[Review] Empyre: Earls of the Deep Earth

As a genre, isometric RPGs are infamous for expansive narratives, tactical gameplay and for requiring colossal amounts of time to explore. When done well, they can make for some of the most immersive and rich experiences in gaming. Then there’s Empyre: Earls of the Deep Earth, whose bare-bones gameplay and uninspired writing left me reluctant to give it the time of day.

Like most of the genre, starting a new game pulls you straight into the character creation screen, where you allocate points to one of six attributes, which in turn influence the six skills that your character possesses. I think that these skills then determine which perks are available to unlock, but the game is very opaque when it comes to how these all relate.

One choice that intrigued me was the requirement to pick two personality perks: one strength and one flaw. However, the potential of this system floundered, as I realized that the flaws only provided minor debuffs to a stat. Since I was dumping my melee capabilities, I could be a gentle person and just do less damage with a weapon type I had no intention on using, sidestepping the problem entirely.

Too often, the game relied on my chosen perks as a crutch to resolve its conflicts. Early on, there was a scene where I was required to investigate a crime scene for something that might lead me to the perpetrator. Rather than have this resolved through gameplay, the entire situation came down to whether or not my character had a high enough skill in a specific perk. Since I didn’t, my character loudly exclaimed to himself about how he couldn’t find anything, and the plot moved on.

This shallowness continued throughout my time with Empyre and steered dangerously close to the cardinal sin of RPGs, clicking through reels of dialogue just to make progress. When I wasn’t in a conversation, the gameplay consisted of running from point A to point B, chatting with a different NPC, rinsing and repeating. Travelling between these locations presented some of the game’s most mind-numbing moments, where I would set my characters off on their journey, and proceed to stare at an empty destination. This usually only took a minute or two, but alongside the monotony of endless conversations, the wait was agonizing.

The central plot revolves around your character’s hunt for a man named Elias, a mysterious figure who seems to have supernaturally stolen a part of your identity, leaving you with amnesia. What exactly this means is frustratingly unclear and while the writing does its best to weave this into a sense of intrigue, it feels deliberately obtuse. Your companion Sun Wukong (the monkey king from Chinese mythology) clearly knows more than he shares, but when pressured, he insists on speaking in riddles. Without any context to my adventures, I was left feeling lost and the only reason to make progress was because I had a review to write.

Not only is traversing maps a time sink, they’re also pretty desolate. Traipsing through the woods felt miserable. It’s gray, depressing, and about as interesting as staring at tarmac. In a striking comparison, the interiors of buildings were lit with vibrant primary colors. I couldn’t determine any rhyme or reason to the colors chosen, but they shook up the otherwise monotonous surroundings. Similarly, the character models for my party were infused with a lot of color, oddly contrasted against the muted tones of the environment. Playing was like watching the teletubbies run through the streets of historic, rural China, beating up bandits, yet about as fun as watching grass grow.

Unclear and clunky dialogue takes up a large portion of the gameplay, and I suspect that translation issues might be at the heart of my gripes. If that was the only problem, then I’d have been happy to overlook these minor quirks, but there are issues with pacing and dialogue that go beyond language barriers. Over-explaining simple plot-points and one-dimensional characters, the worst offender was the many occasions where a party member would insist on recounting what had happened to them. I know that they failed to get important information out of someone, I just played through them doing it!

The one redeeming aspect was its unapologetic use of Chinese. The player character is a foreigner, so my party members often had to communicate with NPCs on my behalf. When this occurred, the game didn’t provide any translation, leaving me listening in on a conversation I couldn’t understand. This approach made the game’s depiction of China feel a lot more genuine and reinforced my character’s position as an outsider.

Much of the game feels like padding to extend what is actually quite a short experience, for an RPG. In Chapter Three, I had to ask a countess for a map required to reach a safe house in the swamp, where Elias was supposedly holed up. Simply exploring the swamp wasn’t an option because it was too ‘dangerous’.

First, two of my companions talked to her and failed to get the map, so I had to talk to her again with my main character, who found out her son was missing. Asking around for a lead, I learned about bandits in the region and tracking them down led me to discover that, lo and behold, their leader just happened to be the son I’m looking for.

The game won’t let me report back with this information, that would be too easy. First, I learn about a mine shaft that conveniently leads into the bandit’s base. This entrance required a key, sending me off on yet another tangent, before I snuck in, kidnapped the son, and fought my way out. After all that, I finally had the map that I needed and with it, I passed safely through the ‘dangerous’ swamp, filled with absolutely no danger.

Arriving at the safe house, I learned that Elias isn’t there, and Chapter Three comes to an end. All that running around (and I cut a lot out to make it easier to read) for basically no pay off. The game gleefully moves on to the next chapter, leaving me grieving for several hours of my life. The best thing I can say is that the shorter chapters do have a nice episodic structure, which suits playing them in smaller sittings. It helps alleviate some of the tedium.

Combat felt sluggish, and dealing with its quirks often created more of a challenge than my opponents. Party members would frequently forget who they were attacking, and Sun Wukong seemed determined to keep equipping a revolver, despite the fact that I had built him for melee. Encounters boiled down to a lot of baby-sitting, where the outcome was decided simply by whether my party had high enough stats, or enough healing items, rather than any tactical ingenuity on mine or the game’s behalf. Playing through on normal allowed me to blitz my way through without any real trouble, so this was never a hindrance to progress.

Without engaging combat, the isometric RPG quickly started to feel more like a visual novel with extra steps than a true tactical challenge. This is obviously not intended as a slight against visual novels, but here it felt like the narrative was attempting to sell itself as something more, and instead of fulfilling that expectation it felt like it buckles under the weight of its ambition.

One ray of sunshine in an otherwise bleak experience was the ambient score. There’s only two tracks, a gentle woodwind melody, and a separate track that denotes combat. This second track has an excellent bass line that adds a sense of energy that the game otherwise lacks, that’s continually interrupted by too many cymbal crashes. Neither piece of music goes far beyond generic ambience, but since none of the dialogue is voiced, and there are few audio effects besides gunshots, it’s enough to stop the soundscape from feeling desolate.

As I got further and further into the game, the experience simply became a slog. It felt like a passion project whose technical execution left me with no reason to engage with anything it offered. Empyre: Earls of the Deep Earth is a game that I will likely never think about again. Its story having failed to leave any kind of lasting impression, and its gameplay having felt like it existed to pad out the overall experience.