Retrospective: Steambot Chronicles

At some point you'll also probably wonder why these robots that putter around towns like elderly gentlemen are capable of blasting around battlefields and arenas like pissed-off rockets. It's best to file that one under S, for 'Shhhhh'.

Steambot introduces you to all this first so you grow fond of your robot and have something concrete to care about. It's only afterwards that the game introduces you to the world, throwing open the dozens of menial tasks and decisions that secretly make up the body of the game.

And this is where Steambot Chronicles gets interesting, because over the course of the next six hours you come to understand that the game isn't trying to be something you play through, it's trying to be a world you live in. Wandering through town you find out the local bumpy trot arena is looking for fighters, but also that the local theatre is desperate for movie reels and the museum wants fossils from the big dig site nearby. The two sides of the game, the robotic and the personal, are completely intertwined. As you go around finding or earning parts for your robot and engineering plans to make new parts, you're also collecting food items, musical instruments, tunes, clothes, souvenirs, friends and happy memories. In time you get a place of your own and start collecting furniture, too, and in a further and completely unacceptable amount of time you finally get to take girls back there where the frigid things will most likely not actually sleep with you because you failed to perform the ludicrous arbitrary tasks required to make that happen.

I do like this game, honest.

Looking back, what I don't think the reviews of Steambot picked up on is the quiet and honest sense of magic the world has. It's full of the kind of stuff you'd expect to see in a great kid's book, and tends to shuck traditional game storytelling. The first couple of times you get captured, one of the bandit leaders locks you in his kitchen and tells you to make him dinner and the other just lets you go because she likes you.

Without wanting to spoil anything, the game's full of this kind of stuff. And although the dialogue seems to represent translators doing their best with inconsistent material it sometimes manages to be pleasingly eccentric, and the plot itself bobs and turns pleasantly. But the unpredictability is the main thing. In avoiding traditional plots, mission structures or reward systems, Steambot keeps you guessing, and that's all too rare these days.

It's fun, because if you squint really, really hard you can see a vision of the future where Irem didn't have to include the robots in Steambot Chronicles. The mundane side of things often manages to be so compelling (and when the plot kicks in it can be so annoying) that it's easy to imagine a similar game where you simply play a boy with a knack for musical instruments who washes up on a shore one day and you control him as he searches for his place in the world. A kind of more grown-up, itchy-footed Animal Crossing, where Tom Nook is actually the sinister tight-fisted bastard all those gaming webcomics have made him out to be. And who wouldn't want to play that?