Necromanceers

The disorienting, proper-noun-heavy opening of Necromanceers at first feels like it’s going to lead in to an anime-tinged science-fantasy Starship Troopers pastiche. Your combat unit has been inserted behind enemy lines via a missile-shaped dropship whose rough landing has left half the soldiers screaming in mortal agony, and everyone’s afraid of telling the eponymous protagonist their real name lest you use it to call their ghosts back to keep fighting this bloody, pointless war. Your mission is to assassinate an enemy Saint (there’s a bunch of Neon Genesis Evangelion-style religious labeling for stuff), and there’s no price too high to pay to accomplish it.

Happily, though, this is no grimdark embrace of redemptive violence. Things quickly go pear-shaped with the platoon, and you wind up in more of a found-family situation with a much smaller group of much more appealing characters. The vibe also reveals itself to actually be 70’s heavy metal album-cover (or 70’s Heavy Metal, if you prefer) sci-fi: you’ve got a vat-grown cyborg girlfriend who rides a gravity-defying manta ray into battle, an enormous undead worm can carry you through hidden paths, and terrifying enemies can turn into passive-aggressive companions without too much effort. Oh yeah, and when I said that you play a Necromanceer with the power to summon the spirits of the dead, I was oversimplifying matters: there’s a dual protagonist here, since the main character, Returne, is so easily-embarrassed and irresolute – fortunately, her friends find this cute – that she outsources most of her decision-making to Inward, the still-sapient twin she absorbed in the womb and who winds up being an avatar for the player.

I was also surprised that the focus of the gameplay wasn’t on what you choose, but who you call. Most of the game is played in a standard choice-based interface – you can click on some unfamiliar terms and names to get additional context, you can pick who to talk to and them decide on dialogue options, or just skip all that and move to the next scene, it all works fine. But sometimes you’ll see a name highlighted, which is confusing until you reach one of Necromanceer’s handful of set-piece decision-points, where you’re given a free-entry text box and can type in the name of anything or anyone you want to summon to help you out of your present predicament. There are rules – they have to be dead, you have to know their name – but they’re pretty broad ones; for example, you can cheerfully sequence-break by invoking someone whose name you only learned in a previous run. In fact the game is built around repeat plays; my first-run through I’d only learned of five or six of the almost twenty possible summons, and had only had a chance to try out two or three.

See, using the right summon at the right time not only can help solve your immediate problem in a new, possibly more impactful way, it can also reveal the name of an additional possible ally, which makes exploring the possibility-space a compellingly gotta-catch-them-all experience. Like, the fact that [spoiler]the author’s name has a halo around it in the credits[/spoiler] sure seems like it means there should be an Easter egg for invoking it, right? I couldn’t ever get that to work, but the fact that I spent so long trying is a testament to how well the design encourages you to try just one more thing – the game’s relatively short, and the UNDO link and chapter select make it easy to experiment. Sure, sometimes the more-obscure summons aren’t as compelling or thematically relevant as the easier-to-find ones – I’m looking at you, (Spoiler - click to show)farming robot who’s the single trickiest thing to find in the entire game – but the payoff isn’t about them as such, or even how they help you overcome an obstacle, since of course you get to proceed no matter who you pick. No, it’s that seemingly every new interaction you find rewards you with delightful bits of lore, about the origins of necromancy or the inhabitants of the moon or the backstories of your friends, delivered in pacey, evocative prose. I don’t want to spoil any of the actual examples of that, but to give a flavor, here’s an early interaction where an octopoidal radio-operator responds to your inquiry as to whether he needs a hand:

Gnar makes a happy piping noise and waves and coils a boneless arm at me. “Have not needed one whole life!”

“Um,” I say.

“Now not joking,” Gnar says, “do not touch crystal set.”

The downside of Necromanceers being a wonderful narrative tinker-toy is that the narrative can feel like a tinker-toy. The range of possible endings is vast, with friends, lovers, and frenemies variously dead, angry at you, or totally happy to hang out with you forever, in circumstances ranging from sky-piracy to desperate fights for survival in the depths of the seas to modern-day workplace romance to cottagecore domestic bliss, almost all of which turns, so far as I can tell, on your last one or two choices, with almost every final passage introducing wildly new characters, situations, and plot elements. In a few cases, these felt like they were calling back to seeds that had been planted in the earliest bits of the game (I was especially fond of the first ending I found, where (Spoiler - click to show)the first necromanceer separated Returne from Inward, which feels epic and an interesting resolution to the protagonist’s character dynamics) but mostly they’re just fun pops of flavor that come out of nowhere. As a result while I enjoyed the motley crew of heroes and was invested in their relationships in general, there weren’t any particular outcomes or plot beats that landed that heavily for me, since the blink of an eye could erase them and substitute something entirely different.

This is a long way of saying that my main problem with Necromanceers is that sometimes I was having too much lighthearted fun with it to take the themes seriously, like a hilarious, in-joke-laden Mad Libs session with close friends. Would that we all suffered from such flaws! Despite its portentuous opening and its flirtations with the gothic, there’s nothing lugubrious about this game: it’s fleet, funny, and fun, and more than worth playing with to your heart’s content.

And seriously, if anyone figures out if there’s an Easter egg, drop me a line, that’s been bugging me for days.