Risen’s initial couple of hours showed its cracks too openly. When your entire picture of the game and its character hinges on some short, please-go-here-next conversations with just a couple of thinly-sketched, clumsily-animated NPCs, you fixate on them a little too much. Is this the best this game can do? But when you’re – oh, let’s drop this second-person pretence – when I’m in a town, there’s a sort of gentle sensory overload. Purely by dint of sheer volume of people, the place seems that much more real. The animation’s patchy and a few of the voices misfire, but suddenly the game’s full of movement and noise and faces and objectives and incidental scenery and chickens I can kill without the guards arresting me. The place visibily breathes.
