Dark Messiah of Might and Magic: Half-Life 2 w/ Bludgeons?

One-point-five gigs is awfully hefty for any demo, and doubly so for a game that only contains fifteen of actual game (on my Methuselah box it took longer to load the levels than it did to play them). But Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is certainly entertaining enough to warrant it.

What's exceptional about Dark Messiah, based on the wonderous Half-Life 2 source physics engine, is that it may just do what no RPG up to this point could: it will the make environment a part of the game. For those of us who began our RPG lives with pen and paper, the true excitement was never garnered from the game or system itself. It came from the constant battle of wits that emerged in a game of good players. Who could come up with the most entertaining, most exciting, most brillant new way to deal with a situation that would knock the GM's socks off. And the key to this way being able to improvise with what was at hand.

Unfortunately, this was never quite an option in PC RPGs. Because of graphics and game constraints, PC RPGs became more about story. And from those few companies that knew how to tell a good story, these were exceptional.

But the game that catalyzed it for me was Neverwinter Nights. While certainly a benchmark of customization with its DM toolset, I never liked the game and didn't understand why until I played it a little more thoroughly. I realized that while the settings were interesting, the characters developed, what was lacking was environmental interaction. Labyrinthian pipe systems of some abandoned underground sewer were wonderful atmosphere, but they were truly that, a grand intanglible, something that was never really part of the world.

But imagine a game where an enemy could be hiding in such a pipe system waiting to strike. Or a thief who could as easily snag a pipe and escape into a vast firmament of metal. And image if you could follow just as easily. If there has been any trend we have yet seen in "next-gen" this has certainly been one. The propsed ease of running up or climbing anything in Assassin's Creed (which, if not released for PC, may just bring me to tears as I hand away months of room and board to purchase a PS3) and the destructible enviroments of Company of Heroes are all ways to make the game world a little more real.

And that brings us to Dark Messiah. The game is not too far from its source (pun intended) material. Think Half-Life 2 with swords and orcs. And while the use of the enviroments is clearly staged (the interior decorator that places a giant log held by a single rope over your door jamb is not your friend), it allows a slight reclaiming of that which was so engrossing about pen and paper RPG's. If I want to clear out a room filled with orcs by slicing, or even cooler, shooting out with an arrow, that one precarious rope, the option is there. The proposed multiplayer for the game has the chance to be wonderous.

What worries me is the chance that the technological innovations will be all the game has to present and will be an RPG only because it reminds one of hobby shop rejects eating their ketchup packets because their mother refused to give them an extra five bucks until they clean their room. The story portion of the RPG, which has become so finely honed, may be put aside. Looking at the demo, the story of which contains the exciting adventures of finding a rock and searching for something that smells like suflur, is not reassuring.

Regardless, the Dark Messiah demo reeks of, if not that ever-elusive sulfur, than cool. I've already played through it twice, each time opening up a little more excitment about just how exciting this world could be. The little pleasure of kicking an ambitious goblin of a high cliff has never before been so accessible.