The Secret World
I’ll describe a particular early investigative mission to give a better idea of how they play out. (As it’s one of many standalone quests that don’t spoil the main story, please excuse a few minor spoilers, though skip ahead two paragraphs if you’d prefer to avoid any.) An elderly lady named Norma Creed has you researching the Kingsmouth town history about a series of murders. I initially looked online, but not turning up much information meant I had to look round the town for more. I eventually stumbled across the town hall, with its conspicuously highlighted archive for me to snoop through. Interacting with the filing cabinets involves just a simple keystroke whilst looking at the drawer you wish to interact with. After checking through several cabinets, I found a newspaper clipping about the murders, with the full article popping up for me to read through.
Finding this new piece of information updated my quest and moved me on to Tier 2, with a generous boost to my EXP. The next goal was again fairly generic, but the news suggested that the sheriff’s office had been decidedly cagey when questioned about some of the victims, which suggested another visit to the sheriff could turn up something new. And so you’ll continue the story, chasing new leads and researching further information. You have to speak with NPCs (like the sheriff in this case) as well as solve riddles and crack codes to progress. There’s also a wide variety of environmental puzzles to accompany the investigations, like clicking panels in the right order or searching out where a signal is coming from, as well as a limited number of inventory puzzles where you need to find the correct keys or objects to proceed.
These are immensely satisfying missions that really stretch your puzzle-solving abilities and draw on a lot of Funcom’s expertise in the adventure field. A particularly lengthy one even had me recording a satellite signal on my phone. I literally held my own phone up to the speaker on my computer to analyse the waveform and crack the Morse code message being transmitted. I don’t know if this was actually required by the mission, and you may be able to work out an alternate solution, but my phone was handy and sometimes you have to improvise to get the job done.
Just a handful of these would make up a fairly tricky adventure game, but The Secret World has at least 6-8 investigation missions per zone. That means there’s a lot of adventuring to be found here that will keep ardent genre fans occupied for a long time. The stories that accompany them are usually born from the surreal circumstances of the inhabitants. (Another spoiler alert for the same side-quest!) For example, the quest I detailed above will need you to die and not immediately reunite with your body in order to glean more information from ghosts in prison cells and uncover sinister goings-on in an eerie pumpkin patch. Each quest draws from the horror/science fiction genres, but the colourful cast and wonderful cutscenes help ensure the missions never take themselves too seriously and are a joy to complete.
Likewise, the main story that ties the whole game together is fantastic. It’s a thoroughly well-written and in-depth narrative that takes folklore elements from the three main zones and weaves the action, stealth and investigation styles together wonderfully. You’ll follow the plot through Kingsmouth, Egypt and Transylvania, occasionally hopping back to London, with each area adding more and more to your understanding of the secret world and the organisations that wish to harness the strange forces in our planet. Oh yes, the three main factions aren’t the only ones interested in what the secret world has to offer. Over the course of your journey you’ll come across the sinister Orachi group and their inhuman experiments with a strange black ooze, as well as the Morning Light, a thinly veiled parody of scientology. It all culminates in the ethereal void that haunted your dreams at the beginning of the game for a final confrontation with the being that has been tormenting you.
That’s not to say it’s ‘game over’ by the time you’ve finished, as this is an ever-growing and changing world. More zones are going to be added as the development team finish them (most likely arriving as a series of both free and commercial DLC), so consider this the end of Chapter 1 and we’ll see what the future holds. Funcom have put a lot of support behind this game, and it has the potential to grow to be something special. There have already been several major updates since release to tweak the gameplay and fix bugs as well as introduce additional story missions in the form of new ‘issues’ for those who have completed the main quest. I’m led to believe that some hardcore MMO fans find the controls and combat a little outdated, but this shouldn’t impact the less diehard action gamer. It is still, in the end, an online and at-times multiplayer RPG, and there’s no way around that, but I was able to play most of the game solo and found the design worked well enough that I had no trouble building one of the decks (a snazzy ‘Preacher’ character with a suitably cool costume to go with it). If you’re not used to this sort of game it can be frustrating in the early days, but stick with it and you’ll find you soon get the hang of it.
Whether The Secret World is right for you boils down to how much combat you can tolerate and whether an MMO is something you’d like to try. I sank a fair few hours into this game every week, but nothing like what you hear some MMO players do, and spent a lot of it mashing number buttons. Combat is an ever-present element, but what kept it appealing for me was that I never felt I was simply building stats – even on action missions the stories are well thought-out and I constantly felt like I was moving the main story forward. In between fights, the green missions were pure adventuring, so the excitement of stumbling across a new one of those was palpable. The social side also means you can play through the investigations with a friend remotely, something not often possible in adventure games. There’s heaps of content here for the price, offering challenging puzzles and interesting characters to go with rich, vibrant landscapes and wonderfully eerie, atmospheric music to really assault the senses. It’s expertly crafted and a truly engrossing game which does its pedigree proud. If it in any way seems appealing, I’d recommend giving it a try – after all, there’s no monthly subscription anymore – as I found this to be one secret worth passing along.
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