The minions are a horde of small demonic creatures that accompany you through the game, and are more than happy to do your bidding. There’s a quick lesson in being evil through the medium of jester-kicking, and before you know it, you embark through the knowingly generic Tolkienesque landscape, ransacking villages, enslaving peasants, slaying corpulent trolls, rebuilding your imposing tower, and even taking a mistress to help you spend your ill-gotten gains. You take control of the titular Overlord who, at the start of the game, is woken from undeath only to be informed that his predecessor has been killed, and that the reputation of evil in the surrounding land is a joke.
In fact, the most taxing quandary you’re likely to face is whether to immolate a peasant with a volley of fireballs, or set a rabid pack of impish minions upon him. Overlord subverts this device by largely dispensing with the ‘good’ end of the moral spectrum, leaving you with choices that exist somewhere between ‘evil’ and ‘incredibly evil’. Deciding whether to save or harvest the Little Sisters in Bioshock, or judging which of Niko Bellic’s friends should live or die in Grand Theft Auto IV are the kind of choices that encourage players to emotionally invest in the gaming experience. In recent years, games have become increasingly concerned with creating moral dilemmas, asking players to make difficult decisions that not only challenge their own personal ethics, but also those of the character that they are roleplaying.
0 kommentar(er)
