![]() Geneforge 1 uses a combination of real-time world exploration and turn-based combat. If you keep a creation around long enough, it’ll accrue experience and level up its stats on its own without further investment of Essence, so it’s best to make a strong all-around team of critters so they can stay with you through the various combat puzzles G1 throws at you.Įventually, though, you’ll probably want to reabsorb your initial creatures and put their Essence to use in something else – it’s the difference between having a lizard and an entire dragon. Shaping a creature requires a hefty investment of Essence – especially so, because the Essence used to shape creatures is removed from your Shaper’s maximum Essence as long as that creature is alive. Shaping creatures is the real star in G1, as it gives you an immense amount of control over how you want to play the game by allowing you to create new party compositions the way you see fit. Over the course of the game, you’ll learn how to shape new creatures, cast new spells, and stab things better using the stat points you earn from leveling up. No matter which class you pick, either a “Shaper,” a very wimpy wizard who specializes in making dragons and burly men from thin air – a “Guardian,” a knight who mostly focuses on hitting things himself, but can still create dangerous life – or an “Agent,” a kind of assassin-wizard who can hold her own in a fight but really struggles with Shaping – you are still referred to as a “Shaper.” The title of “Shaper” is more about your role in society – that is, your role of mastery over Shaped creatures. In Geneforge 1, you play a Shaper: a member of a secretive society of wizards who specialize in creating creatures and living tools from vats of goop and life energy called Essence. As someone who was just discovering RPGs around the time the third Geneforge game came out, there was no way I wasn’t going to get sucked in to a world this complex, beautiful, and utterly bizarre. It asks you to know just enough about fantasy building blocks – swords, fireball-spitting creatures, magical power – and then throws you into a slimy vat of biotechnology, ethical questions about consciousness, and tentacle creatures that want to slurp your brain. It’s the perfect game for just-post-Y2K, when aesthetics, politics, and science were constantly hurting themselves on their own fleeting cutting edges. I feel safe calling Avernum staunch fantasy.Įnter Geneforge – a meld of Western 1950’s pulp fantasy and science fiction about gene editing. ![]() Exile/Avernum has a weird-enough concept – expelled from your society into an underground realm, you discover a civilization of outcasts under the earth some of them are brewing rebellion against the Emperor on the surface who cast them down. Geneforge was the second series for developer Jeff Vogel’s Spiderweb Software, after his debut Exile and Exile II were re-released as the first two games in the Avernum trilogy, starting in 2000. ![]() Geneforge 1 was released for Macs in late 2001, with a PC release a few months later in 2002.
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