Post
by Sly Boots » Sun Sep 01, 2019 6:27 pm
Seven: The Days Long Gone
Oh wow. Did anyone else grab this the other month when I said it was selling for about £2 and the devs were giving away the enhanced edition for free with every purchase? I hope so.
This is one of those games that you start, fiddle around for a bit, then glance at the clock and ask 'where the fuck did the day go?'... as just happened to me today. Prior to today I'd played the opening hour (the tutorial, basically), had an ok time but then dropped it and turned to something else. Today, in a fit of boredom, I finally turned back to it, and am glad I did.
So what is it? After 8 hours of play, I'm still not entirely sure how to answer that question. It's a third person, isometric game, and initially it's billed as a stealth game and I played it as such, before I realised it isn't quite that at all. There are no-entry areas that you have to infiltrate for sure, but rather than a Shadow Tactics (something it looks quite similar to), it's definitely in the RPG arena rather than a tactical game. There are huge public hub areas where you can visit shops, pick up quests, break into people's houses and rifle through their possessions.
I'd say it's closer to a third-person steampunk/fantasy Deus Ex, or Divinity OS2 without the real-time combat but with Assassin's Creed-like traversal. Or Desperadoes with RPG elements and verticality. For quests you're often tasked with getting something from inside one of those guarded areas, how you do that is entirely up to you. You could fight your way in (not recommended), you could pick a guard's pocket for their keycard and let yourself in, you could find a cable to zipwire your way in from the roof, you could scope the perimeter for a weak point like a broken wall or window and sneak in that way, you can use your special tech-spidey-sense to identify critical security systems and hack them, observe patrol routes and time your sneaking between handy bushes... the possibilities are near-endless.
I've no idea if it is, but it reminds me of one of those cool Eastern European games where they start with a neat idea and then basically throw in everything they can think of, before games became homogenised Ubi-style map icon gruel. It's fun, there's a bit of jank but just enough to add to the overall charm. Eight hours in I still have almost no idea what's going on or what I'm doing half the time, but having a blast anyway.
Ironically, Seven is one of those solid 7/10 games, I'd say... it's not one that will be regarded as a classic, but one that will steal your days for a while as you get sucked into it.
If you've picked it up at some point but haven't got round to play it yet, give it a go. And give it a good 3 or so hours before deciding if it's for you, things really open up after the tutorial section and that's when I properly succumbed to its charms.
