Game Alert: Intelligence

While I try to stick to talking about finished games, Intelligence is a rather good game to make an exception for. Plus, it's still a good five hours long and is up to Act 2 and will likely go up to at least Act 5, so it's probably not going to be 'finished' anytime soon and what is there is satisfying (not to mention that the Act setup means the existing story arcs are finished even if the overarching story is not).

So, what's it about? In a nutshell, humans have left Earth and animals have somehow become very intelligent as a result and a green dog named Rolly, a red cat named Pep, and a kangaroo named Tristy end up having to save the world/galaxy/universe from intergalactic monstrosities. As you can probably guess from the plot, the game doesn't take itself very seriously at all and quickly goes off the rails.

Above all, Intelligence is a game with a lot of 'little things',

There are all sorts of little touches on all aspects of the game which really make it enjoyable.There's a surprisingly large amount of unique flavor text for nearly anything you try to interact with, from closed doors to cabbages, and NPC's will often have a variety of things to say if you talk to them multiple times, which in turn goes a long way towards giving personality to the characters instead of constantly relying upon awkward and overly-long cutscenes, a lesson more than a few developers could use. There are also a lot of neat little aesthetic touches to be found in the game, such as a rather nice main menu with lots of personality, a bestiary, graphics for inventory items, a respectable amount of custom graphics which fit together surprisingly well RPG Maker's assets, and even decent voice acting from time to time. Bosses, and enemies in general really, tend to be massive (though rarely challenging), which adds a satisfying, somewhat ridiculous, scale to most fights.

Even early fights have a massive sense of scale

There are also a fair amount of not-so-nice little things in this game. While the sheer amount of flavor text in this game means a mistake or two would be understandable, there are plenty of grammatical errors (though spelling errors are rare), even by RPG Maker standards, especially in regards to misplaced or missing commas and apostrophes. The story also is at least initially somewhat convoluted and sloppy as the first hour or so consists of a jumble of flashbacks and flashforwards combined with occasional globs of exposition from various NPC's. There is also an oddly preachy passive-aggressive overtone to the game concerning how the way humans lived before they left Earth was 'wrong' and how living with nature was the way 'things were meant to be'; there is nothing wrong with supporting environmentalism, and the setup for Intelligence more or less requires such an underlying message, but the game sometimes lays it on a bit too thickly. However, the oddest 'not-so-nice' aspect of Intelligence is just how linear it currently is; the world is surprisingly big and open, but there is only ever one thing to do in one specific place (there are even little guide arrows to show you the way); there is no flavor text for parts of the game which are not 'on track', unrelated tasks which in other games would probably be sidequests must here be done in a specific order, and even what you fight (and when!) is entirely predetermined as there are no random encounters and, while the bestiary has an 'optional boss' tab, there are not currently optional bosses.

Mr. Universe may not want to tell everyone what to do, but that blue guide arrow sure does.

Judging by sheer text-quantity, it would seem like the bad outweighs the good, but this isn't the case. Intelligence is a flawed game, and it's unlikely to satisfying anyone looking for something particularly 'deep', but the flaws rarely dampen the overall experience. Rather, the flaws are, at worst, 'noticeable', but never frustrating while the amount of effort that was put into 'little touches' transform would have have easily been a very 'average' experience into a unique and memorable one where you can simply sit back, relax, and have fun.

The latest version of Intelligence  (1.1.9 as of this writing) can be found here: http://rpgmaker.net/games/3073/