosen to die first - if that's the way you want to play your character. There are multiple ways to escape, and it's up to you to figure them out.
In every chapter, deep conversation trees give you the freedom to become the character you want. You frequently make trade-offs between integrity, expediency, success and even survival. The squad as a whole performs better or worse in combat depending on its internal relationships, which you can affect. As the game goes on, you become wound tighter and tighter into this group of soldiers who will either bond and thrive or fall apart disastrously.
So: Embedded is a game with moral and ethical choices, a dramatic setting, crunchy gameplay, character development, powerful dialogue and real excitement. Is there a place for this kind of game in the market? I sure think so. But the console generation that is now coming to a close brought us surprisingly little innovation, as publishers became locked into tighter and tighter game- design boxes.
Sam Walton understood. People like choice. The choice in our hobby right now is between run, gun, drive, fight or jump. That's not enough. The use of a joystick or mouse to shoot people has become so refined there's nothing left but a few more permutations of genre. You can already shoot people in space, in the old west, in a haunted house, in the jungle, in the desert. This direction is going nowhere. I'm not proposing that we do something radical, like throw it all aside and make an MMOG based on Rez. I'm just making a simple suggestion: Put all that high-powered technology and razor-sheen production value into a game that's a few steps to the side of what we're used to.
We can attenuate or we can innovate. I'm hoping for the latter.
John Tynes has been a game designer and writer for fifteen years, and is a columnist for The Stranger, X360 UK, and The Escapist. His most recent book is Wiser Children, a collection of his film criticism.
