The reason to play Age of Decadence is singular: the writing. Singular in the sense that it’s very good, singular in the sense that it’s unique among fantasy RPGs, and singular in the sense that it’s pretty much the sole reason to play.

After the jump, no ring to bind them all.

The Age of Decadence. A low-fantasy, post-apocalyptic RPG featuring turn-based combat, multiple ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, extensive dialogue trees, and all the role-playing you can handle.

Unlike the usual fantasy RPG — even most of the good ones — Age of Decadence isn’t about a Doo-dad of Unimaginable Power. It’s not even about your garden variety Evil Wizard or Conquering Demon Army. It’s a mystery about what happened to make this world the way it is. Namely, broken down, dissolute, barren, a failed state ruled by petty squabbling Houses. The tone is closer to noir than fantasy.

As the mystery unfolds, a lot of the dramatic tension is between the supernatural (i.e. high fantasy) and the plausible (i.e. low fantasy). Suffice to say the developers at Iron Tower have a very specific preference. Would it be a spoiler to say I didn’t palaver with any elves, fight a dragon boss battle, or cast a single fireball spell? Frankly, I consider those bullet points rather than spoilers. Age of Decadence is a welcome alternative to the usual fantasy nonsense, which feels more like a habit than a creative choice. Plus it’s the safest thing to do. Why reinvent the kobold?

Bounty train download. But Age of Decadence wants nothing to do with kobolds, just as it wants nothing to do with Doo-dads of Unimaginable Power. The overarching idea is a crumbling society divided among three noble Houses, each fumbling around in its own version of darkness to comprehend what destroyed the world. That’s the central mystery. It plays out like noir in that you are the detective, piecing together what really happened from differing accounts, all vividly written with clear voices and efficient prose. And like a detective in a noir yarn, you can’t help but become part of the central mystery, effecting an outcome you might not have intended. Age of Decadence might run away from you.

It helps that Age of Decadence sidesteps the thorny issues of gameplay. On my first playthrough as a loremaster, I didn’t fight a single battle. Well, I should say I didn’t win a single battle. I did fight a few, despite my attempts to avoid them. At which point I died immediately and had to reload from a save point before the battle. But the game was more than happy to let me avoid battles. If there’s a boss battle somewhere at the end, I sure didn’t see it. I couldn’t get into a few areas because they were gated behind mandatory combat. I was expecting that I’d be able to hire bodyguards or maybe add a tank to my party. But Age of Decadence doesn’t believe in parties. Like a noir detective, you work alone. So by the time it was over, I hadn’t killed anyone. Not directly, anyway. Thousands died as a result of my decisions, sure. But because I didn’t personally wield the sword, bow, or dagger, I have plausible deniability.

Is it a good idea to let the player sidestep a huge swathe of gameplay like combat? That’s up to you, because Age of Decadence has made a firm decision. Combat here is analogous to ducts in Deus Ex, a game where you get past every door by either finding a key code to unlock it or crawling through a duct to circumvent it. Deus Ex won’t judge your choice because it just wants you to get to the other side of the door. That’s how combat exists in Age of Decadence. It won’t judge your choice because it just wants you to get to the next story beat.

One of the upsides of nonviolent gameplay is that it moves quickly. When story happens, you don’t have to connect it to something you read ten tactical battles and fifteen loading screens ago. Names and places will be immediately familiar and easily remembered. Events are referred to several times over. Besides, there are only three cities, huddled together on a tiny map screen. How much narrative sprawl does such a world allow, whether you’re interrupting it with tactical battles or not? This is a small and tightly knit cast of characters in a modestly built world.

The modestly built world will be a problem for people who want production values in their fantasy. Age of Decadence starts out implying rich detail in a broad world. But the more you play, the more the detail falls away and you find yourself zipping along a rail down the central storyline. Which actually makes sense. The time to pick your way through side quests and world-building is the early game. Once you’re hip to the central mystery, it rightly demands all your attention. You don’t even have to mess with pointless travel. The game is more than happy to just bop you over to the next important conversation whether it’s across town or across the world map. Geography, smeography. Age of Decadence has a story to tell and I don’t mind that it trimmed away so much cruft that it told it in seven hours. How long would it take me to read something by Robert Jordan or one of those elfstones of Shanarrah things? I’m pretty sure I made the right call.

It reminded me — and I say this as a good thing — of an Infocom adventure, with the focus on text and decisions. Sure, the dated graphics could have been a module for Neverwinter Nights (the game engine dates back to a 2001 shooter and it shows). Yeah, I had a character screen where I assigned points to skills, which I started out RPing, but eventually saved up until I needed to boost a skill for a specific decision. There was even an inventory in which I carried around gear, alchemy herbs, and crafting ingredients before realizing I was never going to use them, so I sold them for gold I never needed to spend. The text was always the thing. Everything else was incidental.

You could play Age of Decadence as a more gameplay oriented RPG, but I don’t recommend it. Unfortunately, this is what will happen if you want to play a combat-based character. I chose a mercenary for my second playthrough and eventually decided I couldn’t be bothered with the combat. For a system with so much detail — you can choose to aim for an artery when you swing an axe — it sure does feel pointless. Age of Decadence even warns you before you start playing. “Hey,” it says in a politely worded message, “you might want to consider avoiding combat, because we made it kinda hard.” I’ll say. Pass. I’m here for the story. If I want detailed tactical combat, I’ll go back to Pillars of Eternity. If I want visual spectacle, I’ll go back to The Witcher 3. It’s worth noting I didn’t finish the storyline in either of those games. But I sure as hell did in Age of Decadence.

• Age of Decadence

• PC

• The Age of Decadence is an isometric, turn-based, single-player role-playing game set in a low magic, post-apocalyptic fantasy world, inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire. The game features a detailed skill-based character system, multiple skill-based ways to handle quests, choices & consequences, extensive dialogue trees, and combat that you can totally skip if you want.

A Decadent Girl, by, 1899The Decadent movement was a late-19th-century and movement, centered in, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artificiality. The visual artist 's body of work and 's novel (1884) are considered the prime examples of the decadent movement.

It first flourished in France and then spread throughout Europe and to the United States. The movement was characterized by self-disgust, sickness at the world, general skepticism, delight in perversion and employment of crude humor and a belief in the superiority of over logic and the natural world. Aubrey Beardsley, illustration for 's, 1892Though influenced through general exposure but also direct contact, the leading decadent figures in Britain associated with decadence were Irish writer, poet, and illustrator, as well as other artists and writers associated with.

Others, such as, resisted association with the movement, even though their works seemed to reflect similar ideals. While most of the influence was from figures such as Baudelaire and Verlaine, there was also very strong influence at times from more purely decadent members of the French movement, such as the influence that Huysmans and Rachilde had on Wilde, as seen explicitly in The Picture of Dorian Gray. British decadents embraced the idea of creating art for its own sake, pursuing all possible desires, and seeking material excess. At the same time, they were not shy about using the tools of decadence for social and political purpose. Beardsley had an explicit interest in the improvement of the social order and the role of art-as-experience in inspiring that transformation.

Oscar Wilde published an entire work exploring socialism as a liberating force: 'Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.' Swinburne explicitly addressed Irish-English politics in poetry when he wrote 'Thieves and murderers, hands yet red with blood and tongues yet black with lies Clap and clamour-'Parnell spurs his Gladstone well!' ' In many of their personal lives, they also pursued decadent ideals.

Wilde had a secret homosexual life. Swinburne had an obsession with flagellation.Italy. Sick child, 1903-04Italian literary criticism has often looked at the decadent movement on a larger scale, proposing that its main features could be used to define a full historical period, running from the 1860s to the 1920s. For this reason, the term, modelled on 'Romanticism' or 'Expressionism', became more substantial and widespread than elsewhere.

However, most critics today prefer to distinguish between three periods. The first period is marked by the experience of, a sort of proto-decadent movement. The Scapigliati (literally meaning 'unkempt' or 'dishevelled') were a group of writers and poets who shared a sentiment of intolerance for the suffocating intellectual atmosphere between the late (1860s) and the early years of (1870s). They contributed to rejuvenate Italian culture through foreign influences and introduced decadent themes like illness and fascination with death. The novel (1869) by tells of a love triangle involving a codependent man, a married woman and an ugly, sick and vampire-like figure, the femme fatale Fosca.

In a similar way, 's and his short stories venture into tales of sexual decadence and disturbing obsessions, such as incest and necrophilia. Other Scapigliati were the novelists and, the poet, the poet and composer and the composer. As for the visual arts, stands out as one of the most influential European sculptors of that time. Most of the Scapigliati died of illness, alcoholism or suicide.

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The second period of Italian Decadentism is dominated by,. D'Annunzio, who was in contact with many French intellectuals and had read the works of in the French translation, imported the concepts of and into Italy, although in his own particular version.

The poet's aim had to be an extreme aestheticization of life, and life the ultimate work of art. Recurrent themes in his literary works include the supremacy of the individual, the cult of beauty, exaggerated sophistication, the glorification of machines, the fusion of man with nature, the exalted vitality coexisting with the triumph of death. His novel, published one year before The Picture of Dorian Gray, is considered one the three genre-defining books of the Decadent movement, along with Wilde's novel and Huysmans's Against Nature. Less flashy and more isolated than D'Annunzio, and close to the French symbolists, Pascoli redefined poetry as a means of clairvoyance to regain the purity of things. Finally, the third period, which can be seen as a postlude to Decadentism, is marked by the voices of, and the.

Svevo, with his novel, took the idea of sickness to its logical conclusion, while Pirandello proceeded to the extreme disintegration of the self with works such as,. On the other side, the Crepuscular poets (literally 'twilight poets') turned Pascoli's innovations into a mood-conveying poetry, which describes the melancholy of everyday life in shady and monotonous interiors of provincial towns. These atmospheres were explored by the painters,.

Was the most brilliant and ironic of the Crepusculars, but we can also remember, and.Russia.