Moralising Art: Broken Roads Impressions

Philosophy

There’s a brilliant interview between Woody Allen and Twiggy recorded in Michael Caine’s 2017 documentary “My Generation” that I occasionally see doing the rounds on social media. Trying to belittle Twiggy, Woody asks, “What are your views on serious matters? Who’s your favourite philosopher?” Unsurprisingly, Twiggy is unable to answer on the spot, but in a stroke of genius she asks Woody “I don’t know any, who’s yours?” Woody, also unable to answer, ends up embarrassing himself more by saying “I like them all … all your basic philosophers”. Twiggy pushes further, saying, “I don’t know their names though. What are their names?” In 2009 for IMDB (although for the life of me I can only find it sourced on website Glamour UK), Twiggy recalled that this final question led Woody Allen to walk out of the interview.

Besides the obvious misogyny from obvious misogynist Woody Allen, I think this clip perfectly demonstrates how much more embarrassing it is to be proven pretentious than it is to demonstrate a lack of knowledge honestly. I’m not saying Drop Bear Bytes’ Broken Roads, a CRPG inspired by the Fallout series and Disco Elysium, set in a post-apocalyptic Australia is pretentious—especially not to the same degree as Allen in that clip. However, if you humour me here and imagine a game made by a version of Woody Allen, who, after being shown up by Twiggy, makes sure he knows who his favourite philosopher is by doing a cursory read of all philosophers, that game might have a similar attitude towards philosophy that Broken Roads seems to—that is, one that never realised how pointless the question “Who’s your favourite philosopher?” is.

The Philosophy Brush got on my damn loading screens.

You see, much of Broken Roads is painted with a philosophy brush; this is most explicit in the morality system, but can also be seen in quest titles like “The Categorical Imperative”, philosophical quotes on loading screens, and in the names of skills and abilities—vendor’s even sell philosophical texts. On a surface level, Broken Roads is engaging with an incredible amount of material. Just off the top of my head the game makes moves to draw upon Plato, Kant, Nietsche, Locke, Mill, and de Beauvoir. This breadth is exactly the issue. Though mostly flavour, the quotes, references, and so on in Broken Roads touch on such a broad range of material that it accidentally reveals a deep misunderstanding of what a game about philosophy should look like. 

The only other piece of fiction that explicitly targets such a broad range of philosophy that I’m aware of is TV sitcom The Good Place, and even then the topics of discussion are strictly limited to morality. The thing is, The Good Place requires large chunks of episodes set within a classroom for the themes and jokes to land. This is something that Broken Roads doesn’t have time economy for, as discussions of philosophy are forced to fit in somewhere alongside: the particulars of this post-apocalyptic Australia, character development (including the player character), and main narrative beats. Then there’s also the time spent on combat, freeform exploration in some gorgeously rendered environments, and management of RPG stats and mechanics. This is all to say that a theme of generalised “philosophy” is just far too wide in scope for a game like Broken Roads. 

Food salesman Wilkins happens to be a big fan of Kant, or maybe not so big a fan if he’s trying to pawn him off.

The moral compass of Broken Roads impacts much of the game outside of philosophy. As to be expected with a moral wheel in an RPG, many of the game’s narrative decisions loosely correspond to the wheel which the game points out with [square brackets] (an option that you can turn off, but is on by default). Where D&D has a good/evil alignment system, Broken Roads has four distinct schools of ethics—kind of. These are: Utilitarian, Humanist, Machiavellian, and Nihilist.

A literal moral compass.

I say kind of because neither machiavellianism or nihilism are fully fleshed out moral frameworks in the same way utilitarianism and humanism are. Machiavelli was primarily a political figure whose ideals aren’t held in high regard now and are saved for fictional characters. Nihilism, too, is a weird choice as, depending on flavour, it could represent a rejection of all ethics and morals rather than a moral standpoint in itself. Broken Roads defines Nihilism as nothing matters, so “I matter most”, but Nihilism would also involve a denial of the self—a real nihilist would care just as little about what happens to themselves as to others. It’s weird, because if they wanted a selfish philosophy to be a kind of “evil” path, Ayn Rand is right there.

This may seemlike a lot of words on minor quibbles that I have just because I’m a philosophy freak, but it all has an impact on the game. Machiavellianism is a strange choice for an ethical school for the reason I mentioned above, but also because it’s difficult to separate from utilitarianism. Broken Roads hasn’t gotten anything wrong with it, but there’s a decent amount of overlap between the two, especially in cases where ends may or may not justify means. And this lack of distinction is seen in some of the choices in-game. A couple of times the Machiavellian and Utilitarian choices were materially the same, just one was done with a maniacal grin and the other with a sort of grim dutifulness. The whole system introduces difficulties like this for role-playing, as well as mechanically as you gain different stat bonuses based on where you are on the compass. A player who isn’t too familiar with these terms is probably going to get frustrated with these gameplay limitations, and a player who does isn’t going to forgive those limitations because the philosophy stuff simply isn’t satisfying or accurate.

The Game

Broken Roads does an admirable job at incorporating all of the standard RPG systems— sidequests, dialogue, loot—but the companion system feels incredibly barebones compared to its peers. You can’t talk to them outside of main hubs and they don’t talk to you. The result is a general lack of companion reactivity to the world, but it’s most noticeable in quests. In the ten hours or so I spent with Broken Roads I never ran into a quest that deepened my relation to the characters. Instead, companion opinions of you seem to be based purely on the morality system. 

This culminates in a void where relatability and investment should be as there’s no “in” for the player to start understanding and breaking down the world. Many RPGs show you how your companions understand the world and then prompt the player to respond. The motivations and worldview of the player character are then formed between and around their companions, entirely within the bounds of the game world. It might seem like having memorable companion characters runs counter to player expression, that they might steal the spotlight, but often it’s only through these characters that players are able to fully develop the personality and role they step into. 

Generally, the art for characters and environments is great. It’s seriously impressive looking for a game from a smaller studio, but the art style doesn’t stand out from its inspirations. It’s the same vibe, just prettier.

This market could be in any post-apocalypse.

Combat in Broken Roads is definitely the weakest part of its core, to the point, it feels like an afterthought. After a fight in the tutorial, I spent hours talking politics, learning deep interpersonal secrets about characters, making difficult ethical decisions, and so on—then I had a random encounter with giant radioactive spiders. It was jarring, and the experience of combat was not worth the cost in my investment. However, this experience is totally subject to change, in an upcoming update, Broken Roads is planned to receive more narrative-driven combat in the first few hours of the game. After that, more promised updates aim to address many of the other issues. All on the foundations built by my imaginary, alternate universe Woody Allen.

Hot Take: Bad Games Aren’t Evil

Around the time I began writing this piece, developer Drop Bear Bytes’ game director posted this: 

“This launch has been a rough one. We’re glad so many people have enjoyed playing the game. We’ve loved watching the streams, engaging with you all and hearing about your positive experience with Broken Roads. But we know that, overall, we’ve fallen short of player expectations in some key areas and in many ways, we’ve not delivered the quality game we had hoped to ship, so we’re changing that. Our work on Broken Roads is far from over. We have taken the criticism on board. There’s a lot we can improve and a lot we can outright redo because it just isn’t good enough. On top of fixing bugs and issues with quest logic, we’ve also been gathering feedback on the main areas we need to refine. You want more freedom from the early game. You connected with the companions you met, but wish they had more depth and more to say along the way, and you want to level them up yourselves as you go. We greatly underestimated how much combat players expected during the origin stories. You want more features such as being able to click on the map to move the party. Moral or ethical moments that could have been far more interesting lack depth. Translations need to be improved. Combat needs a lot of work. We’re on it. We have a short term roadmap that begins with what we’re delivering by the end of next week, a May patch goal that aims to flesh out some areas of the game where players have felt they wanted to see more, and we’re busy working on a longer-term list of improvements that all address your most commonly reported issues and areas where Broken Roads is falling short. Thank you for your continued support and interest in Broken Roads, and for caring enough to comment and report issues. We welcome all feedback and suggestions, be it on forums or our official Discord, and are getting to work from Monday.

She’ll be right.
Craig Ritchie
Game Director”

There clearly is genuine passion in Broken Roads.

By the sounds of it, a lot of Broken Roads is subject to change, but I can only review what’s in front of me. What I’ve focused most of my criticisms on are the core of the game, things that would be much harder to fix or change. 

I know I’ve not been full of glowing praise of the game, but seeing this post made me sad. I’m worried that the (relative) redemptions of much bigger games like Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky have created an expectation that smaller games should attempt the same thing even when it may not be possible, financially or otherwise. But it’s not just that. To me this reads as an apology for the game being bad. Not broken, not offensive, just underwhelming. I just don’t think that’s something any piece of media or art should have to do. It’s strange to have to say this for a game about ethics, but it’s not morally wrong to make bad art.