Alcyone: The Last City Review

Alcyone: The Last City is an interactive sci-fi novel developed by Joshua Meadows. Set in the future, something called Nihility had spread throughout the universe, causing the fall of civilisation. However, one place has managed to escape the devastation: Outpost Alcyone, or the City as it is now known these days.

Now, after being revived in the Rebirthing Facility, you’ll find yourself caught up in politics and conspiracies that will decide the City’s fate. Do you help the Six Ruling Houses? Become a kingmaker and choose one to support and let the rest fall? Maybe you want to destroy them all, create something new from the ashes? Or do you simply try to find a way out before everything inevitably implodes? Your choices will matter and failure is not the end.

The story has multiple branching paths, with many decisions affecting the world that will lead you to one of seven endings. There are even romance storylines to pursue if you like a character enough, but if you want to be friends, there are always aromantic pathways. After completing a route, I consider the narrative to be pretty well done overall, with lots of twists and turns as you explore the City and deal with the many machinations that hide beneath the surface.

However, before you go out and save or doom 8 million lives, you’re gonna have to get your own story straight. There are some RPG elements here that will allow you to do some roleplaying and immerse yourself in this world. The character creation can be quite a journey. Aside from determining your starting stats (Body, Vigour, Mind, and Charm), you can also add in details to create your ideal persona: your gender identity (with four legally recognised choices by the City), events from your previous life, if you were in a relationship, and even how you died. Maybe you’ve just got yourself into an unfortunate accident or you’ve gotten murdered and you’re itching for revenge; this opens up quite a few possibilities and can make repeat playthroughs a little more interesting.

That being said, your base stats may not be enough at times, so you might need a little support in the form of the various items you can equip. Equipment is gained from both the story and completing tasks in the main questline or by pursuing side jobs and they’ll buff your stats to be a little more useful, as some choices only have a percentage chance of succeeding, based on what your stats are. You can change your equipment at any time, so if you're faced with only bad odds, maybe something in your inventory has an item to give you that little boost. Be warned, however, that a successful check doesn't necessarily mean a good outcome.

There are some choices that can result in increasing your Misfortune meters (Malady, Lethargy, Clumsy, and Wary). If one of these Misfortunes gets too high, your run ends there, and your game is over. I sort of have issues with this system, as it can feel like some of your decisions in character creation won’t matter. It is easy to always have a high chance of succeeding if you have the right equipment, and it takes actual effort to die from one of the Misfortunes. With all of this in mind, it made me feel like the game had no consequences, which would've been welcome: multiple meters rising instead of one at a time, locking equipment to prevent snowballing. It just feels a little too easy past the first chapter.

Although, there are rarely ever any “good” or “bad” choices to make. Playing seriously, there are some decisions that I agonised over, trying to predict what would happen and how things might go. The game makes sure to lay out all the positives and negatives before key decisions, just to make sure you have all the information you need to make an informed verdict and deal with the consequences thereof.

Now, like any modern game, you can save and load to a previous point. There are no consequences; it's just to make sure you don’t lose your progress. However, I seriously don't recommend save-scumming. It actually hurts the experience and it makes for a more interesting story out of it.

That being said, I sort of expected something a little more… substantial? My first playthrough ended up clocking in at four hours, and admittingly, a good chunk of it was me seriously weighing on the decisions I've made. It does make for less tedious playthroughs, but I wasn't expecting the ending to come so soon. It felt so sudden and I thought it would take a little more time building up to those twists and turns while also dealing with those consequences. When I expected to try to solve the resulting crisis, it ended in a paragraph that just told you what happened. Repeat playthroughs are a must in order to answer every single question you may have and to see everything the City has to offer, both good and bad.

Onto any issues I encountered, well, there was one piece of dialogue where I spotted a slight coding mistake, showing “</>” in text. Otherwise, I’d like a little indication of any new events that pop up. Checking all the locations is a little annoying. Aside from that, and maybe slightly disliking the cursor, there isn’t much to criticise other than the writing.

Alcyone: The Last City is fine. The writing is quite good with plenty of world-building and implications of the City at large, and there’s still plenty to discover even if you know some of the answers. That being said, the ending can feel a little abrupt — like, the entire story kind of takes place over three or four days at best — and, when I think about it, it is surprisingly easy to get a really good ending with no strings attached. I enjoyed my time with Alcyone: The Last City, but I can’t shake the feeling that more playthroughs might not satisfy.