![]() ![]() It all ends up making the game’s shiny surface feel hollow underneath. It also doesn’t help that the majority of characters you see walking around on Veles aren’t interactable. Oh, you can ask about mission objectives and offer an odd quip here and there but for the most part your character isn’t the talkative type. Your character doesn’t seem to have much to say about much of anything really. Other characters don’t so much as talk to you or with you than talk at you. Narratively, while being a silent protagonist may have done wonders for the career of Charlie Chaplin, for your own shadowrunner, it serves as more of a detriment than anything else. ![]() There’s nowhere in the game you can actually do this, though it might have been an interesting inclusion. Ironically, since the game is so fond of throwing hordes of enemies at you, if you’re diligent about selling all the loot you’ll likely never use (and even if you’re not), you’ll be swimming in more than enough ucredits to pay off your life contract well before the main story comes to a close. You do visit the Pinnacle, a high security tower where the ultra rich live in luxury above the clouds, presumably free of these messy life contracts but no mention is made of this while you’re there. For example, the narrative surrounding the fact that every citizen on Veles is chained to a life contract to some huge faceless megacorporation is interesting, in theory, but not much is done with the element, besides using it to drive the fact that your character is completing one tedious mission after another. The individual parts that make up The Ascent can be interesting, even fascinating on their own, but when viewed in the context of the larger game or the bigger world itself, they each feel underwhelming at best. From there, you’re asked to provide security for a clandestine meeting, investigate a few other matters and hack into a terminal or two before your life contract is acquired by a new megacorporation who, unsurprisingly, has a variety of tasks for you to perform, implying that at the end of your usefulness, you may be freed from your contract entirely. After a relatively short character creation process, you are tasked with repairing Cluster 13’s Waste Management System, lovingly referred to as “The Deepstink” by the residents. You begin the game on the neon drenched planet of Veles as an “indent” (indentured servant?) whose life is under contract to a megacorporation. Yet perhaps as a nod to its lofty title, from here there’s nowhere to go but down. ![]() You then whip around an instant later, a cyberdeck in your other hand as you quickly hack a nearby vending machine which spits out health packs that you gather up greedily, before coming back around, quickly pulling out your rocket launcher and firing one off at the nearest thug, who promptly explodes, completely soaking you in blood and entrails. When The Ascent is at its best, you are running through the shadows, your body half illuminated by the garish red and pink dynamic neon lighting that permeates much of the interior of Veles, your chosen firearm in one hand, empty ammo clips bouncing off the rain soaked pavement, bullets tearing through all manner of thugs and feral creatures as if they’re just sacks of organs to be torn apart mercilessly. The cyberpunk genre owes a lot to films such as Blade Runner and classic gaming experiences such as Shadowrun, and no truer is this embodied than in the recent indie release The Ascent. ![]()
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