Consortium: The Tower Prophecy Trailer Falls On London

I haven't played Consortium [official site], but I've read enough to know I should. Consortium was an RPG which favored social interaction over combat, a story that could turn out a dozen different ways, and an ambitious attempt to create a lot of the things people say they want.

So maybe you also want a follow-up, set in a new place, with new characters, but expanding on the same ideas. That's what Consortium: The Tower Prophecy [official site] aims to be, and there's a teaser trailer below.

It's, perhaps sadly, not a game about freefalling on to skyscrapers. Instead the game takes place entirely in that one futuristic building in London, called The Churchill Tower. You're there to rescue hostages, but through unexpected Events and Drama things naturally become more complicated - and depending on your choices, more shooty, talky, sneaky or rebellious and so on.

Although Consortium sounds wonderful, the reason it didn't find a larger audience was in part due to the buggy state in which the game was released. RPGs with branching narratives and social AI are hard to make, I suspect. There's reason to hope The Tower Prophecy might not fall to the same problems, however: the original Consortium was gradually patched to fix those bugs over its lifetime and this new game is designed to build upon the same systems.

Perhaps more worrying are those most terrible words on the game's website: "CROWDFUNDING LATER THIS YEAR". There's no hint on how much they're asking for, but hopefully it's enough to replace the voice acting. Otherwise I remain quietly hopeful for a futuristic spy RPG that might be geographically narrow, but which should consequently be far deeper than its genre equivalents.