Playing your part

When you think about it, every game is an RPG, after a fashion. Whenever we step into a protagonist’s shoes, we’re inhabiting a role. Yet, as Book Of Travels’ creative director Jakob Tuchten notes, some games don’t always think about what it means to truly embody the character you’ve become. Should bards and priests really be picking up swords? In downsizing the traditional MMO, Might And Delight’s new game is hoping that players learn to organically live their part. There’s a bit of Method in their madness, you might say.

Indeed, there’s a remarkably broad selection of roles to take on within this month’s Hype crop. In Santa Ragione’s deeply unsettling Saturnalia you switch between several characters. As a visiting geologist or photojournalist, the game’s disorienting tricks make you truly feel like an outsider. As for when you’re inhabiting one of the locals, well, those shifting streets come to reflect your struggle to escape.

Elsewhere, in Nerial’s Card Shark, you inhabit a series of dual roles. You’re both a social climber and a swindler, cheating your way to highstakes tables in the guises of wine servers and shifty dealers, completing WarioWare-style minigames while trying not to arouse suspicion. And in romantic visual novel Mask Of The Rose, Failbetter’s latest sojourn in the Fallen London universe, you don a range of outfits to change your social status. If you want to loosen tongues while playing detective, you might choose to look more authoritative; but perhaps something less imposing might work if you want the real skinny on what’s going down.

However, it’s your actions that ultimately define you in Sloclap’s Sifu, which captures the thrilling physicality of the Raid films in its taut, focused martial-arts brawls. Because sometimes embodying a character does involve a bit of the old ultraviolence – even if, these days, it’s far from the only language videogames understand.