Sentient

Sentient is an interesting, quirky game released for the PC and PlayStation. It’s certainly a high-concept title – it takes a huge risk by centralizing gameplay around a system that’s never been thoroughly tried before. In this case, most of the game is about talking to AI characters through an extensive dialogue menu and trying to get their cooperation. If it worked well, you might have heard more about the game. As it stands, it’s an interesting little science project, but not a great deal more.

Sentient takes place in the far future, where the galaxy is running dangerously low on resources. The centralized government takes a gamble on mining “kenyons” – a form of potent energy found only inside a unique and distant sun. They hastily construct a scientific and mining station in its orbit to research these kenyons, while at the same time, recklessly scoop them up in vast quantities as fuel. The station’s name is Icarus. I think you can see where this is going.

The station is rapidly becoming a disaster as a mystery plague sweeps through the crew. However, radical discoveries are also being made, while the political ramifications of keeping the station afloat make abandoning it an impossibility. Enter your character, a first-rate doctor named Garrit Sherova. You’re assigned to fly to the station and assist the medical team with researching the plague and finding a cure.

But things turn south before you can even examine your first patient. Political intrigue is rampaging faster than any virus. As you arrive, the captain has been murdered and martial law declared. A visiting Senator is threatened by an assassin who may have slipped on board. Solar flares constantly rock the station, leading to dangerous radiation leaks and equipment failure. The medics think the scientists are holding back information. The engineers think the medics are experimenting on them. You’re having strange waking dreams of your dead wife delivering cryptic messages. And finally, as your ship comes in for its landing, it takes a nasty spill and leaves you one of two survivors, with a bucketful of questions from security that you can’t answer.

This is where the game is supposed to woo you with its realistic AI. There are 60 or so individual characters throughout the station – all with names, agendas, and opinions of each other – all going about their business. They will work, they will eat, they will retire to their quarters to rest. You can insult them, praise them, ask questions about their status, ask locations of people and places, ask about the weather; you get the idea. I’m not about to count, and the game documents don’t offer a clear number, but there are probably over a hundred conversation options if you include all the variations of who and what you can ask about. You can even change the delivery of your lines from levels of cheerful to angry, supposedly allowing you to intimidate passive characters or suck up to aggressive ones.

This all looks pretty good on paper, but it fails for two practical reasons. First, to allow you this freedom of dialogue, you must navigate through a labyrinthine menu system. Simple choices like “Ask” branch off into trees like “Ask about __” which branch into people, places, and items, which further branch into breakdowns by station level or crew affiliation, which finally break down into a list of the actual items you’ve overheard in conversations. It’s a lot of nested menus to pour through, with awkward backtracking and restarting if you mess up.

When you’re having to hunt through menus, it takes nearly a full minute to construct a complete sentence. There’s more minutes for however many follow-up questions are required. The entire game is timed, and you will be in quite a rush toward the end, so stumbling through to create “Where is the medical level shield override?” while klaxons wail and the station tears itself apart makes things vastly more frustrating than they should be. Take too long and characters will even walk away, forcing you to chase them down again.

The only way the game could have had a friendlier interface would be to have an intelligent text parser, where you type sentences instead of building them in a menu. I’m not sure why they didn’t go this route, except for knowing this was also going to the PlayStation. Controllers mean you’ve got to use a menu interface, and without the conversation menu, you can’t get the level of character interaction this entire game is built on. Even having something that auto-completes, based on what the program thinks you’re looking for, would probably cause you to fumble even more.

The other reason this system fails is that it never has quite the effect it’s supposed to. You can insult someone all day, but they’ll never refuse to help you, ignore you, or appear to permanently change their opinion of you. You can ask what they think of someone else, and they will tell you how much they hate them, then say “I have no opinion of them” if you ask again right away. Changing your moods doesn’t seem to work well, if at all. You can make it through the entire game with the same neutral delivery. Other characters don’t seem to respond to emotion changes, except to scowl or smile when giving their reply, then immediately return to their previous face and attitude.

Again, the entire game is built around this dialogue system. Every activity makes use of it and you absolutely cannot beat the game without conversing with characters. There’s some exploration for items, but most of the time you’re simply moving from one person to the next, asking where an item is, or who knows where the item is. None of the doors are marked, except by numeric code. There’s no directory to this code, so to find a location, you HAVE to ask someone. The characters have mostly distinct faces, but if you haven’t met someone yet, you’ll have to ask their name, or ask another character where or who they are. Sure, it’s realistic, but the dialogue trees and menus are simply too clunky to support, essentially, every part of the gameplay.

As said before, the game is timed, but you’ll never know how much is left. Instead, you have very strict windows to complete small, crucial tasks, like raising solar shields or stopping a radiation leak. It’s also no big spoiler to say that Icarus is dropping its orbit into the sun, so you’ll eventually have to work the station’s systems to buy yourself more time. Ultimately, you have to decide whether to save yourself, others, or go down a third, extensively wackier path. Side stories include investigating the assassin, the scientists, or the nature of kenyons themselves. I don’t think you have enough time to look into everything, so expect replays. Curiously, you’ll never once treat or examine a patient with the disease you were sent to the station to cure. That shows just how numerous and severe the plot twists in this game are – you don’t even DO what it says on the case that you’re going to be doing.

Making matters worse is that Sentient is a fairly ugly game. Everything is in full 3D, with textured polygons for all characters and environments. However, the game was made just a little too early into the creation of 3D engines and suffers as a result. Characters have somewhat distinctive faces, which you have to be right next to them to see. Otherwise, the polygons kind of shift and blur together. The station’s hallways are devoid of detail. There are about five different layouts per level that get shuffled around to make new rooms. Machines in rooms all have lengthy descriptions of their unique purposes, but look exactly the same, and generally can’t be used by you.

You’re also kept to a very slow walking and turning speed, which works to the benefit of the engine, as it already blurs considerably at distances. Polygons further dance about and warp when you turn. Amazingly, the PlayStation version actually looks better than the PC version, presumably due to the lack of specialized 3D hardware here. The engine just barely gets the job done, while the game probably would have benefited from simply using sprites instead of trying to be cutting edge.

There are a few cutscenes that do a good job of cluing you in on the game’s underlying plot. I won’t give anything away, except to say that even The Outer Limits never got this crazy. The sounds are best in these rendered movies, with decent enough voice acting. In-game, all voices are shown through text bubbles, with no spoken speech. Effects are limited to Buck Rogers beeps and clicks for equipment and an overall hum throughout the station. Crashing noises of solar flares and warning alarms also make frequent appearances.

Controls are, unfortunately, about as awkward as trying to navigate the menu. You must stop and hit a “cursor” toggle anytime you want to interact with an item in the world. With the cursor active, you stand stock still while your movement keys now control the cursor. You can also control the cursor with your mouse, but your mouse cannot control your movement, or cycle through the dialogue menus. If you go this route, you must take a hand off the keyboard every time, move it to the mouse, and then back. You can imagine how frustrating this can get. I wonder again if this is a limitation of building the game for a PlayStation controller.

There are sections toward the beginning and middle of the game, where the time limits are lengthy and you don’t have the safety of the station weighing on your shoulders, where the game can actually be interesting. The conversation system can be amusing when you’re not rushing against some deadline, and there’s plenty of intrigue and conflict to uncover across the vast decks and rooms. If they’d focused more on these adventure sections than trying to rush on the next action scene, Sentient might have fared better overall. Unfortunately, the game is an interesting experiment bogged down by poor execution.

 

The Good

Offers some the most advanced character interaction ever, and a large and realistically-detailed station ripe for exploration.

 

The Bad

Terrible controls and dialogue system, annoying time limits serve to drag the game down rather than keep things intense.